Curse you, armpit thermometer! Hello, rectal!

Last night, Violet’s cold took a bad turn, and by this morning, she was refusing to eat. She felt hot, but the armpit thermometer told us more than once that her temperature was 97.9. Remember yesterday, when I wrote that if you can get a baby to smile, then they’re not that sick? Well, we couldn’t get Violet to smile for anything. When she started moaning, “uhhhhhhhhhh…uhhhhhhhhh…uhhhhhhhhh,” over and over again, we decided it was time to call the doctor.

That was at 9 AM. By the time we arrived back home at 12:30, we’d found out that Violet’s temperature was actually 102 (Curse you, armpit thermometer! Hello, rectal!), her neck rash was the worst the pediatrician had seen in his 27 years of practice (what parent wouldn’t love to hear that?), we had to take her to get a chest x-ray (when they told us we couldn’t go into the room with her, I asked, “Can we stand near the room?), and I found out that there’s not just children’s Tylenol, there is also infant’s Tylenol, which led to great confusion in the medicine aisle at the grocery store, returns, and more phone calls to the pediatrician’s office (but I am still positive that when the doctor sent us on our way, he told us to get children’s Tylenol). The chest x-ray turned out clean, and the pain reliever brought her out of her fever-induced haze for an hour or so, giving us a glimpse of our old Violet. Her nose and chest are still extremely congested, the moans have returned, and I'm ready to go out and buy some leeches.

130 days old