This latest round started last Tuesday. Phoebe went to a half day of daycare while Jeremy worked in a coffee shop nearby. After he picked her up, they came and ate lunch with me and then went home for some quality baby-daddy time. Phoebe was a little fussy, but we didn't really think anything of it. Before bed she drained a huge bottle and snuggled right down to sleep with no problems. I headed up to bed around 9:30 and I had just pulled up the covers when I heard a pretty gross sound coming from the pack-and-play. At this point, I wasn't quite sure what was going on, but it was clear that something wasn't right, so I called for Jeremy while I fumbled for the light switch.
Jeremy got there just as I got the light on and we saw that Phoebe had vomited up the entire contents of her huge pre-bed time bottle. We're pretty familiar with spit up, but this was something entirely different. She was soaked, the bedding was soaked ... there were puddles. I snuggled Phoebe until she calmed down and then cleaned her up while Jeremy changed the sheets on the Pack and Play. At this point, I was a little worried about the munchkin but Jeremy figured it was just a huge spit up and even said that next time I called him like that, there better be blood involved. Hmph.
It was probably about 20 minutes until the next vomiting episode (and our 2nd baby wardrobe change of the night). This time, there was a bit of leftover bottle contents, but the rest was greenish-yellow. Then there was another all green-yellow puke (this time I was holding Phoebe when it happened so we both got new clothes). At this point even Jeremy agreed that we should call the on-call pediatrician. The on-call doctor was great! He answered right away and was very helpful. He sent us out to get some Pedialyte and said to feed Phoebe only Pedialyte until the morning and then bring her in to get checked out. While Jeremy ran to the grocery store, I rocked Phoebe who vomited again (more clean clothes!). When Jeremy got back, we tried to feed Phoebe some of the Pedialyte, but she was not a fan. We finally got her to drink a little and it pretty immediately came back up. At this point, pretty much all the baby bedding we own was dirty, not to mention I had gone through several shirts and Phoebe was on her fifth sleeper of the night. We threw in some laundry and decided to see if we could all get some sleep. Unfortunately, the poor little munchkin just kept puking. Since she kept throwing up and she wouldn't drink anything, we started to get very worried about dehydration (this is a big concern with infants since they are so little). We called the doctor back. At this point he said we might want to go ahead and take Phoebe to the ER to get checked out.
At the hospital, despite continuing to puke (including once in the car and once all over the triage nurse's office) Phoebe was actually in a pretty good mood. Between bouts of vomit, she smiled and flirted with all the nurses and doctors. Jeremy and I were exhausted (we were at the hospital from 11 PM to 4 AM) but Phoebe seemed wide awake, cheerful, and ready to party. The nurses had to keep devising new methods of keeping her pulse monitor on since Phoebe kept kicking it off. Here Jeremy is trying to reattach it yet again:
(Sorry, not a great picture, but it was taken with a phone and Blogger helpfully rotated it for me)
The doctor in the ER gave Phoebe some medicine to help with the puking and (after vomiting up the first dose and getting a second) it really seemed to help. The nurse gave her some Pedialyte (and showed us how adding a splash of juice makes it much tastier) and Phoebe was able to keep it down, so they sent us home. The whole thing was one of the scariest things we've faced as parents so far!
Despite being up all night, Phoebe only slept for another four hours after we got home. Wednesday was a rough day for everyone. We took Phoebe to the pediatrician for a follow up and he said that there was a bug going around, so she probably had that. He told us to expect a few days of diarrhea and to add a few bottles of Pedialyte to Phoebe's daily intake. Luckily, the little munchkin seemed to skip the next phase of the bug - although we kept her in disposable diapers for a few days just in case - our dedication to cloth diapering has its limits. There were a few days of pretty light eating, and fitful sleeping (several long stretches of awake time at night) but other than that, Phoebe seemed to bounce back very quickly.
It was a different story for me. I started to get sick Wednesday night. I was up pretty much all night and then was a complete mess all day on Thursday. I will spare you the details, but as an example, on Thursday I ate five oyster crackers for lunch. It took me two hours. Yeah, it was that bad. I was still in really bad shape on Friday. I had some meetings I had to go to, so I went to work anyway which was not a good idea. Luckily Jeremy managed to escape most of the killer stomach virus and only felt a bit under the weather for a few hours on Friday.
Typically I try to clean with only environmentally friendly products and to avoid antibacterial products (that's a post for another day), but after this, we did feel the need to wipe down the bathrooms with disinfectant. Hopefully we've killed the germs and we won't be getting a second go-round with this lovely virus! We are all pretty much back to normal now, although I am extra sensitive to noises from the Pack and Play in the middle of the night. We're even all caught up on laundry :)
