And the Heat Goes On...

We spent over 2 hours at the doctor's office today. It looks like the fever is because of a Urinary Tract Infection, like I originally thought. When we left the office last week, the nurse gave me a "goodie bag" of the equipment to do the urine catch in a bag for Belle in case I thought she needed to be retested, so I did that before we went today, but left it at home. So we did another one at the office, and after testing it they concluded that things "didn't look right", but that the results might be attributed to the diaper rash that she had. The doctor got ready to send us home, then decided that with Belle's young age and the high fever she should get another test done. Unfortunately the additional test required a catheter (which was the reason she wanted to put it off in the first place) so I had to feed Annabelle for a while so that she'd pee, then I had to hold down her arms and try to keep her calm, while the nurse held her legs and the doctor inserted the catheter and got the "sample". It is SOOO hard to do something like that that makes your baby cry out of fear or pain, even if it's for their own good! She had the most blood-curling scream, and I can't believe that I didn't cry myself!

They did the preliminary test on the new "sample" and again it had "suspicious results", so they are sending the rest of the sample out for a full test. Unfortunately because of my insurance, it has to be sent to a lab that isn't local, so I should have the results by the end of the week. :(

Since the preliminary results didn't look good, they decided to go ahead and start Annabelle on antibiotics to treat a UTI. And, again, because she's so young they want it to heal as fast as possible, so instead of an oral antibiotic they wanted to inject it. So, after being at the office for nearly 2 hours already and missing her afternoon nap so she was SO tired, I had to lay her down on the table again to get injected with not one, but TWO, shots! Since she is little they wanted to put it in in two separate injections to distribute it (or something like that???) so two nurses each held down a leg, counted to 3, then injected a shot while I held down the top half and tried to calm her again. Poor Bellee! Again, I can't believe that I didn't bawl along with her!

After all of that, we had to stay at the office for 15 more minutes to make sure that she didn't have any adverse reactions to the antibiotics. The nurse left us alone in the room, so I turned out the lights and danced Annabelle to sleep. Just as she really drifted off, the 15 minutes was up and the nurse came in which woke her up.

So... we came home and aside from seeming sleepy, yet not wanting to sleep, she has been okay. I have to give Belle meds every 3 hours (alternating between Advil and Infant Tylenol). She was acting really fidgity and kinda high for a little while, plus she was falling over while crawling and sitting up so the medicine is definitely affecting her. Other than that, she's still eating well and just now went to bed for the night (hopefully!).

*SIGH*

We have to go back tomorrow afternoon for a follow up since Annabelle had such a high fever (it was 103.7 today). At that point, they may do another test (hopefully just the kind in the bag and not the catheter). Also, if/when her lab results come back and say that she has a kidney infection, we have to get more tests done. These tests will be an ultrasound to make sure everything looks okay, and possibly a thing where they insert dye into her bladder and it seeps into her kidneys then they watch it to make sure that it flushes back out correctly.

Thank you for all of the kind thoughts and words of encouragement! I'll keep everyone updated on Annabelle's progress.