On Sunday October 18th Steve started to feel sick and that was when Elijah had developed a cough. Over the next few days the cough seem to have gotten worse. We started to take his temperature and the highest it had ever gotten was 100.6 but it had gone back down after we gave him some Tylenol and that continued through Wednesday. In the mean time we placed a few phone calls to his pediatrician letting them know about his cough and temperature and that he was becoming more irritable, we even told them that his breathing had labored at times. They had advised us not to come in because they were worried that if we brought him in we might infect others that may have been in their office so on Wednesday they just prescribed him some Tamiflu and told us to call if he got worse. On the morning of Thursday the 22nd his dressing around his mickey button had been changed and his temperature taken. His temp was 101, so we gave him dose of Tamiflu and some Tylenol to help his temperature. About two hours later we noticed that his mickey button site was bloody and had been slowly bleeding so the front of his outfit was full of blood. We called his pediatrician again and of course our doctor was out of the office so they said they would squeeze us in to see another physician. Since Steve was sick my dad and I took him. The doctor spend about a minute with him and advised us that she was going to call the emergency squad to transport him to the hospital because she could see that he was not doing well.
They strapped me to the gurney and I held on to Elijah while they took us into the ambulance. We had gotten two blocks away from the doctors office when they said they needed to get us to the hospital immediately because his stats were not looking good, so they flipped on the lights and siren. We arrived at the ER and there was a team of people waiting for us. They took Elijah and started to work on him right away. They wound up intubating him immediately to help get his heart rate and breathing under control and then they sedated him to keep him calm. He spend a little over an hour in the ER and then was transferred up the Pediatrics ICU unit. They worked on him up there for about an hour and he had become stable. They did some blood work and culture swabs on him and confirmed that he had Influenza A(H1N1).
Needless to say we are very upset with his pediatrician. I am sure the office advised a lot of other parents to keep their children home to reduce the risk of infecting others, but we believe that they overlooked that fact that Elijah is not a "normal" baby. He has a compromised immune system and a heart condition that puts him at a MUCH, MUCH higher risk than others. The staff at the hospital had told us that he was the most critical child in their unit.
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