After school, we went home and had dinner and Jack’s rash returned. Eventually his whole neck was red except a strip down the back of the neck. It just grew and grew. There would be a red spot over his mouth. Then there would be three spots. Then the whole area under how mouth would be red and then over his mouth would be red. It went on and on. And then Jack came to us and asked for honey to make his knees feel better. We were puzzled by that. We looked and found rashes in his armpits, knee pits, and elbow pits, so we figured that was how his knees hurt.
Eventually, though, Jack didn’t want to walk. After taking a lukewarm bath with baking soda, Jack laid on Charlie’s bed with the Mr. Bumps cooling pads behind his knees for a long time. While that was going on, I went out to the drug store to get some Benedryl. After an hour, the rash wasn’t better and Jack was refusing to walk, which was scaring us, so I grabbed a bunch of his books and off we went to Texas Children’s Hospital. I had never been there before, so I followed Ronny’s GPS and turned in at the first Children’s Hospital sign that I saw. Of course, I was at the wrong building and ended up parking underneath it, but I wasn’t too far away which is good because Jack still wouldn’t walk.
We arrived around 9:15 and checked in. After a short wait, we saw a triage nurse. He thought it might be a virus that caused the rash and that the virus might be in Jack’s knees. We got out of triage around 10pm and picked out a little loveseat in the waiting room. There were lots of people there.
Eventually we hit the vending machines for a snack. Jack got some Skittles and I got some M&Ms and a bag of animal crackers for us. I had grabbed a couple of bottles of water at home, so we had a little snack there at 11pm. By 11:30pm, Jack was asleep on my lap. The triage nurse had estimated our wait at 2 hours, so I didn’t think it would be too much longer. How wrong I was. We finally got called back to a room at 2am. After chatting with a nurse, Jack fell asleep laying on top of me on a narrow gurney.
The doctor came to see us at 3pm and by then Jack was walking again. The doctor ordered blood tests, which the nurses came to get around 3:30am. Every time Jack was woken up – 2am, 3am, 3:30am – Jack was pretty upset and asking to go home. I wanted to go home too. Who knew it would take this long? I asked the nurses who took Jack’s blood how long until we could leave. They said we would need to wait until the blood test results were back – at least 45 minutes. So we hung out on the narrow little gurney for a while longer. I’m not sure if we slept much after that. Around 4am I finally figured out where the Disney channel was on the TV. Jack watched a couple episodes of Lilo and Stitch while I tried to sleep some next to him.
Around 5am, we took a potty break and went to inquire about the blood tests. Then we had another snack. Finally the doctor came back. The results that had come back were normal. There were some test results that weren’t yet back, but they let us go home around 5:45. I was hoping that it wouldn’t be light by the time we got home, but it was, which meant that Jack wouldn’t go to sleep. Apparently he had caught enough zzzzs at the hospital. His mother, though, had not. I tried hard to get him to sleep in his room, and eventually we went down to my bed, and eventually Ronny took Jack into the next room and I got about 2 hours of sleep before it was time to get up and face the day. What a night!
We still don't know what it was that affected Jack. All of the blood test results were normal.
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