Sunday, January 02, 2005

How it all got started

Looking back on this I think we started to see some signs maybe a month ago like her telling us that she didn’t feel good over and over again, or that could have just been for attention as we thought. The big stuff started though on Christmas day, that night. She had a fever of 102 but no other symptoms. The next day was Sunday and since we were in California we decided to go to visit all of our friends at out old church in San Diego. Abby was fine for the whole trip and all day Sunday. On Sunday night or Monday morning she started to get a cold, runny nose, cough, fever, etc… this turned out to be the Flu. I got it on Monday or Tuesday too, and Tiffany caught it too, but as far as we knew it was just a nasty cold. On Tuesday we found this scary rash on her feet, little blood blisters under the skin, and decided that we should take her to urgent care. Her fever had been about 103 for a few days at this point so off to urgent care we went. The doctor there ruled out Meningitis which was our biggest concern from the rash and thought that it may possibly be HSP which is a viral infection that cause a similar rash. She told us that if we wanted a blood test that we should go to the emergency room. We went home and stressed about what to do, we call the Dr. on-call in Colorado to get a second opinion as to if we should take her in to the ER and if flying back on Wednesday would be ok with such a high fever and this rash. He thought it would be ok, I didn’t want Abby to have to go see another doctor and lose more sleep so we made the decision to wait until we got home.

Wednesday she seemed better, the fever was done because of the Ibuprofen and Tylenol flip flop that we were doing was bringing it down and she even felt like playing with play-doh for an hour or so. The airport was fine, and even with the high fever she was traveling quite well. About mid flight though, she go a bloody nose that just wouldn’t stop. It would stop for a little bit but then she would cough and then it would start again. A very long hour or so went by until the plane landed and we got off. Abby started to cough and again and this time there was blood in it. Pretty scary stuff to be honest. We were so stressed already and now this! We called the doctor on call again, which that night turned out to be Dr. Samuelson who goes to Summitview with us for church. We explained the whole thing and he told us what to watch for during the night until we could see him. The whole way home as she coughed and started the nose bleed again we were trying to decide if she needed to go to the ER or not. The nose bleed stopped finally, the coughing subsided, and we tried to get some sleep and still stay with Abigail through another long sleep deprived night.

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