ick.

Kirstin went to Chicago for Friday & Saturday nights to visit our friend Robin. Friday night started off fine, as Leo and I dropped her at the train station and then went to the 2nd half of Centennial High School's JV basketball game against Mattoon. Then we got home....

Leo started running a fever that night, which semi-peaked at around 102 then. He came back to my room, because I didn't want to try to deal with getting him back to sleep on his own. (I was more or less braced for the idea of him ending up in my bed, as it usually seems to happen the first night around anytime that Kirstin's out of town for a conference.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, we went to the convenient care clinic on Saturday morning. The ears checked out fine, the lungs checked out fine, the oxygen level in the blood checked out fine. The doc swabbed his throat for strep, and the rapid strep test (96% accurate) checked out negative, too. He screamed about a dose of ibuprofen at the clinic, but creative application of an ear-flushing syringe got it down him without too much incident. (He was used as a demonstration for the nurses on duty about how to accomplish this.)

His fever had hit the 102 mark again later in the afternoon, but he was kicking and screaming about taking a dose of medicine. He screamed so much, in fact, that he gagged on it and ended up puking things back up. (This is the only such colorful remark in the entire post.)

He slept without much incident until about 11:00, at which point his fever had hit 104+. I first woke Kirstin up in Chicago, debating whether to go straight to the ER. We ended up with a call to the advice nurse, who suggested a bath. This was only accomplished because I got in the tub with him, and even then only got his legs wet. In the end, I was up doing the cool washcloth on the forehead thing until about 1:00. He, perhaps not obviously, slept through much of that last hour. Then I got about 3 hours of sleep (effectively for the first time all night).

His fever had crept back up by 4:00, so we went through another round of the washcloth thing, and I managed to get back under the covers around 5:15. He then slept until about 7:45. (Because I didn't fall asleep until sometime after 6 on this go-around, that makes somewhere around 4.5 hours of sleep, for those keeping count.)

The weather has been a mix of freezing rain and sleet on and off all day, so that was icky, too.

Kirstin got home around noon, and I got about a half-hour catnap during Leo's nap. I woke up before he did, but that was mostly because I didn't really fall asleep.

We're glad that Robin (who's an ER doc) came back down with Kirstin, because it took some of her tricks to get a dose of Tylenol back down him after his fever came up and peaked at 104.6. That really did start to bring the fever back down, and he does seem to have started to get back to his normal self.

The two upsides: Leo saw his first movie (Finding Nemo), and I finished my library book (White Night). [Side note: I'm geeked out a little because the Urbana Free Library now has Small Favor listed in its public access catalog, and it doesn't even come out until April. I'm number 2 on the reserve list, and seriously excited.]

I'm not ready to go through this again any time soon.