How Not to Spend Your Sunday

OR

How To Find Out Which Doctors In Your Town Suck Ass

So, yeah. Of course the kids have this, this, thing. This 900 pound gorilla squatting on their chests and sinuses who happens to be a distant relative of the hanta virus and hemorrhagic fever.

Maybe that's a bit much. When you've got hemorrhagic fever you bleed from every orifice. What we've all got? More like mucushagic* fever with snot flowing freely and threatening to seep from our ears if our noses aren't blown every two seconds.

At any rate, much of the weekend was spent dosing Bubba and his extremely high fevers and letting all three kids rot their brains with Little Bear, Thomas the Tank Engine, and various Disney movies. All was quiet until 2PM Sunday when I spied a nasty, raised rash on Bubba's arm and ankle. A rash that looked suspiciously like this:


Yeah. That's what I said. So, the pediatrician's answering service recommended taking him to urgent care. My mom happened to be over so she trucked off with us.

We were rushed into an urgent care exam room within minutes of our arrival (obviously, nasty rashes on 3-year-olds moves you to V.I.P. status at the weekend E.R.) and the doctor, with a visual of the rash and Bubba's temperature reading, stated, "Take him to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta! Could be cellulitis! Could be lyme disease! High fever! They'll draw blood! Cultures! GO!"

And off we went. Now, of course, Children's Healthcare is 35 minutes away from our house. My mom was using her past experience as a driver for Enterprise Rent-A-Car (read: driving like Meatloaf outta Hell) while I stuffed my face with a 3 o'clock lunch. And what should happen on I-75 South just before exit 265? My mother announced that she had a migraine headache coming on fast. So fast that she was already losing her ability to see.** While driving 80 miles-per-hour. In Atlanta traffic.

Yeah.

We pulled off, dosed her with migraine meds, and I proceeded to drive us at speeds approaching Mach .118*** all the way to the Children's Healthcare ER. They took Bubba's name, birth date, weight, crying decibel levels (fracking OSHA regulations), glanced at his now-disappearing rash (wouldn't you know it), and after a one hour wait during which I heard about little Hannah's constant bouts of diarrhea and vomiting since Thursday, young Matthew's nasty head gash, and spry Annie's face plant into a soccer goal post, we were finally taken back to an exam room. The doctor looked at the rash and said, "Hmmmm, yes," listened to my monologue regarding Bubba's history of high fevers and said, "Aaaaah, I see," took a gander at the insides of his ears and declared, "Well, there's your problem! He's got a wicked double ear infection! The rash is an overflow, if you will, of the ear infection! Here's some amoxicillin! Go forth and be well!" OK, maybe he didn't say that last part. Maybe I made that up. But the point I'm trying to make is that after a 70-minute round trip drive and a 90-minute ER extravaganza, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia is going to take a dump in my mailbox in about 10 days. Why? Because of a doctor who looked only at the panicked expression on my face and the rash on my son's skin and not at his whole body, his whole condition, and sent us on our way.

Yeah.

So the moral of this story is that high fevers, whether Bubba says his ears hurt or not, are indicative of my little man having ear infections. That when my mom worries to the extreme over my kids, don't let her drive down the interstate because a migraine could be imminent. And that it is possible for me to live through the craziness of a simultaneous ER visit/Mom migraine without crying a single tear or yelling at a single person.

Yeah.

*Yep. Made that shit up, baby!
**Um, yeah. Her migraines are that bad.
***Do the math! First one to answer that gets... the self-satisfaction of a math problem well-solved!