Possibly the worst moment of my life so far.

Well, I've just spent the entire weekend in hospital with Sebastian.

It started on Friday night when he began to get grumpy after his 6:15 feed however he went down ok but then woke at 10 (normally we give him a DF at 10:30) and so we fed him and after that he spent the rest of the night screaming apart from two 1/2 hour stints when he went to sleep on me. By morning he had a temperature of 39 and climbing so I called NHS direct and after speaking to a nurse they said that in the absence of any other symptoms that it was probably just a virus and not to worry. Call it mothers instinct but I still wasn't happy but decided to trust their judgement. Anyway he slept all morning (unsurprisingly) and woke up about 11am I tried to feed him but he wasn't interested and after that things began to get scary he just lay in my arms with his eyes open and rolling doing nothing. I was getting upset so my mil suggested our local out of hours service which turned out to be a dead loss as they run a call back system which could have taken up to 3 hours!! Anyway still running on mothers instinct I phoned our lcal A&E expecting them to direct me to a walk in clinic or something instead after listening to his symptoms the Sister told me to phone an Ambulance. At this point I thought s**t this is actually serious and then when I phoned the ambulance the call taker wouldn't get off the phone until the ambulance got there just in case he went downhill fast so now I'm really panicking. To add to things he was now becoming covered in a rash and still not reacting to anything, when the ambulance turned up they did a heel prick test on him and he didn't even flinch. We went to hospital and thankfully they very quickly ruled out meningitis but they did some blood tests and a lumbar puncture then put him on antibiotics straight away. It took them 3 goes to get a canula in by which time I was shaking and in tears as he was so distressed. His temp was still high and although calpol helped everytime it wore off his temp just went sky high again. They made us stay in until his temp went down and the test results came back. Thankfully they all came back negative so they think it was just a bad virus. We came home yesterday and apart from still taking reduced feeds he is back to his happy smiley self.

It is nice to know that my instinct was right but I could happily live a long time without going through that again. I was so convinced that someone was going to tell me that it was nothing that when they actually said phone an ambulance...well, all I can say is I never want to feel like that again.

Sorry this is long but just needed to get it off my chest so I don't keep dwelling on it now it's over.

Wendy and (a very cheeky) Sebastian

P.S. all the health professionals were fantastic. The only problems were the initial call taker at NHS direct who aksed me if he had a headache (how the hell do you know if an 11 week old has a headache) and the stupid call back out of hours service, they left 3 messages on our phone and the first wasn't until 2:30pm 2 hours after I called them.