Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Resolved-ish

I spelled etiology wrong on my last post. I fixed it here. Apparently, fixing Zoe's stomach ache was equally easy although how it actually worked, I'm not sure.
We went to see the ever-lovely Dr. D. She asked a million questions and then listened to Zoe's lungs. She'd checked them out just a few weeks ago but this day, she could hear the wheezing. She thought, just in case, to test her out for a possible urinary tract infection but if wasn't a UTI, she suspected pneumonia, which sometimes presents with stomach pain. But before we got to that, she'd try to UTI. She asked Zoe to pee in a cup. Zoe thought this was madness and she leaped off the table and hid behind me. I finally talked her into it and took her into the bathroom. Once I explained it's just like peeing in a tiny toilet, she relented.
Of course, no UTI.
We've been the pneumonia route before. Last time, it was the last part of an 8 day stay at the hospital. But the doctor did not seem panicked so I tried not to panic myself.
So we headed downstairs (radiology downstairs. How handy). I took Max and ran to the appointment at the university I had at 1:30 to cancel. This sucked in several ways: The first was leaving Zoe. The second was that the appointment was to help the printmaker who was helping my poetry students put their book filled with letter-pressed pages together. I felt horrible about leaving him to do all the work. I can't stand that I did not see my students' final books. I knew I'd done the right thing though. As I drove back toward the doctor's office, I kept imagining them admitting Zoe to the hospital to treat the pneumonia, wondering how one has a baby at home and a kid in the hospital and no family around for 500 miles. Apparently, Dr. D's non-panicking effect only works directly in her presence.
Zoe did have a little pneumonia but the not-panicking doctor, described the streaks on her lungs as very tiny. She prescribed a different anti-biotic from the one she'd prescribed last week for what she suspected was a sinus-infection--ampicillin does not help pneumonia but arythromax does. She had the former first. Now she is taking the latter.
But! Here's the rub. On the way home, my stomach started to hurt. We all went home and took a nap. Zoe for her usual 2 hours, Max for his usual 45 minutes. I slept too for those 45 minutes and my stomach still hurt. Like I'd been kicked in the gut. And in the back. And like I wanted to throw up but couldn't. I drank 64 ounces of water. When Zoe woke up, I made her drink two big glasses too. We both started to feel better--Zoe more than I. By six o'clock last night, there was no more, "it hurts. It hurts." She slept through the night. She's been fine all day.
So now, all the fine people we saw and ate and drank with this last week--I hope you didn't get what I believe now happened to be a short-lived stomach virus that Zoe couldn't fight off because she was fighting off the pneumonia too. Once the anti-biotics started working on the lungs, her body took care of the stomach--well, that and the huge amount of liquid I made her drink and that uncanny way of the virus that seems to abandon one person as soon as it's safely ensconced in another. If you did get it, let me know and I'll repay you with a dinner made without any infectious children around.

1 comment:

Lisa B. said...

So glad to hear this. Sounds like a pretty great doctor to me. But I hope that you aren't sick now!

I would love to hear, sometime, about that letterpress poetry book project. That sounds amazing.