Always surprises...

As some of you know, Stevie was in the hospital the last few days. Here's what happened... On Monday night around 11 pm, Andy was just coming to bed (I had fallen asleep hours earlier in Declan's bed telling him a story, and had made my way to our bed with Andy's assistance). He heard one of the girls on the monitor, but it wasn't a cry, it was more like a moan. He went into the girls bedroom and he saw Stevie laying on her side, just moaning. When he picked her up he could tell something was off, her body was stiff and her head was floppy. When he brought her into the light, he got really alarmed because her eyes were wide open, but they were rolled back, so she wasn't actually looking at anything. He woke me up and we tried to snap her out of it. Nothing was working, we went downstairs thinking we could get a better look at her. We called the pediatricians office right away thinking that we could get the Doctor on call. We waited for her to call back, and it seemed like it was 10 minutes, when it likely was only about 30 seconds. We kept trying to get Stevie to snap out  of it, but nothing was working. Her body was stiff, her hands at her sides and you couldn't even move them. It was like her body was there, but she wasn't. I had two thoughts, that either she was having a seizure or something had happend and she all of a sudden became a parapelegic (and I'm not even kidding, I've never seen anyone have a seizure). We decided to call 911 because it had felt like it lasted forever, part of me felt 'do we call 911 for this type of thing,' but we just didn't know what to do. Hands down, it was the scariest, most helpless and terrifying experience that we've had to date. Nothing that happend in the NICU or anything else stands close to this experience. And I hope, god willing, that we never have to experience it again.

When the paramedics got there, Stevie had vomitted and had started to come out of it. You could tell that she had a fever and the paramedic had thought that what we described was a seizure. Once we got to the hospital, they did a million tests. Chest xray, urine sample and then they had to do a spinal tap to draw some spinal fluid to check if she had meningitis. Her fever was also at 103 when we got there. Inital results showed that she didn't have meningitis, which was good. I think with the inital results and the fact that the motrin had kicked her fever, they would have let us go home. But when the Doctor came back she said that Stevie's white blood cell count was through the roof. Normal is between 5,000 - 10,000, and Stevie's was at 46,000. She was shocked and said that she should look much sicker than she did. She said that we were going to be there a few days becasue they needed to test the blood, urine and spinal fluid for the next 48 hours to determine if it was any kind of infection, or if it was something serious. By this point, they did also determine that she had a febrile seizure, which is basically a seizure that happens due to a rapid fever spike. The strange thing is that Stevie was fine all day and didn't have any fever when we put her to bed. Oh, and don't worry, both of us could be at the hospital because Aunt Em was able to come over in the middle of the night to keep an eye on the other sleeping kids.

So we hunkered down for 3 nights and a few days at the Princeton Hospital. Andy spent the time back home with the other kids. As a summary, here's what we found out. Stevie had a febrile seizure, which caused the increase in white blood cell count (when we left today it was down to 13,000). They think it was also dramatically high because of some virus that she had - those two things combined, seemed to cause a really abnormal spike. All the testing proved that there was not a bacterial infection and it was indeed just some crazy virus.

Stevie is doing great now, pretty much back to normal and very happy to see her sisters, big brother and Daddy. But I do think that she enjoyed the 1:1 time with her mommy. Let's just hope we don't have to go to such extreme's next time. Here are a few pictures from her stay...

Sweet baby girl...

After she ripped out her first IV, they basically had so duct tape the second one on. But nothing is a match for Stevie, because she got this one out as well :-) She looks like she's flipping us off in this picture - which she probably was...

Checking out the cool view from our room...

This adorable picture that Declan drew - he missed his sister so much (and if you are wondering, that's a heart in the middle).