Nate's Birthday!

Nate's 3rd Birthday

December 23rd, 2011

AM: Nate woke up looking like a different kid.  Josh randomly thought it would be funny to name him "William" since he didn't look like Nate. Nate's head, neck, and face were extremely swollen and he was in so much pain and was really emotional. 

Paged his doctor who never called back that day.  URRRR. Called John, who was out playing basketball with Josh, and told him we needed to take Nate to the ER.  We knew that Nate either had a subcutaneous bleed under his scalp or an infection or both.  John said he'd watch it.  I was uneasy about this even though John is an expert in this arena.  I kept telling myself, no one wants to go to the ER unless they HAVE too, especially on your child's birthday.  I told John that it would be worse to go to the ER on Christmas day and Nate get hospitalized for Cellulitis, which was the direction he was headed for as far as I understood.  As a pediatrics nurse, I had a patient who nearly died from Cellulitis and Nate was beginning to look alot like her.  Also, John's little sister was hospitalized on Christmas Day when she was 8 years old with Cellulitis and nearly died.  I really didn't not want to just wait around and watch him get worse.

Josh decided he should wear a head dressing too.  It was so funny and Nate laughed so hard. Josh's example helped Nate decide that it was fine to keep his on.

His 3 year old Birthday Pictures, don't look quite like Nate, but we won't forget that day.  I just think he is so amazing that he can still smile even when he is so sick and in so much pain.

I decided to relax and let try to let John do the worrying and we attempted to do something fun for his birthday.  We headed to Panera Bread for a birthday dinner with plans to come home and eat cake and open presents.  Just before we got our food, (don't read anymore if you cannot handle medical stuff) let's just say that part of Nate's head exploded a ton of puss and he was screaming.  

Off to the ER we went.

3 or so hours later an IM shot of antibiotics.

5 or so hours later at 11:30pm home with kids begging for cake that had not been frosted and birthday presents that had not been wrapped.  Kids straight off to bed with promise of birthday party the next day.

Me, just glad that Nate could be home with us for the holidays.

At the end of the night, I asked Nate how his birthday was.  His reply was simply, "Bad."  This kid definitely knows how to tell the truth.  Hopefully, we can make it up to him in January.

***If you really want to know how Nate got his head infection, just go into your kitchen, make dinner, while your husband is working and have your kids set the table.  They might decide it would be funny to chase each other while holding forks in their hands.... Basically, Nate was stabbed in the head with a clean fork thanks to his big brother, Josh.