Part 2

Continued from the last entry... Penny's doctor, Dr. Dawson, is really great. Penny pitched a holy fit when we got there and the (unduly gruff) nurse wanted to weigh her and take her temperature, etc. Then, they turned on a movie on the tv mounted on the wall in the exam room - the movie Robots - and left it on with no way to turn it off. Penny was freaked by the movie, it was too loud and I thought I'd never calm her down. I'd tried every toy in my purse, and downloaded three different apps to my phone trying to distract her by the time the doctor came. Dr. Dawson walked in, blessedly turned the movie off, and proceeded to talk with us with a calm, quiet demeanor. Penny chilled almost instantly and laughed with Dr. Dawson and willingly let her examine her. If you've ever had anything halfway significant happen to you health-wise, you know that you can kind of tell by the words the doctors use that something's up. She said she wanted to do a strep-test and then we'd talk about some things, but she didn't want to worry me until the test came back (which of course did nothing but worry me). She was really calm and cool, but it was obvious that she no more expected that strep test to be positive than to see pigs fly. Still, a nurse was sent in to swab Penny's throat. We'd never had to do that before, and it was not fun. It was a quick test (5 minutes), and negative. Then Dr. Dawson returned to talk. She explained that she thought Penny might have an inflammatory process called Kawasaki disease, but we needed to do another throat swab b/c the quick strep tests can be falsely negative and so they'd do the more accurate test that takes longer. She also wanted to draw some blood. She explained that she had a two year old daughter at home and she would not be doing these tests if they weren't necessary. Two more nurses were sent in to draw blood from her arm. It took forever and she screamed the whole time. And then, when they were finally done, they swabbed her throat again. Penny has never before had a full-on temper tantrum like I've read about. She just about had one then. She crossed the line into crazed panic. I confess that I barely heard Dr. Dawson telling me about when all the test results would be in and what to do and so forth. I was trying too hard to calm Penny down and I couldn't hardly hear over her. I left without a totally clear picture of what to expect. The phone rang that afternoon and they said that one of the tests came back and it looked good. Her sed-rate was elevated, but not crazily so like is usually seen in Kawasaki's disease. I went to bed that night thinking it probably wasn't really Kawasaki's and didn't really expect the rest of the test results to show any different. What a difference a day makes.