Ellie randomly woke up limping on Monday April 13th. She woke up crying that morning and as soon as Steve got her out of her crib, she told him that her knee hurt. Then once he put her down to walk, she was limping and started crying again. I immediately got worried and thought this was super weird. Steve told me not to worry and thought maybe she was just having growing pains? So I gave her some Ibuprofen and watched her throughout the day and she seemed to be fine. A few hours before bedtime, she stopped limping and was running around like she was totally fine. She woke up crying 3 different times throughout the night which made me really worried. So Tuesday morning when she started limping again, I told Steve we had to take her to see the Pediatrician. The Pediatrician did an x-ray and blood work while we were at his office and both came back normal. Ellie's knee felt warm to the touch though, she cried when anyone tried to move it, and it was starting to swell, so he wanted us to head to the ER at the Children's hospital in Memphis. I HATE the ER so I asked if there was some way around this, but he said she needed to be seen by an Orthopedist today and this was the only way to do that. So we packed up and headed into Memphis. We knew that we'd end up spending the entire day there, so we came prepared with snacks and ipads to keep Ellie entertained. After being in the waiting room for 3 hours, they finally took us back to a room and started an IV. Poor Ellie. Little did we know that this would be the first of MANY IVs.
Poor girl. She hated having that contraption on her hand:(
You'd think that I would be able to handle these kinds of situations pretty well since I worked in a hospital for 4 years, but when it is my own child that is sick and being poked and prodded at, forget it! I was a wreck. Thank goodness for Steve for being a rock, and trying to keep smiles on both Ellie's and my face. We sure love that guy!
Her first of many rides in the "red bagon" as she called it:)
Her poor swollen knee.
So the ER doctor ordered more blood work and another x-ray. The x-ray still looked fine, but the blood work was slightly elevated from the one done earlier that day. This made them (the ER doc, and the Orthopedist) worried that she had an infection in her knee. So they decided to aspirate the fluid in her knee joint and test it to see if there was infection. The culture from her knee came back negative, but they decided to admit us to the hospital and do an MRI first thing in the morning. This made us pretty mad because by this point it was like 10pm and we had been at the ER since 1:30 that afternoon. We were tired and hungry and just wanted to go home. But we obviously wanted to know what was causing the swelling in her knee, so they admitted us and we spent a long sleepless night in the hospital. Thankfully Ellie crashed though and slept all night long. She didn't even wake up when the lab lady came in and poked her again to draw her blood!
They came in to get us just before 8am to go get the MRI, but by the time they did paperwork and finished up the other patients having MRIs done before Ellie, it was 10am when they actually took her back and put her on the scanner. Meanwhile, Ellie couldn't eat or drink anything before her MRI. So she was just crying and asking me over and over again for "cocky milk". This broke my heart. I was crying right along with her.
It takes about 45 minutes to do the MRI and of course you have to be completely still during it and well since she's 2 that's not going to happen. So they had to just completely knock her out during the scan.
She was so much happier after she got to eat and have some "cocky milk"!
The MRI only showed mild swelling in her knee joint, but there was no infection in her bone. This was great news, but we still didn't know what was causing her knee to swell. So the doctors wanted us to stay one more night just to see how she did throughout the day. So.....we spent the day exploring the hospital and trying to entertain ourselves.
A cool view of Memphis from our hospital room.
Ellie seemed happy all day long and was up walking around, still limping, but otherwise acting like a normal toddler. So they discharged us the next day on Thursday. The weird thing about all of this was that Ellie never had a fever. About 2 weeks beforehand, she had a random fever for 24 hours that I assumed was just due to the fact that she was getting her 2 top molars. Because all of her tests came back normal, and she hadn't had any recent fevers, the doctors told us this was viral and it should pass within a few days.
So happy to be home!
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