Emergency!

Probably one of the biggest parental fears with international travel is the sick child who needs medical care. If you've ever wondered what that sort of situation might look like, here is OUR story.

It's started the same way it mostly starts back in the States - sick friends. Our friend, Sophia, was sick on her trip with us to Baby Boss. And she still wasn't better by the time we saw them on Sunday. She was on meds to bring her fever down, however, so she had the strength and energy to play, and we tried to keep her away from the kids and limit our exposure to her.

I think it wasn't enough. The day after playing with Sammi, Sofia, and Alan for the last time, Eloise woke up with a head-ache and threw-up in the morning. Most disappointingly, this cancelled the return trip to Yingge with JJ and Mabel to eat at the century old home on Old Street. (This loss took me a while to get over. I was SO looking forward to this experience. It was going to be one of the last fun things we did. And I was anticipating it would also be one of the coolest.)

Blessedly, by the same afternoon, Eloise felt much better and didn't have further spewing episodes. (Making me all the sorrier our plans had been cancelled. STILL getting over it.)

So I was anxious that Eloise's bug would spread to the rest of the family in our final week. Actually, I'm not sure Eloise caught anything from Sofia at all. In fact I think it was Arthur who did.

Sofia wound up staying three days in the hospital beginning right after we saw them on Sunday. I don't think hospital stays are as big a deal in Taiwan as they are in the States, but she proved to have a pretty ferocious fever. And by Wednesday, so did Arthur.

His lasted all day. At some point, I gave him the baby ibuprofen we had traveled with. This helped somewhat, but he didn't seem fully himself.

That night I told Q I would trade beds with Kai so I could keep an eye on Arthur throughout the evening. I gave him a final dose of ibuprofen at 8pm, and we all went to bed.

Sure enough, around midnight I woke up to Arthur calling for me. Our room was somewhat dark (though I'd left a light on fearing he would also need to throw-up) so I reached down and felt his hand. It was outstretched and shaking. I rolled nearer the edge of the bed and rubbed his back, but he continued to call to me as if he wasn't aware of my presence.

So I got on the floor with him and held him in my arms. His little body was on fire, and most disturbing of all, he continued to reach up, shaking and trembling, and call for me to hold him though he was already in my arms. I didn't know what to do, but I was scared and felt I needed to cool him off as fast as possible.

I took his shirt off and began pacing the apartment to circulate air around him. I'd been wanting to give him a warm sponge bath earlier, but didn't have any washcloths so I didn't. Now I found a shirt of his I'd put in a pile of things to discard in Taiwan, ran lukewarm water over it, and sponged his head, neck and back. He'd become aware that I was holding him, taking care of him, and he began responding, though without any energy.

And I was tired. We went out to the couch and I laid him down on it to rest my arms. He lay there and seemed to go back to sleep. As I wondered what to do next, Arthur called out to me again. Laying on the couch, perfectly safe, he seemed terrified and told me he was "falling upside down."

I picked him up again, paced, sponged, and went in to wake Q. "We need to talk about what to do," I told him. He could see Arthur in my arms and quickly got out of bed and came into the living room. Though it was past midnight and how to get to the hospital, and what would happen once we got there were ALL big unknowns, when I described what I had been dealing with, Q was fully on-board with going. He said he was surprised I was hesitating at all.

I didn't know Arthur was feeling up to the "smile" above,
but I was relieved to see his face in this first pic when
all I had said was, "I'm going to take a picture.

He readied our bags with food (we thought we might be admitted because we knew Sofia had been), passports, and other essentials, while I ran down the hill to the security house to ask them to call us a cab. They said one would come in just 3 minutes and I responded that we would be ready and ran back up the hill to make sure we were.

One of the challenges we faced was that we were down to our very last bit of cash. Blessedly, we'd already been inside the hospital, so it wasn't completely unfamiliar, and we were confident we would get good care. But we knew none of the ATMs liked our card. We DID have enough cash for the cab, and figured we would cross the money bridge later.

The cab driver was VERY fast. I didn't go into any great detail about our needs - I figured to anyone paying attention, a foreign family heading to the hospital at almost 1 AM said enough. As we waited for a green light to turn onto the main road to the hospital, an ambulance passed. Our cab was so fast we caught up to it and would have arrived at the same time were we not cut off by another red at the turn into the parking lot.

Inside, the staff quickly established that we were cash pay and we waited maybe 5 minutes to register by giving them Arthur's passport. We were then taken back, Arthur's temperature was taken (101.5F) and his weight noted, and we got in to the doctor who was able to see us right away. The doctors in Taiwan study medicine in source-language, meaning English is the FIRST language of their medicine. So in English, we visited with the doctor about how long he had been sick for (the whole day), what we'd done (given him ibuprofen) and his other symptoms (none). I told them about the shaking and disconnect with his body Arthur had experienced just an hour earlier. The doc asked more about that, but most of his questions I wasn't able to answer because of the darkness of the room Arthur and I were in.

The face he pulled for this second pic was a "tender mercy"
for my mother heart. I knew if he felt well enough to
pull a face, his full recovery couldn't be far off.

The doc examined Arthur by looking in his ears, throat, and feeling his glands. He had Arthur squeeze his hands. Through all of this Arthur was a champ. When he wasn't being talked to, he rested in my arms, but was responsive and unafraid to interact with the doctor. He even made a few funny observations which I don't now remember, but they were definitely tender mercies calming my panicky mother-heart and helping me to feel he would be alright.

The doc said he found a slight infection in Arthur's throat, and that the fever was likely due to this. However, since he didn't exhibit other symptoms of a cold, he said he would prescribe cold medicine we could take if we needed, but for the fever, prescribed ibuprofen (which we already had) and acetaminophen. (This thrilled me! It was, in fact, all that I had wanted in the first place, but at the hour I needed it, IF a store that sold it existed, I had no idea where or how to find it, and doubted it would be open anyway.)

After the diagnosis, Arthur and I waited for the meds to be prepared and Q went on the hike to the 7-11 behind the hospital for more cash. In the end, it turns out he didn't need it. The total we payed the hospital was under $1,000 kuai - less than $30 for the emergency room visit AND 3 medications. AND it took less than 30 minutes! The hospital called us another cab and we were back home fast.

Leaving all the other kids at home had been an unsettling thing. Before we left, Q had awaken Kai to tell him where we were going in case there were issues. I told Q that if we were admitted, or there for a long time (our experiences in stateside emergency rooms and instacares have taken hours) we could call Mabel in the morning to come be with the kids. (I felt blessed and comforted that this seemed an option. It is difficult to find people in Taiwan who don't work or who don't have little kids for whom contagion would be an issue.) Anyway, the kids were sound asleep when we got back around 1:30 am, and in fact, in the morning Kai did not remember Q waking him up and was surprised to learn Arthur had been to the hospital.

Getting out into the cool night air had also seemed to help Arthur. When we got back to the apartment and went to give him his first dose of acetaminophen, we couldn't find the dosage! I got online and Q and I spent some time trying to do the math to convert Stew's weight into kilograms and teaspoons into milliliters. NOT fun with a 1:30 am brain! Exhausted physically and mentally from the effort, I thought to myself that it was a CRAZY oversight to not provide that with the prescription, and hunted on the instructions again for the "mL." On this second try, though I didn't find the "mL" I DID find that he was supposed to take 7 CC's. For the life of us, neither Q nor I could figure out what CC's was an abbreviation for, but we again googled a conversion for the CC's prescribed to the mL measuring cup and discovered they were the same! CC, or cubic centimeters, are the same as mL! A good thing to know!

Arthur took the meds. In general, he is not a fan of syrup medicine, but tolerated this one as he had the others. I promised him the medicine would help him feel better and not be so hot. Within about 20-30 minutes my promise came true and he slept comfortably until about 6 am, when I was able to give him another dose of ibuprofen before he got to emergency heat. All the following day we staggered the meds every 4-6 hours and Stew's strength and energy came back, comforting me further, though I could tell he was not well.

And we were down to the last few hours in Taiwan. I felt so blessed that in all of our sicknesses, I had kept our time incredibly open. We didn't have to cancel anything but the dinner on Monday. We weren't able to do as much as we might have to enjoy our last days in Taiwan. BUT, with Q's help, and with the health we all felt on Tuesday, we were able to stagger things and get out and do final gift shopping.

On Thursday night after a day of meds, I posted an update to the post I had written on facebook the evening before we wound up in the emergency room. I had asked people to pray for feverish Arthur. I updated that though we had wound up in the emergency room, we had the meds we needed, and were doing better. I asked next that people pray that Arthur would not NEED the meds - that he would get better for our long journey home coming up in less than 48 hours. These prayers worked! Arthur's final fever dose was Thursday morning, and his fever never came back!

We survived an emergency room visit in a foreign country in the nick of time to get well and return home to tell the tale!