another one? seriously?

I know I haven't posted in awhile, so I hope this pleases those of you who check the blog daily... you know who you are. :) Unfortunately, I don't have any new cute photos to share, but rather a vent session regarding Marshall's second ear infection.

Marshall's had a runny nose for... well, forever. I honestly can't remember when that started. But, last week, he started to have yellow goopy eye discharge, just on the right, so I was waiting for his eye to turn red, thinking he probably had conjunctivitis. Thankfully, his eye never turned red, and warm wash cloth compresses were taking care of the goop, so I thought we were in the clear.

Then, on Thursday night, I had the delightful pleasure of going out to dinner with a large group of my girlfriends, and I brought Marshall along to meet the crowd. He was quite the ladies man, and flashed several cute smiles to the girls. Then, around 7:30, per his usual, he started to fight sleep and squirm in my arms. I held him against my chest, as I always to do calm him down to sleep, and I noticed that he was rubbing his eye. He eventually drifted off to sleep, so I laid him down in his carseat and finished my dinner. A while later he started to cry, so I picked him up and noticed that he had scratched the crap out of the right side of his face in between his eye and ear with his fingernails. I'm not sure if he had done that while he was over my shoulder or when he was in the carseat, but either way I felt like a pretty crummy mom. One of my friends helped me clean him off with a wipe and evidently it looked a lot worse than it really was once the blood was wiped away.

Last night, when I was feeding him, I thought his right eye looked a little red, so I told Jordan to go ahead and make an appointment for Marshall in the morning to get checked out by our pediatrician since I had to work. I'm on my pediatrics rotation and am finishing up my week in the full-term nursery, which meant that I had to get up at 5am this morning in order to get to the hospital by 6:15am. Lame as it is, I tried to go to bed at 8:30 last night, but Marshall woke up three times before 10:45pm. Ugh. I was so frustrated that I pretty much mandated that Jordan get up with him for the rest of the night (thanks, honey, I so owe you!). Apparently Marshall proceeded to get up every 20 minutes from then until 6 this morning. I was long gone by that time, but Jordan was smart enough to check his temperature and the poor kid had a fever. Unfortunately I didn't get Jordan's text message, but again, since he's a great daddy, he went ahead and gave Marshall a dose of tylenol to make him feel better while he waited for the pediatrician's office to open and for me to return his text.

I did something I try my best to never do this morning, which is to pull my phone out during rounds. But, as we were wrapping things up on our last patient, I checked my pager and I'm glad I did, because I got Jordan's text, and then excused myself to call him. Our attending physician and resident overheard me asking Jordan, "wait, how high was his temp? 100.5 or 105???" and they immediately started asking if Marshall was alright. The attending decided to do my end of week evaluation with me right then and excused me from writing any notes on my patients from that morning and told me to get home to my sick kid. I was so grateful.

We were able to get Marshall in to see the doctor just as I was arriving back in Lawrence. Turns out the little critter has another ear infection. If you remember, he was just recently treated for an ear infection in the same ear. Hmmm. This time they're going to have us come back in 10-14 days to have them recheck his ear to figure out whether or not these are actually separate infections or if we're not resolving the infection in the first place.

Today Marshall was playful and happy and laughed out loud. His favorite word is "dude." But, you have to say it with a huge smile on your face and get right up in his face for him to laugh out loud. He laughs especially loud if you pretend like you're doing something else and then turn to him and say "DUDE!!" It's so cute. I'll try to capture it on video and upload it.