Imagine you're female (if you aren't already). Furthermore, imagine you're only 3 months old. Now imagine you've gone to the doctor's office, and they've taken a special medical bag with adhesive around its mouth, then glued the thing around your crotch (after first performing the necessary cleansing indignations) in order to collect a urine sample. Once you've finally peed, then they rip the bag off your crotch and send it to the lab.
Now you have an idea what Dorothy's day was like yesterday. :-(
Starting sometime early Sunday night, Dorothy got extremely fussy. Elizabeth didn't get great sleep that night, and woke me around 4:15am to take Dorothy, so that Eliz could get a bit of sleep before work. Around 7:30am, we decided to call the doctor's office, because we measured Dorothy's temperature at 100.4 and 100.6 (at different times). Plus she was screaming and fussing in a very uncharacteristic manner.
We got in to see the nurse-practitioner around 10am (BTW, her weight was 13 pounds, 2.6 ounces). They measured Dorothy's temperature at 100.8, but otherwise couldn't find anything wrong with her. I'd been concerned about poop getting where it shouldn't, so they decided to check on the possibility of a UTI by taking the urine sample described above. Between waiting for her to urinate, and for the results to come back from the lab (the urine was clean -- no UTI!), we didn't wind up leaving until almost noon. Oh, and the screaming she did during all of the poking and prodding was a lot worse than what she did when she got her 2-month innoculations, mostly because she didn't stop after 30 seconds. Heck, one time she tried yelling so much (after she didn't have enough breath left) that her chin turned purple for a minute.
In the afternoon, I was looking in Dorothy's mouth more closely, and saw some slightly disturbing bumps. At first I thought it might be teeth, but the front incisors are supposed to be the first teeth to come in, not the back molars. Plus, molars aren't supposed to come in until age 10-14 months. We're going back to the doctor's office today to see Dorothy's doctor herself, since the inside of her mouth is looking like she might have thrush.
For most of yesterday morning and last night, the only way to calm Dorothy was to dance with her. And not just anything, mind you; we had to keep our motion nearly random. No repeating of dance steps allowed! This can get tiring fast. Luckily, after a good enough amount of dancing, she would often drift off to sleep, allowing us to make our movement smaller and more repetitive (i.e., easier to do). She might wake up again in 10 minutes, but at least we got a bit of respite. Last night she again was fussy and awake a lot. I got put on baby duty around 4am, and went half-insane trying to dance around unpredictably for 45 minutes (until she started falling asleep).
Anyway, Dorothy's been extremely unhappy the last couple of days, and if it weren't for some relief provided by my Mom (and Dad) taking Dorothy for a while and calming her, I'd probably have lost my mind by now. Hopefully we can find out ASAP what the problem is so that we can do something about it. To be fair, she has had an hour last night and a half hour this morning where she was actually happy. In the meantime, though, whenever she's awake she's mostly been very fussy, and moving around has been just about the only way to calm (distract?) her. So we'll keep on moving as long as it takes for her to get better.
Posted by Tom Nugent at June 8, 2004 09:01 AM