emergency!

mercer had a bit of excitement last sunday night. throughout the entire weekend, mercer was feeling very lethargic, tired, and just...blah. he would whine no matter what he was doing and he wasn't eating anything, including his cherished milk. on saturday, he was running a very high fever of about 104. we gave him some Tylenol and by the next morning, he had cooled off a bit.

on sunday night however, mercer's fever jumped back up to around 104 and we decided that we needed to take action. we called his doctors and decided to take him to the emergency room. we were worried about dehydration and he looked terrible - hot, red, droopy-eyed, sweaty, sick. we got there at around 6:30pm and the doctors immediately gave him some extra strength baby motrin. over the next few hours, mercer saw a total of 3 doctors, 2 nurses, and had a chest x-ray taken.

to make a long story short, the doctors wanted to diagnose him with walking pneumonia, simply based on one doctor hearing congestion in mercer's chest, yet they found nothing in his x-ray. they wanted to give him an antibiotic, but when the attending doctor finally listened to his chest, he heard nothing. we refused the antibiotic and chose to see mercer's real doctors in the morning for more advice. at this point in the night (10:30pm), mercer was running around in his hospital crib, playing, laughing, drinking. these were all good signs. we're guessing the doctors wanted to give mercer some kind of treatment to justify our visit and calm our worries, but the hospital never appeared confident of the diagnosis. we picked up on that and went in another direction. gotta love american health care!

our pediatrician told us we did the right thing by refusing the antibiotic and that mercer simply had a very bad virus. a 104-degree fever is very serious, but it has since gone away, leaving in its wake a trail of baby sniffles and coughs. mercer is OK now, back at day care (where he probably picked up the virus in the first place), and sleeping like a champ.

this will all soon be forgotten, but still, it's good experience for new parents.