Meningitis

It's been a crazy few days for the Wise family.  Colton was released from the hospital this morning after spending 48 hours being treated for viral meningitis.

Here's the story:

Wednesday morning I noticed that Colton was really hot when he woke up.  I figured it was just because he was all bundled up.  I got all the kids ready and we went and ran some errands.  Colton was sleeping a lot so I didn't pick him up much.  Wednesday evening, however, I picked him up to feed him and noticed that he was still really hot.  He had been sleeping in his bouncer under the fan without a blanket so I was a little concerned at this point.  I took his temperature in his armpit and it was 101.4.  I've actually never really had a kid with a fever, so I called the pediatrician to see if I should be concerned.  It was after hours so I just talked to the nurse.  The nurse had me take his temperature rectally.  This time it was 102.9.  That's high!!  She told me I needed to take him to the ER.  Thankfully my friend Jennifer was over, so she stayed with the kids and I went to the ER with Colton.  

We got to the ER around 6:30 and they spent the next 5 hours running a million tests on him.  They tested everything from his urine to his blood and even did a nose swab.  All the tests came back fine, so I was starting to think that it was just a virus or something and they'd send us home.  The ER doctor came in and said they wanted to do a spinal tap to make sure it wasn't meningitis.  I figured that this was just an extreme precaution.  Evidently not.  The spinal tap showed that he did in fact have meningitis, so they admitted us to the hospital.

We were finally admitted around 11:30.  Chris had been at home with the kids during this whole time.  When we were finally admitted he woke up our neighbors, K.C. and Sterling from across the street.  K.C. stayed on the couch to listen for the kids and Sterling came to help Chris give Colton a blessing.  At this point his fever was under control with tylenol and he was just lethargic.  The rest of the night was kind of a blur with waking up to feed Colton and dealing with the monitors going off all night long.  I think I slept about 3 hours or so.

Thursday morning the nurse came in and told us that, thankfully, Colton had viral meningitis, which is less severe and has less chance for long-term side effects.  It also meant that they didn't have to have him on his IV anymore because there isn't any medication for it.  His fever was high again, back to 102.9, so they gave him tylenol, but he was pretty alert.  We farmed the kids out to friends, so Chris was able to come up and visit for a couple of hours.  I spent the rest of the day keeping a close watch on the little man.  The doctor said he wanted to keep him one more night just to be safe.  

Thankfully, all went well last night.  Colton was released from the hospital around 10 this morning.  His fever hasn't spiked again and he's been acting completely normal.

He really didn't seem too bugged at all to be hooked up to all the monitors.

I want to thank everyone for all the help we have been given.  I can't even put into words how grateful we are to have so many people reach out to help us.  Most especially thank you to everyone who helped with the big kids so that we could be with our little man.  Thank you for the e-mails, phone calls, text messages and facebooks posts.  Above all thank you for your prayers.  We feel very blessed that such a scary situation has been resolved so quickly and positively.  

Colton is doing great and back to his normal self.  He's been given a clean bill of health.