911...What is your emergency?

Well, Jason and I thought we have been scared before but nothing could have prepared us for this past Saturday night. McKenzie was spending the weekend in Madison with my mom and dad. Saturday morning my mom calls and says that McKenzie woke up about 5:30 with a fever of 101.5. She had given her Tylenol and she was doing fine, eating, drinking, and playing like normal. I asked her if she wanted us to come and get her and she said no. So all day we talked back and forth and Mom and McKenzie played the Tylenol game. (Take the medicine fever breaks and 4 hours later it is back a little bit higher.) So by 4:oo Mom and I decided for Mom to take her to the Urgent Care just make sure it was not an ear infection or something. So off they went. At this point, Jason and I broke our plans for the evening and headed to Madison to get her. We arrived in Madison around 6:30 and Mom and McKenzie got home from Urgent Care around 7. The Urgent Care found nothing wrong with her, said it was viral and would have to run its course. So we had dinner, which McKenzie ate nothing and then we were ready to leave. I decided to bathe her and put her in her pjs because I was sure that she would fall asleep on the way home. I took her temperature again and it was 102.2 so I gave her more Tylenol and we left around 9:15. Jason was driving and I was in the passenger side and McKenzie's seat is right behind me. When we started to drive McKenzie asked me to sing the Wheels on the Bus...her favorite. So I did and she was singing right along with me. All of a sudden she stopped singing. I did not think anything of it...she does that and picks back up later. A few seconds later she begins to make this noise like she is throwing up. So I immediately told Jason to pull over, thank God we were still on Mom's road, (no traffic at night) and Jason pulled off. It is pitch black out so I could not see her until I opened her door and realized that she was not throwing up at all. Her little eyes were rolled into the back of her head, her head was thrashing around, and she was just chewing/ trying to swallow her tongue. (I know you can't really do that but that is what it looked like.) She was not breathing at all either. She was clearly having a seizure. I yanked her from her car seat and told Jason to call 911. He did. I held her head on my shoulder as tight as I could so that she would not hurt her neck when it was thrashing and I tried to hold her mouth so that she would not bite her tongue anymore. While doing all this I am screaming McKenzie, McKenzie! After about 30 seconds...it felt like 30 minutes....she stopped. She coughed a few times then took a few deep breaths and began to breath normal again. By this time I had her in the back of my car laying down, because I knew if I was going to have to do CPR on her, I needed her laying down. (Which yes, I do know how to do CPR and the steps were actually running through my head. I was very calm and knew that I needed to be if anything was going to get done. It was like God just took over my body and was in charge. It was amazing!) When she came to, she was out of it. I sat her up because it was like she was going to fall asleep and I needed to keep talking to her until the ambulance came. By this point we could hear the sirens coming. You want to talk about a beautiful sound! It was! The ambulance got to us in about 5 minutes and right behind them was an entire truck load of first responders. I could not believe the quickness. Mom, Dad, and Steve arrived next. The ambulance man just scooped up McKenzie and put her right into the ambulance. I followed and began explaining what happened. She was still out of it. At this point the EMT said lets go and we went by ambulance to the hospital. Once there, McKenzie had every test run that could be run. Strep, flu, urine, x-rays on her chest, CT Scan, and they even took blood out of her little arm. Everything came back negative. The diagnosis was a viral fever that got too high too fast and caused a fever induced seizure. We were discharged around 1:30 am and drove home. The fever only lasted less than 24 hours. Sunday morning she woke up fine no fever and has had no fever since. I did not sleep much on Saturday night to say the least. I kept waking up to check on her.

We did learn several really important things during all of this. You can give Tylenol and Motrin at the exact same time because they are two totally different medicines. Motrin also works much better and fast for McKenzie anyways. A fever induced seizure is not like a regular seizure. It has nothing to do with the brain. It is simple a way for little ones ages 6 months to 6 years to cool their bodies off as fast as possible. It does not matter the degree of temperature, MG has had much higher than 102, it matters how fast the temperature reaches that degree. A fever induced seizure is nothing more than an adult passing out from heat stroke, it is just how little ones react. And thank God it is because if McKenzie had just passed out, it was dark and I would have thought that she had fallen asleep and never would have known. Also, fever induced seizures do not do as much damage as they are scary to watch happen. So, with that all said, it was lots of learning and good information for very parent to know. These are the things that they never teach us in parent classes! We do have to start to be very proactive with McKenzie and fevers though. When she starts to get warm we have to treat it right away. So from now on, I will have Motrin where ever I go!