This is Jeremiah or “Miah” as we like to call him. He is my sweet baby boy and yesterday we had a day from hell.

You see, Miah has had a rough winter. A lot of little colds, thanks to his big sister in nursery school, and teeth that seemed to take FOREVER to cut.

All of this came to head yesterday…

Around midnight Friday evening, Miah woke up crying. This was a bad sign since he has been sleeping through the night for awhile now.

Naturally, I went in to check on him and he was burning up. I thought “Great, here we go again. Another cold”. I gave him a dose of pain reliever/fever reducer and brought him into bed with Matt and me.

Matt and I were still up and had ort salt lamp on which was fortuitous since that is how I noticed the huge lump on the right side of Miah’s neck.

I FREAKED OUT! This looked bad, real bad and Miah was obviously in pain.

Luckily, I was able to connect with my friend who is also a nurse of 20 years on Gmail chat and she told me that we didn’t need to rush him to the ER. We could wait it out til the morning and take him to the pediatrician then.

So, yesterday morning, I did just that with the hopes that this was just some weird infection and we could solve it with some antibiotics. Not so much.

The pediatrician took one look and said “Mastoiditis”. What the hell is that?

Basically, its an infection of the mastoid bone, that pointy part of your jaw just below your ear. Scary stuff.

Since the hospital here in Plattsburgh sucks we were referred to Fletcher Allen, an amazing hospital and medical school in Burlington, VT. Its about an hour or so from here.

Preparations were made (My dad came to get Evalee and we had someone slated to come and take care of the dogs), bags we packed and off we went.

All this time I was doing my best to keep my shit together and not cry until my face was raw.

Around 3pm we arrived at the hospital and by 4:30 got the incredible news that they were not going to need to do surgery (which is what our pediatrician told us would be needed), it is highly unlikely that it is Mastoiditis due to his symptoms and history and that we were to give him antibiotics, go home and call an ENT (Ear, Nose, Throat) specialist on Monday. The doc said that we had a 50/50 chance that the antibiotics would take care of whatever this was. He was thinking something along the lines of a lymph node infection.

Woo Hoo! So freakin happy, you have no idea. Well, if you have kids then I am sure you can imagine.

And I am happy to report that when we woke up this morning, after a full nights sleep for all of us, Miah’s lump is down by half and his fever is gone.

As much as I hate the idea of putting anything other that food and juice into my little guys mouth, sometimes medicine is needed.

This whole experience made me so grateful to have such healthy kids. I don’t know how parents do it that have kids with cancer and other serious illnesses. This little incident was nothing in comparison and I was coming apart from the inside out.

I hope we never have to go through anything like that ever again.