A surprise trip the hospital

Last week on Monday I called our pediatrician about a spider bite on Anna's bottom. It wasn't healing and Anna had finally admitted after her nap that "bum hurt!" (at this point, the bite had been oozing a little brown liquid every time I changed her diaper)
The nurse who I was talking to suggested that we come in to have it checked out because what I was describing sounded like it could also be a staph infection.
We had the last appointment of the day at 5:50 pm. I thought we would go in, get some cream or some medication and be home for dinner. When we got there, the doctor confirmed that it was staph and instead of a large spider bite, it was a golf-ball sized abscess that needed to be drained at the hospital. So without going home, we went straight to Seattle Children's hospital and got checked into the Emergency room.
We were told that Anna could not eat or drink anything. The hours passed, we watched Disney movie after Disney movie, and Anna got more and more irritable. Finally, after numerous doctors had examined Anna's bum, we were told that even the Emergency room was not equipped to deal with the abscess. Anna would need to have it surgically drained under sedation. This was about midnight. Anna had been freaking out due to exhaustion for about an hour and finally collapsed on my chest, so thankfully she has no memory of being sedated. But I will remember forever them taking my sleeping child off my chest and laying her on an operating table.

Around 2:30 in the morning, we finally got our girl back. They had inserted a penrose drain in the incisions to help the abscess continue to drain over the next few days and Anna would need to remain in the hospital for another two days. We hadn't brought anything with us because we had no expectation that any hospital stay would be involved. Richard finally went home around 3:00 am while I let Anna sleep on my chest in a rocking chair in her room. Richard would come back the next morning to bring us some supplies.

Two days after our surprise trip to the emergency room, I took this picture of Anna's high chair, exactly as I left it when we went to her doctor appointment-- complete with remnants of Anna's dinner.
Anna was a miserable little girl during our two days in the hospital. She had a I.V. going through her foot, which restricted her movement to about an 8-foot radius. She also couldn't have any visitors under 10 years old, and she couldn't leave her room. So she either slept on me in the rocking chair, or she watched Toy Story (over and over and over again). She didn't sleep much at night because the nurses had to check her vitals every hour. Needless to say, we let her eat pretty much all the fruit snacks she wanted.
My mom sent this cute bouquet to cheer Anna up. Going through this experience made me miss my family and Utah more than ever. Because Richard and I had to go through this alone. There was no one to relieve us, or bring us anything, or take a shift at the hospital. Having no family around was really hard.
Anna is doing well. It turns out she did have MRSA (a resistant form of staph infection that can be especially dangerous if it is not caught soon enough). She is almost done with her antibiotics (but we have to wake her up in the middle of the night for one of her doses-- which makes her hopping mad) and she finally got the drain taken out on Monday and her wounds are healing nicely. She really was a trooper. I just hoped that she understood that everything that happened was for her good to help her get better. She is so trusting of us, and I hope she forgets everything that happened over the last week. Richard and I are still catching up on sleep, but over all, we are all recovering.

If your child ever seems to have an unexplainable "bite" somewhere, please get it checked out or at least call to talk to a nurse. I sometimes wonder if we could have avoided the whole hospital experience if we had checked out her spider bite as soon as we saw it, instead of waiting a few days.