Sleep Sickness

It was weird this morning. I left Amy at home alone to go to church. We were unable to find her cell phone so I left her mine figuring she would sleep most of the morning anyway.

- As an aside - this is the only real drawback I've found to not having a landline phone...if you misplace your cell phone and it's off...it is hard to find).

In Sunday school I started feeling antsy about her so I decided to skip services, make a quick Wal-Mart run (not that you can really do anything quick in Super Wal-Mart since it's the size of Lithuania), and then surprise Amy by renting a movie.

It's cold and rainy here today and a good day to have a fire and sit on the couch watching TV.

When I walked in the door Amy was obviously uncomfortable. She had in fact called the church only minutes earlier asking for me to come home.

I could tell right away she had a high fever and was miserable. We called the doctor, but the doctor "on call" is someone whom we have dealt with in the past and (although we may end up going this route anyway) we knew his only recommendation would be that she check into the hospital via the emergency room, get fluids and antibiotics and wait to speak to her real doctor. We have fluids here and she's already on antibiotics so Amy was not keen on that approach. For now at least we've decided to wait until morning when she can contact her real doctor.

In the interim I tried to get her fever down, keep getting fluids in her, and get her to go to sleep. That wasn't easy, she was in this sort of weird half dream, half fever state and so I was triple checking everything making certain she hadn't already taken some medications I was giving her, etc. She also started a new medication yesterday so some of this could be a reaction to that. In any case, I finally got her comfortable (we played the "I'm hot, I'm cold" make Michael adjust the thermostat game for a while) I put on a sweater, stoked the fire, took off the sweater, and let the fire sputter out.

Amy is fairly notorious for post surgical fevers, but this is a little later than her pattern so it has me concerned. The good news is that if the fever is the result of something surgical, we should be able to discern that now with some simple tests.

I prayed over her and held her hand...eventually she dozed off. She's been sleeping peacefully for nearly 5 hours or so now. I'm learning why nurses are reluctant to wake sleeping patients, but I'm about to wake her to check her temp and if things haven't worsened, I'm going to repeat the routine to keep her hydrated and hopefully sleeping soundly.

She doesn't appear to be as feverish....

Okay...it's becoming obvious even to me that I'm writing simply to stall, so I guess I better go back into nurse mode and see how my patient is doing.


I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety. - Psalm 4:8


UPDATE: Fever is down...still not great...but we're sticking with our wait till tomorrow plan