We just got back from the hospital. What a week it has been!

What began as an innocent mozzie bite on Sophie in Vanuatu turned ugly when we got back. I mentioned that Sophie’s been ill. It’s true. She’s been having high fever, a bad cough, runs and a tiny infected mozzie bite on her right leg which we thought had already healed.

What on earth happened?

Towards the end of the trip in Vanuatu, Sophie started having high fever (Thursday). She was totally floppy and clung onto me most of the day. Very rare for Sophie, even when she is sick. You know a child is REALLY ill when she is floppy. Her temp was 40 degrees. Not a good thing while we were still in Vanuatu. Anyways we got the usual meds and monitored the fever. We associated the fever to the cough and runs. She recovered the following day (Friday) and we went on our group island tour. On Sat, she started to have a fever again and it was alright on Sun when we took the flight back. In fact she did pretty well on the plane and car ride back to Matamata and didn’t even throw up once. She was still having a bad cough and a bit of runs though.

On Monday, she was alright. Not the best, still a bit clingy. Fever up and down. Then we spotted that the mozzie bite had pus! Which was strange coz James had been routinely cleaning it and making sure that it was covered. You see, in Vanuatu, mozzie bites can get infected very rapidly by the flies and it can go really bad. Anyway, we decided to bring her to the GP in town coz the fever had been almost 5 days and most times if fever don’t leave after 5 days, it’s really time to worry. It was 10 mins drive away. He saw her and decided to give her a cream antibiotics for the bite instead of oral antibiotics coz it’ll make her runs worse. It was either runs or blood infection, I suppose. Both as bad.

On Tuesday, her fever shot up again and she was floppy the whole day. She did not move once from the sofa from morning till almost evening! By the end of the day, we noticed that her lower right leg was swollen and blistering! That explained why she didn’t really want to walk! All this time we were worried about her cough and runs! Called Rae, our ped nurse on the base and she was really worried and got us to the clinic. Thank God there was still a doctor at 8pm. It normally closes at 5/6pm. He saw her and put her on oral antibiotics (Rae said at that pt, he shd have sent her into A&E immediately. She would have.) to monitor for a night and if the infection didn’t recede, he’d need to admit Sophie for IV. So we went home.

Infected leg, with markings courtesy of Rae & Claire our brillant nurses on the base

Next morning, I got up early and checked her leg and the area of infection had increased! Panicked and I facebooked Claire. Thank God for facebook, thank God for Claire! She came over and checked. I can’t tell you how amazing God’s put 2 nurses on the base – one ped nurse and one orthopedic nurse, both totally specialized in this case! Long story short, we got her to hospital in Hamilton, 1 hr from here.

She got admitted, got her antibiotics via IV and was on her way to recovery. The fever subsided and we were out in 2 days. What a scare!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Announcements, Baby, New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.