Scariest Day Of Our Lives (so far)

I have been texting with a lot of people this weekend, but have not been able to tell the full story of what happened.  I thought this might be a good way to do so and everyone can read it in one spot.  Plus...it is a good place for me to document it...

Caleb woke up burning up at 3am Friday morning.  I instantly stripped him (he was in hot footsie jammies) and gave him some tylenol.  He felt cooler when we woke up at 7 and we started our day.  Both boys ate a big bowl of oatmeal and some juice and they were playing.  Caleb was a little whiney and clingy, but nothing super unusual.  Around 9, he came over and sat with me on the chair and fell asleep for about 45 minutes.  Around 10, he got up and started playing with Jacob.  They were in the playroom and Jacob had gone upstairs to get 2 pillows and they were making a bed in the playroom.  He came and asked me for a blanket and around 10:20 Jacob came over to me and said look mom...we made a bed!  I looked and Caleb looked like he had fallen asleep, so I walked over there and he was just playing around with me and was laughing once I got over there.  I walked away and called him a silly goose.  About 10 minutes later, Jacob had come back into the family room/kitchen area and Caleb had stayed in the playroom (not abnormal) and I sat down on the couch and all of a sudden heard a weird noise coming from the playroom.  I looked over there and Caleb was laying on the ground convulsing.  I ran over to him and immediately knew he was having a seizure.  At this point, his fever had not been super high and I had been maintaining it with medicine so I was in complete shock that this was even going on.  I picked him up and took him over to our ottoman to strip his clothes.  I then realized he had closed his eyes and was "spitting" out of his mouth and his breathing was becoming more and more labored.  I rolled him onto his side and I grabbed my phone and dialed 911.  At this point I have NO idea when he started seizing and it had been a good 3-4 minutes since I had found him.  He FINALLY stopped seizing, but became very still and quiet and unresponsive and his breathing was still very labored.  The fire department finally got there and they gave him some oxygen and took his temp, which was 103.  However...he was still not responding to them.  That went on for another 15 minutes.  During that 15 minutes, I had called Joe (who was stuck downtown because he takes the train into work) to tell him to get home as we had an emergency.  His company will actually pay for a cab ride home for you if you have an emergency during the non-train hours.  I then picked up the phone to call our NEW friends who live down the street to see if they could help me with Jacob until we could figure out what we were going to do or until Joe could get home.  Amy was at our house before I could even get off the phone with her.  It was record time.  I am so incredibly appreciative to her for being there for us.  These kind of situations are EXTREMELY hard when you have no friends/family around you to help.  It is definitely one of the cons of living 180 miles away from all of those people. 

At that point, the firefighters felt like because of how long he seized and because of how long it took him to come out of it that I needed to take him to the hospital.  They did NOT suggest me driving him because they were concerned about his temp rising up again and him having another seizure in the car on the way there.  When it comes to the kids, we are pretty adamant that we take them to Children's Hospital in Seattle if possible.  So...we headed there via ambulance.  Once we were there, it was apparent that they were CRAZY busy!!!  It took us about an hour to get into an actual room and another 30 minutes to see a doc.  His temp was still 104.6 an hour and a half after Tylenol and wasn't coming down at all.  So they gave him a dose of Ibuprofen to try to get the temp down.  After about 30 minutes it FINALLY started to come down.  The doc finally came in and checked him out.  I was CONVINCED it was either an ear infection or pneumonia (some sort of secondary infection).  Everything was clear EXCEPT for his nose, which was pretty congested.  So...at this time he is being treated for a sinus infection.  I was very doubtful that was what it was, but since everything else was clear I had to trust it.  About 8 hours after his first antibiotic dose, his fever broke and the rest of the day he was "sweating the bacteria" out of his system.  So...whatever it was (sinus infection or not) seems to be clearing with the antibiotic.

So...many people have asked me what this means for him from now on.  At this point, until he is about 6 years old...he will be more susceptible to having a febrile seizure whenever his temperature is raised quickly.  There are definitely a ton of things we can do to keep his temp down, but sometimes these things just happen and no matter what you do...you can't fix it.  We will probably ALWAYS call 911 because we will always want him to be checked out.  A hospital visit probably won't be as necessary once we rule out anything else that might be causing it.  It's just something that we will always need to be cautious and worried about every time he has any sort of fever. 

Here is a pic of him waiting for the doctor.  He spent the entire rest of the day in his diaper to ensure that he did not get too hot again.