I'm Too Old for This

Why would I be sitting at the kitchen table, with a Miller Lite and a deli bag of roast beef, typing on my wife's new laptop, at 2:20 am? It's certainly not because I just got home from a frat party.

It took Baltimore twelve years to replace the vanishing Colts with the expansion Ravens (and they had to steal them from Cleveland). It took Molly less than 24 hours to end up back in the hospital.

At around 4 pm on Saturday Molly had a relatively high fever. We called the pediatrician who sent us to the ER at Robert Wood in New Brunswick. We arrived there around 5:30.

I don't have the energy to describe the visit in detail, but I will say that it took several hours to collect blood and urine to send out for lab results. We were told the labs would take one to two hours, which would have been great had the samples been taken right when we arrived.

Just after midnight we were told we'd be sent home. There was nothing in the test results that indicated anything too abnormal. Her fever was down; she was calm. I took Gavin out to the car so that we could pull around and wait for Mom and Molly. He promptly fell asleep (after all he had been stuck in an ER pod for six hours). After waiting outside for 30 minutes I decided to scoop Gavin up and head back in to check on the girls. Molly had a temperature even higher than the one that led us there in the first place.

The doctor reversed her decision, and Gavin and I drove home. He is asleep. I am not so much. Who knows what the girls are doing.

Oh yes, and in the spirit of my Lenten sacrifice: It may be wise to stick with one hospital and one set of care-givers, especially if they're as great as those at CHoP. If you decide to switch for some reason, you may be disappointed.