Sunday, December 30, 2007

Stardate 61996.85 - Last Post of the Year (Probably)

Saturday we stayed pretty close to home, but on Sunday we went to NJ to visit with Steve and Rachel and Ethan and Ellie (and Cheryl's parents). Cheryl's parents caught something from all the family togetherness and were not feeling well, so after using their place to meet up we left for Longstreet Farm. We've been there before, and before, and before. It is a nice location for the kids to run around outside, and is close to Cheryl's parents' house.







We then met Cheryl's parents at Macaroni Grill for lunch. Ethan's hair-trigger vomit reflex was "on" and he threw up once between bread courses. Not to be out-done, Loren managed to give us a concussion scare, combined with a voluminous vomit episode.

What happened was that she fell out of her chair pretty hard and landed flat on her back. We didn't think she hit her head (Cheryl was actually worried about her shoulder being broken), but when Cheryl picked her up Loren had a very loud, hysterical, gasping for breath crying episode, which then resulted in her throwing up all over Cheryl and herself. It was quite spectacular, and happened in waves so we ran out of restaurant napkins to contain it.

Then, after Cheryl settled her down Loren started to fall asleep sitting up in her chair. It was really bad after Cheryl and Rachel got her cleaned up and changed into new clothes. Even though she was an hour past nap time and might have just been really tired, I also know that vomiting and passing out are two signs of a concussion so I went into full panic mode.

We ended up calling our doctor on the way to the emergency room at a nearby hospital, but the on-call physician at our pediatrician's office said to let Loren nap and wake her up in an hour. He said if we had trouble waking her up or if she was behaving oddly to take her to the ER, but not to do it right then. So we aborted the hospital trip and instead diverted to home. As it turned out Loren woke back up when we put her in the car and stayed awake for a good 30 minutes before falling back asleep again and sleeping the rest of the way into the city (with a 40-minute backup at the tunnel it took us almost 2 hours to get home, when it is normally around 75 minutes).

We woke Loren up after an hour as we were crossing Central Park and she seemed fine, and she has seemed fine all evening--even eating dinner and asking for milk. So we think the vomiting was a combination of being really tired and the shock of the fall and the hysterical crying that followed. And all that activity just wore her out and combined with missing her nap just made her exhausted and so she fell asleep (she never "passed out" as even asleep she was resisting me taking her milk cup away and resisting being picked up).

So that was a nice scare for the afternoon, and I think next time we'll just let Ethan win the vomit contest. :-) Here is Loren at the resturant, pre-fall.

NYC

1 comment:

JamesF said...

I'm really glad she seems to be okay. The massive crying can really wipe kids out and that probably contributed to her falling asleep. Although it's easy to play armchair quarterback after the fact and not being there. That said, I don't blame you a bit for going into full blown panic mode and I can totally relate to you since I had a full blown freak out today myself.