What Happened, Part 1

More as a way to remember this for ourselves, but also to share with those we haven't talked to in any detail. I took Penny to the gymnastics play time on Wednesday the 13th. She was super energetic and had a blast. We came home and she took a nap. When she woke up and I went to pick her up she felt hot so I took her temperature. She was running a fever. By the next morning she had a horrible all-over rash, even on her hands and face. I thought that was odd because usually with viruses the rash happens after the fever breaks. I was kind of hoping its presence meant that the illness would be short-lived. I called the nurse at Penny's pediatrician's office just to ask about it since I thought it was unusual. She said it sounded viral to her, and agreed that maybe the fever would be gone the next day since the rash was already there. I was reassured. That night she started vomiting, and threw up every hour or so all night long. Every time we'd lay down and fall asleep she'd wake up and throwup again. I called the nurse again on Friday. It was a different nurse, she said it sounded viral but I could bring her in if I wanted. I figured there was nothing they could do, and it was only day 3 of a fever so I opted not to take her. Over the weekend, her rash started to fade a lot, but her hands seemed oddly wrinkled and bumpy. They looked weird, almost gnarly. She woke up during the night Saturday night (in fact she woke up during the night almost every night that she was sick as the fever would spike and she'd need more tylenol), and asked me to clip her fingernails. Odd, but I wasn't looking a gift horse in the mouth. She almost never lets me clip her fingernails until they are almost longer than mine! When I went to clip them, I realized her hands were very swollen. Her fingers were almost like little sausages the skin was so taught. By the next morning, the swelling was gone, but they were back to that odd bumpy gnarly look. On Sunday she complained that her foot hurt and would not put shoes or socks on. Keep in mind that through out all of this, I was giving her tylenol every 4 hours for the fever that never broke. I mean, it would go up and down, but she never woke up after a night sweat with no fever. The fever was always there, high or low. The important thing is the tylenol. The cherry flavored red tylenol. I was aware that her lips and tongue were red, but I thought it was the tylenol. I never stopped to think that the dye would fade and that her mouth shouldn't still look that bright red hours later, you know? It wasn't until the doctor said something to me about it when I took her in on Monday that I realized it wasn't the tylenol making her mouth look like that! Under the fluorescent lights too I could see how incredibly dry and cracked her mouth was. She was begging me for chapstick, but I didn't have any in my purse (we have like 10,000 tubes at home, but of course I didn't have one with me). The nurses found a little sample tube of Aquaphor and we began treating her lips with that. Her tongue was red, red, red. Think the reddest popsicle or lollipop you can imagine washed down with red kool-aid. Red. And bumpy like every tastebud stood out. She'd woken up with bloodshot eyes that morning before I took her in, but they were not bloodshot at the office. Later, her eye lids would turn red like she had red eyeliner on.

That's all I have time to type now, but I'll write again about the initial doctor's visit and diagnosis.