Day One Hundred and Thirty-Seven

Actual Date: Monday, August 9, 2010

This day kinda happened in a blur. Parker had slept in at least an hour past the time he normal would. When he finally did wake up he was screaming. I rushed in there to see what the problem was, thinking he had just gotten his leg stuck in between one of the bars on the crib or something. As soon as I opened the door to his room the smell hit me.

I scooped him up and grabbed a new diaper and proceeded to change him. But as soon as I opened his diaper I could tell there was something more going on here than just a baby upset over having a poopy diaper. The whole diaper was covered in blood.

Seriously, it was one of those Mommy Moments where your heart just drops. I got him cleaned up and grabbed my phone and called the doctor. They made us an appointment for that day and told me to bring the diaper in so we could run some tests on it.

So we did just that, although by the time we went to the doctor, only a couple hours later, he had 3 more bloody diapers. Once the doctor looked at them, and smelled the awful smell, she said that we for sure needed to take samples of it and have it sent out for some testing. She said the likely cause was Salmonella poisoning and asked if we had been swimming lately. Which of course we had. She told us that she sees a fair amount of cases with young children who come in during the Summer months who have contracted it from a public pool. That was enough to make my skin crawl. Yuck.

She also asked if he had gotten into any dog food, because a lot of times dog food can contain salmonella. And yes he had. Now that he's crawling, it's been a non stop struggle to keep him out of it. But I had only once caught him with it actually in his mouth. But maybe that was enough. She also said there was a slim chance that it was another virus from contaminated well water. But she said it was slim because it had been weeks since he had drank any well water.

Then she said the thing any Mom never wants to hear; if the tests come back negative for these things, we will proceed with some more in depth testing to find the source behind it. It's nerve wracking to hear that indeed, we're not really sure what's going on with your baby. But when she said that it triggered a memory that I had. A few weeks before when changing his diaper I found a couple Bendaroos (kinda like pipe cleaners except they don't have the wire in them and they are made out of wax) balled up in his poop. Apparently he had found them somewhere and somehow swallowed them. But he never fussed about it and it hadn't seem to have bothered him since so I had forgotten about it until now.

I told the doctor about this and asked her if she thought maybe there was something else or perhaps more Bendaroos stuck in there, because honestly I don't know how he got into them so I wasn't sure just how many he had eaten. She said that if it was from that we would probably be seeing other symptoms and that she felt comfortable waiting for the tests to come back so we would have a better idea of how to proceed. We love our new pediatrician and I had full faith that she was doing everything she could.

We left the doctors office with orders to keep him hydrated and wait for further instruction. Apparently antibiotics don't really work for Salmonella poising so that wasn't really an option.

We had spent a great deal of time at the doctors office so by the time we got out of there it was time to head straight to Brooke's dance class. Luckily I had thrown her dance bag in the car at the last minute. That picture there is of her with her new "Bun Cover" from Grandma Cindy and Papa Ron. I'm not sure if that's the actually name for it but that's what we call it.