Diagnosis: Something we can't pronounce/Something totally made up

Last Saturday night, Hudson woke up around 11:00 crying. This is a very rare occurrence so I rushed in to see what was going on. He was definitely running a fever, so I gave him some Motrin, tucked him back in and hoped he would feel better in the morning. He has been hard at work on his two year molars so I was keeping my fingers crossed that they were the source of his fever.

However, the next morning his 101 had gone up to 103. He was miserable all day and felt like a little space heater. We just could not get his fever down and he wasn't acting the way I thought a sick baby should. Instead of being fussy and irritable, he was totally out of it. He was in and out of sleep all day long and this totally freaked us out. Normally his energy level runs at about a high octane level, this was definitely not normal behavior.

Finally around 7:00, we took his temp again and it was 104.9. We panicked. He was burning up and sweating while simultaneously shivering. Normally, Matt and I like to alternate our moments of parental panic, but this was a tough one. We were torn between rushing him to the ER or waiting to get a call back from his pediatrician. We decided to wait and I gave him a cool bath while Matt cross referenced his symptoms in our copy of What to Expect the Toddler Years also known as The Biggest Piece of Alarmist Propaganda to ever hit paperback. Ten minutes later he came in and said, "Don't freak out but Mushy has meningitis. It may be bacterial or maybe the other kind that I cannot pronounce." I snatched the book out of his hands, because in a crisis the only reading skills I trust are my own, and I agreed. Hudson had a grand total of two out of seven possible symptoms of meningitis. I decided we were all headed to the hospital and not the crappy one by our house either, a good one.

But in the midst of dressing and packing the doctor called us back (finally) and talked me off the ledge. We took his temp again and it was lowering although painfully slowly. She told us to bring him in first thing to their office, unless of course, those other five missing meningitis symptoms presented themselves in the night. They didn't.

We made it through a sleepless night and in the morning Matt took him to the doctor. As is typical for both my kids, the moment we sign the receipt for our thirty dollar copay, they are miraculously healed. It never fails, they could be on their last leg on the car ride over and as soon as money changes hands in the sick kid waiting room, they instantly feel well enough to laugh, dance on the scale and yell "hi" to every person they see. Essentially they make their exhausted, worried parents look like idiots for bringing perfectly healthy, blissfully happy children to the doctor. I often wonder if I just hand them thirty bucks at home, we could save ourselves the trip.

So after all that the doctor proclaimed him a victim of a slight sinus infection and something she called a "fever virus," a virus whose only symptom is a really high fever. I call that "totally made up." But whatever, he is back to his normal, happy-go-lucky Mushy self and we all live to laugh another day. I'll take it.