Cranberry-Grape Juice

When I was in the hospital, recovering from having little Asher, my delivery nurse brought me some cranberry-grape juice.  I liked it so much that I had several glasses of it over the next two days while I was there.  At the beginning of this week, the thought crossed my mind that some of that juice would be nice.  Well, Wednesday was my lucky day.  

On Tuesday, at about 3:00 AM, I woke up and asked Hugh to get me a garbage can because I was pretty sure I was going to throw up.  This turned out to be useless because whatever my body wanted to expel, it wanted to expel it from both ends at once so I was forced to get up anyway.  Three hours, and a few similar trips to the restroom later, Hugh got up to get ready for work.  I was now faced with the task of taking care of a 5 1/2 week old infant all day while all I felt capable of was spending half of my time sitting languidly in the bathroom and the other half feeling sorry for myself in bed.  Luckily for me, Hugh's boss is flexible and after two hours of work, he let Hugh come home.  Hugh also skipped class so that he could take care of both the burrito and me.  

At about noon, at the advice of Hugh's dad, we went to see a doctor.  Normally, I wouldn't have gone to a doctor for something like this, but I didn't remember ever having felt quite so miserable in my life (not even during labor) (....okay, maybe a little bit during labor..) and I was worried about dehydration and contagiousness because of Asher.  The woman that Hugh spoke with on the phone at the local hospital suggested that the best place to go would be an "instacare."  I was unfamiliar with such places, but Hugh called a friend of ours who works at one and he said that it would be like going to the emergency room except cheaper and with a shorter line, so we proceeded.

When we got in to see the doctor, he said (quite confidently) that what I had was food poisoning, and therefore should not be contagious.  He then talked for an awfully long time before giving me the thing I really wanted:  nausea medicine.  He said that it should take 20-30 minutes to kick in and then sent us on our merry way.  I was afraid that the medicine might not have worked because as soon as we got home (which was precisely 30 minutes after I took the stuff) I had to run to the bathroom to vomit some more, but luckily that was the last time and I spent the rest of the day experiencing only a medium level of crumminess.  

The next day Hugh went back to his normal life and left the burrito to me.  I still wasn't quite with it, so it took me until about 11:00 to realize that Asher felt a little warm.  I got out the little stick thermometer that I got for free somewhere and attempted to take his temperature, but I came to the conclusion that this particular thermometer was useless.  I called Hugh and asked him to get a baby thermometer on his way home from work.  He did, and it said that he didn't have a fever, so I figured that maybe because I had been sick my sense of normal body temperature was off.  

A few hours later, it occurred to me that Asher was acting very subdued.  He didn't really cry much-he just whined, he wasn't very active, and when I picked him up he seemed a little limper than normal.  I probably would have realized this sooner if I hadn't been so out of it myself.  I felt him again and he definitely felt warm.  This time the thermometer said that he had a temperature of 100.4, which is when you're supposed to call the doctor for a baby under 2 months.  The thermometer even had a helpful little sad face in the display just in case I didn't know that this was bad.  (Blast these Arabic numerals!  What do they mean?)  So I called the pediatrician and took Asher in to see him.  

They took a rectal temperature (101.1) and a urine sample and did a spinal tap.  They also tested his reflexes and poked and prodded him all over.  Asher did not appreciate any of this.  The doctor (who wasn't our normal pediatrician because it was after hours) then informed me that standard procedure at this point was to send us to the hospital for blood tests and to have Asher put on an IV for antibiotics for 48 hours.  This was surprising to me, but apparently babies so young can have all kinds of different diseases--most minor, but some very serious--and show no symptoms except a fever as high as Asher's so they just do everything just in case.  If all of the tests on Asher's fluids came back negative and he seemed to be doing okay after a day or two, we could go home.  The doctor also told me that one of the things that they worry about is meningitis.  While he went to call the hospital for me, I read a poster in the exam room on meningitis which informed me that 1 in 10 people who are infected with meningitis die and many of the others suffer brain damage, amputation, hearing loss and severe scarring.  I think it's mean to tell a mom that her baby might have meningitis and then leave her in a room with a poster like that.  

So, we went to the hospital and Hugh and a friend met us there and gave Asher a blessing.  Then the nurses took his blood and hooked him up to an IV.  Of all of the things that he had been subjected to that night, I think he liked the IV least.  We then went to a room with a giant crib and a fold out bed where Asher and I got to spend the night.  It was at this point that a nurse asked me if I wanted anything to drink and I asked for some cranberry-grape juice.  Apparently they didn't have cranberry-grape juice anymore, but she mixed some cranberry juice and some grape juice together for me anyway.  (The nurses at the hospital here are amazing.)  Poor Asher had a hard time sleeping in that weird place with an IV sticking into his hand and a bunch of monitors all over him and at about 3:00 AM I got tired of getting up to soothe him and climbed into the crib and held him for the rest of the night while he slept.  

In the morning, our normal pediatrician came and talked to me.  So far all of the tests were looking good.  Nothing had grown in the cultures of any of Asher's fluids.  He put in an order to have the lab techs run an enterovirus scan on the spinal fluid and then left.  The rest of the day was hard because we were stuck in a room with and IV and a bunch of monitors, but otherwise it was uneventful.  In the evening, things were still looking fine so we got to go home.  The next day we went back to the pediatrician's office to have him do a follow up checkup on Asher.  Everything looked great.  He told me that the enterovirus scan had come back positive, which probably meant that I had a virus, and not food poisoning, which I passed on to Asher.  (This is me giving an angry face to the doctor that I saw.)  

Several good things came of this whole thing, such as, 1.  Asher and I now have antibodies to protect us from one more strain of enterovirus, 2.  In the hospital, they gave me a second giant mug to take home--a "motherhood gourd," as Hugh calls them--so now Hugh and I can each have one, 3. I now have more faith in my pediatrician who figured out what was probably wrong and called for the extra test to make sure, 4. The nurses in the pediatric unit gave us a nice fleece blanket to take home because we had to stay in the hospital, and, of course, 5. I got my cranberry-grape juice.  So, all's well that ends well, I suppose, but next time I want some juice, I think I'll just go to the store.

Asher in his hospital jammies

The yucky IV

The adult-sized crib Asher and I both slept in