And this is how I aged 15 years in two hours...

Last Wednesday evening, Steve thought Caitlin was feeling a little warm, and even though I didn't really feel anything out of the ordinary, we took her temperature. It came in at 100.6, and since the internet told me that 100.4 is considered a fever when you're taking the poor kid's temperature through her bum, I told Steve we shouldn't give her anything for the fever, yet. It was mild, and I'm in the camp that thinks a fever isn't necessarily bad, and you need to let your body do what it needs to do to fight whatever it's fighting.

Well, I was in that camp, anyway.

On Thursday, we left for work before Caitlin woke up, and neither one of us thought to tell Steve's mom that C had been warm the night before, so she maybe needed a little extra attention that day. And since Caitlin was mostly acting fine that day, the thought that she might be sick wasn't even on Karen's radar, at all.

Around 3pm, she thought Caitlin seemed a little groggy, so she took the baby up for her afternoon nap. While Karen was changing C's diaper, she started seizing. Karen called 911 for the paramedics, then my father-in-law to come get Brigid, then Steve to let him know what was happening. At 3:30, Steve was calling me, texting me, emailing me, and knocking on my office door as I was trying to give a year-end review to one of my employees, to tell me that we needed to leave right then, because Caitlin was leaving our house in an ambulance, and he didn't have all of the details, but she was unconscious, and maybe had stopped breathing at one point, and we needed to meet them at the hospital.

I barely held it together until we got into the car, and then I lost it. As I told Steve, I had a complete breakdown when our house sale fell through in November. Not panicking while my baby was on the way to the hospital in an ambulance was not an option for me.

We beat the ambulance to the children's hospital by about 20 minutes, because we were closer coming from work than they were in coming from the house, and they weren't treating it as an emergency run, because they thought Caitlin was mostly ok, so they weren't using the lights/sirens. While we were waiting, the EMT called me for some health history on Caitlin, and he was able to tell me that she was responding well, and they thought the fever was just a febrile seizure, meaning her temperature spiked too quickly for her body to handle, but there wouldn't be any last damage from it.

My mother-in-law had ridden in the ambulance with Caitlin, and at the hospital, she had to recount her story at least four times for various nurses and doctors. She also had to explain how Caitlin had managed to get her leg caught in the coffee table while Steve and I were out of town last weekend, leaving an impressive bruise on her poor little thigh, because she had twisted herself in there nice and tight.

In the end, they all agreed that it was a febrile seizure, and we needed to alternate her on Tylenol and Motrin every three hours to keep her fever (probably caused by the same virus that had Brigid up and vomiting at 3:30 Friday morning, but that's another story...) down, and we took Baby Caitlin home to eat all of the popsicles.

You'd better believe that kid is getting medicated at the slightest hint of a fever from now on, because this is dangerous or not, this is not something I ever want to have to experience again.

Poor baby...