Happy Baby

A month or so ago, there would have been no way that our daughter Josie would have passed out asleep on the floor this way. She was pretty fussy. No, strike that, she was uber fussy. Actually the word fussy is insufficient to the task of describing her. But we figured that was just how she was, and that we would have to learn to deal with it.

Then one day in May, she stopped eating. She was inconsolable. We tried everything. Finally our pediatrician directed us to take her to the emergency room. After a series of tests, looking for everything from a hair tourniquet to a lacerated cornea, her urine test came back with a bladder infection. We were staying the night at the emergency room.

They started her on broad-spectrum antibiotics. It took a couple of days to grow the culture and positively identify the bacteria. We were expecting it to be one of the usual suspects of internal infections, like E. Coli. But on the day we were anticipating bringing her home, the doctor dropped a bombshell on us. It was a nasty little bacteria called Enterobacter and it was going to require seven days of intravenous antibiotics to be sure we killed it all.

So, we did what any family of four does when they find out such news, we bought a Wii and hunkered down in our hospital room for another week. To make a long story short, our baby's fussiness was a result of the pain from her bladder infection. Now she is home and pain-free, and she is a completely different baby. We are very thankful to be getting to know our new daughter.