New Level Unlocked
When Campbell made his arrival last December, a handful of other boy moms told me to start saving now for the eventual medical bills a rowdy little boy could rack up. From the rough-housing to daredevil stunts to potentially broken bones, raising a boy would likely test me… every day.
Welp.
It only took 10 months before Campbell had his first ER visit, which led to a 2 day hospital stay. Cool, cool, cool.
This past week has felt like it’s been 4 months long and I’ve reached a new level of exhaustion that I didn’t even know existed. We are now home and the nugget is on the mend. But how did we get here? Well, let’s start from last Friday, November 1st:
I noticed a little pimple on Campbell’s right booty cheek. No big deal. Dude gets baby acne every now and then, but it usually clears up within a day or two. However, this little pimple didn’t. It got worse and got it worse quick! By Sunday morning, it started to look more and more like a staph infection. By Sunday evening, I was looking to see how quickly I could get him into the doctor on Monday.
By Monday afternoon, Campbell had a low-grade fever. When school called to tell me, I was already on my way to pick him up for his appointment. The doctor we saw said it was cellulitis and prescribed us Bactrim. We were told to check back in on Wednesday.
I stayed home with Campbell on Tuesday. His little booty didn’t look any better, but it wasn’t worse either. Ok, I’ll take it! He remained fever free all day Tuesday.
Wednesday was much of the same. No real progress, but since he hadn’t had a fever in 24 hours, we decided to send him back to school. All was fine and dandy, until early Wednesday afternoon. Another call from school. Campbell now had a 101.7 fever and needed to be picked up. This is when everything went downhill. We couldn’t get the fever to break. The abscess on his little booty cheek had burst and was bleeding. By 6p, we decided to go to the Emergency Room. We needed an adultier adult to tell us we weren’t overreacting.
We decided to have the abscess manually drained by the ER doc. They were going to do some bloodwork and start an IV. Should be pretty straightforward, right? Lies. And this is where my mama heart breaks into a million little pieces. It took 5 sticks, 4 nurses, 4 blown veins, & taking a break 3x to get one vial of blood and an IV port. My poor little baby is now covered in bruises and hoarse from all the screaming. After the 4th break, the ER doc and his team came in to sedate Campbell and manually drain his abscess - all while Kirk & I were still in the room. About 20minutes and 2 incisions later, the procedure was done. By 1a, we were finally in our own hospital room. Campbell would get IV antibiotics every 8 hours.
We saw the peds doctor around 10a on Thursday. He wanted to give Campbell at least 24 hours of the IV antibiotics to see if we could make any improvements. If not, then we’d talk with surgery about going in and making sure everything that could be removed, was removed. So now we wait.
We wait in a tiny hospital room, with a crib that resembles an animal cage, with a 10month old who only wants to be held. By Thursday night, I didn’t think we were making the progress we needed to be and started to prepare myself for my little man to have surgery the following day.
But God is so, so good!
Friday morning we woke up with significant improvement. And the doc agreed! We needed another round of bloodwork, but if all looked good, we could go home with some oral antibiotics.
By Friday afternoon, we were home. Then we slept. Campbell and I both took a very hard 3 hour nap, woke up to eat, and then went back to bed for another 12 hours.
Which brings us to today, Saturday, November 9th. What a whirlwind these past 9 days have been! So now, all the good news: Campbell is still healing, but he’s back to his happy self. His little booty is getting better. He’s covered in bruises from all the needle pokes and I know those will get worse before they get better. But that’s the glory in all of this: he WILL get better.
We now know that his little body didn’t react to Bactrim antibiotics, but it did react to Clindamycin via an IV and so far no issues taking Clindamycin orally.
What I learned this week: always, always, ALWAYS trust your mama instincts. That tiny little pimple last Friday gave me an uneasy feeling. A week later, I know why. It didn’t take long for Campbell’s little pimple to turn into a full blown staph infection. I’m also really proud of how Kirk and I both held it together through all the unknown that was thrown at us. Even Campbell didn’t let how bad he felt stop him from flirting with every female staff member at Ochsner. Every. Single. One. #FutureHeartbreaker
Thank you to those who reached out this week to help. We’ll spend the remainder of the weekend resting so we can get back to our normal routine come Monday.
