I said 'when'..did you not hear me say 'when'?

"When you have had enough, just say when".

When.

The cold my darling spud had last week, turned out to be something worse.

RSV (Respitory Syncytial Virus)

While it is basically a really bad cold for adults.(Which Mr. Dreadful had..and I now have)

But can be quite dangerous for infants under 3 months...which spud is.

Friday evening I returned home from work to a very lethargic, unresponsive, funky breathing and "un-spudlike" spud.

So I played paranoid parent and called the pediatricians office (which now charges a 10 dollar after hours fee for the doctor on call to ring you!)

The doctor who returned my call suggested I take spud to the ER at the local hospital. I grumbled under my breath, Friday nights at the local ER are nightmarish... mostly because the poor souls without medical insurance are guaranteed care if they show up in the ER....but ever the paranoid parent, I went..sure that he would get some antibiotics and be sent on his way home to be cuddled by mom.

Momma was wrong...I stood, terrified tears running down my face in the corner of a room in the ER (thats a good indicator that you know you're actually sick here..if you get a ROOM, not a curtained area) while I heard words whispered like "very sick baby" "CT scan" and the most fear inducing "spinal tap"
The doctors asked a slew of questions "Had he recently had a fall?" "When did you notice these symptoms?" and various others I tried my best to answer...to each person repeating 'He was just at the pediatrician yesterday, and they said he was fine!' as if to prove I was not a neglectful parent.

By this time there were no less than 10 people in the room, at least half of them trying to find a vein on my child so they could start a line.

Mr. Dreadful was attempting to attend to both me and the wee-V who was out in the waiting room waiting for my mom to pick him up, so he missed most of the drama.

Finally after the diagnosis of RSV comes back, and they arrange to transport him up the PICU, (no CT scan or Spinal tap necessar) they let me close enough to lean over next to him and talk to him and touch him (tears and such falling on him) I looked down at the floor and realized I am standing in a little splatter puddle of his blood...

The nurse told me we had gotten him there just in time, that we most likely would have been facing a ambulance ride or worse if we had waited.

He spent that night and half of Saturday in the PICU (in isolation since RSV is very contageous)
and then was transferred to the Pediatrics wing, and finally discharged Monday afternoon..

He has nebulizer treatments 4 times a day right now, and cannot return to daycare.
So I must now find either a nanny (yeah, sure I can afford that) or some sort of daycare provider who does not have a large number of other children.

But aside from a nagging cough and junky sounding wheeze occasionally, he's back to the old spud.

He smiled, and waved his limbs at me when I left for work this morning (finally forced to return after using up the leave I had acquired since my return in early January)


So naturally I am now sick since I havent slept in almost a full week (sleeping chair at the hospital is so not comfy, and every cough has me alert now) and am completely useless.

When.