"F" is for Fever

Ah yes, the waterpark was fun. Enter the aftermath. 

Thursday night, Alexander slept poorly. He cried a lot, and woke for short periods of yelling before drifting back to sleep. We left him to it, as he does that when he's teething and we saw no reason to be concerned.

When I went to get him in the morning, he was Burning Up. My ear thermometer registered just under 104f, which is almost 40c, so we dosed him with Panadol right away (strawberry flavour, which he lurves). He drank half a thermos of water and went back to sleep. 30 min later the fever was down to 101ish/38ish and we settled in for a day of sick.

He pretty much just hung out all day. He slept on us, drank a bit, and every once in a while sat up and said "Guh" to the dog. But mostly he was pretty pathetic.

He didn't eat, but since he was drinking and showing occasional interest in life, we were unconcerned. I kept him topped up with Panadol and the fever hovered just around that mark where we were told it was okay. 102/39 at the most and two runny diapers but nothing extraordinary.

But Friday night, as we were contemplating leaving him with a babysitter (who is super responsible and who we totally think is fine to dose him with his Panadol and check his temp and call us if anything changed), the fever spiked. Goran thinks there just wasn't enough drug in his system. I think it should have been fine because the dosage times had overlapped and blah blah blah whatever.

I called the Dr to ask about a 40c degree fever with diarrhea, and Panadol in the system to some degree, and was told to take him to the ER right away. Gah. A friend said I ought to bring stuff for overnight just in case, so we packed me a bag and off we went.

Luckily we didn't have to stay, but we were informed that the hot tub at the waterpark was likely the culprit (he did swallow a mouthful while in there) and that our only concern was keeping him hydrated. We'd had no problems with that, so we weren't worried.

Which is why the next day he stopped drinking for nearly 6 hours. He had become all floppy and slow and had stopped saying "Guh" to Jill and I was freaking out a bit. In the end we tried a two pronged attack. We held him down and forced teaspoons of rehydration solution into his mouth, drip by laborious drip, and I whipped out the retired boobs and offered him the small amount of milk that I had. The combo worked and he revived enough to suck on his thermos straw again. Seeing the difference made us realize that yup, he'd been getting dehydrated, and yup, it happens very, very quickly.

All is well now, of course. By the next day he was drinking regularly and eating potato and onion naan bread by the fistful.  In fact, despite losing a kilo/2lbs and being too tired to take more than a few steps at a time, he seemed a lot more himself by Monday night. So, we decided all was go for the Wednesday Poland trip, and off we went.