Yep, It’s Pink Eye
Posted By Jill on May 4, 2009
Our family had our first visit to the ER last night. Mac has had a little cold the last couple of days, nothing too bad, but his eye that had given us some trouble when he was a newborn is frequently affected when he gets a cold – waters a lot, gets goopy, etc. Well, he woke up from his late-afternoon nap at about 8:15, and that eye was so swollen he almost couldn’t open it. Jeremy immediately said, “he’s got pink eye.” I said I thought we needed to go in to urgent care or the ER right away. I suppose in hindsight we should have called his doctor first, but without knowing anywhere he would have contracted it and how swollen his eye was, we didn’t want to take any chances. None of our urgent care clinics were open at that hour, so we headed to the ER. We saw it was quite busy (duh, everything else is closed) and were informed by another waiting patient that the wait time would be over 3 hours. Yikes! It was already 9:00 p.m.! Luckily he had just woken from a nap, and we had brought snacks and a bottle for him, as well as some toys. We got into triage pretty quickly, within probably a half hour, but then did end up waiting… and waiting… until we were taken to a “room” at about 11:45 p.m. The doctor was in by about 12:10 a.m., immediately said it was indeed an infected eye, likely from his cold virus, and she would prescribe eye drops just in case, because of the risk of there being a worse bacterial infection. This of course is highly contagious, so we asked about precautions for his toys, etc., and for us, but she said not to get too paranoid, that if we keep washing our hands, using anti-bacterial hand sanitizer, not touch our eyes, sanitize any toys we’re worried about, and wash his linens, we should be fine.
Mac did amazingly well. Because we were both there, we were able to take turns taking him out to the hallway to run around (being careful not to let him touch anything of course). We tried several times to get him to go to sleep but were unsuccessful. In hindsight (again), there were a few other things we could have tried, but all-in-all, he was a champ. I even tried to get him to cuddle once we got to the “room” and just let him scream for a while, admittedly hoping it would make the doctor arrive faster… no such luck.
So there we were, finally confirmed, SO tired, and with prescription in hand. We got a bottle of water ready for him, and Jeremy took him out to the car while I went to the pharmacy. I gave them all the information, blah blah, and when they called my name quickly, I was disheartened to hear, “I’m so sorry, but we’re out of this medication.” “You’ve got to be kidding me,” was my reply. Ok, so now we’re off to a 24-hour Walgreens pharmacy nearby, at 1:00 in the morning. Mac was STILL awake at this point.
We were able to get the prescription at Walgreens and headed home with a plan of attack to get Mac’s bed changed, get him ready, bottle, drops, ibuprofen, and to sleep! I think we were both in bed a little after 2.
Luckily, one of the teachers was willing to cover my keyboarding class this morning, so I didn’t have to rush to work at 7:00 a.m. I was up between 6:45 and 7:15 waiting to see if someone would come through for me then was able to go back to sleep. Mac woke up at 8:30, though, so that was it for both of us! We were also lucky that Jeremy was already off today, so he could stay home with Mac. My week coming up is pretty busy with the BT rummage sale – I’m trying to get some old PCs ready to try to sell, and I only have today and tomorrow! I told Jeremy I’d run home if he needed help with Mac’s eye drops, but by the time I called to check on them, our true-champ-of-a-dad had already done it!
Hopefully everything will be much better by tonight and tomorrow, and we can get back to busy-ness as usual!
Thank you to those of you who contacted us while waiting in the ER. It’s so great to be reminded how very blessed we are. We counted our many blessings on the way home in thanksgiving for what we DO HAVE in spite of our exhaustion!
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