Go Ahead. Guess Where I Was Yesterday.

No, really!!!! Guess!!!!!!!!! I will give you ten million dollars if you guess wrong!!!!!!!!!!!!

All the exclamation points are probably a clue to the level of crazy to which I have been pushed. Yes, friends, the answer is: The Hospital. &*^#$%*&^#$%

Sigrid was absolutely inconsolable yesterday morning, except at a few key points which I will get to later. Mainly, she was screaming a lot and refusing to nurse. So we called the pediatrician's office and got an appointment to come right in. Yes, on a Sunday! How sweet is that? A very nice feature. But you know what would be a nicer feature of this particular office? If the pediatrician on duty would actually do a thorough freaking examination before deciding she doesn't know what's wrong, but since Sigrid is clearly miserable, she needs blood work and a spinal tap (SPINAL TAP) and should be taken to the ER.

When a baby is miserable for no apparently acute reason (i.e. no wounds or broken bones), it's probably one of a few things: ear infection, UTI, or hair tourniquet. The doctor barely looked at Sigrid's ears, mentioned the possibility of a UTI but didn't do anything about it, and never even looked for a hair tourniquet (I didn't look either, but I'd forgotten about that possibility -- the ER nurse did a thorough hair-tourniquet search, though). I was a little too frazzled by the screaming baby to realize how half-assed the exam was, so when the doctor said we should go to the ER, I figured it was just the way my universe has been working lately, so I went.

When we got there, there were two kids in hospital beds IN THE WAITING ROOM. And a million other people in chairs. This was pretty much looking like a six-hour wait, which I've experienced before, and it's not fun, especially with no food or distractions -- I hadn't exactly planned for this when leaving the house.

I went up to the registration desk, and of course, Sigrid was sleeping peacefully at this point. Babies are a lot like cars that way. They work great when you bring them to the mechanic. The nurse asks why we're there, and I have to explain that it's because my daughter is inconsolable, except for the fact that she's, you know, sleeping peacefully. So I look like an idiot. Great. And there's always the possibility that I AM an idiot, and she was just a little fussy and is fine now, and I'll be sitting in the ER waiting room for no reason. Kind of like the person next to me, who was there because her four-year-old had a 1/2" cut on his forehead that wasn't even actively bleeding. Maybe she just really wanted to get out of a Super Bowl party or something.

Luckily (?), Sigrid started crying again right on cue when she was taken into triage, so we managed to convince the nurse that there was probably something wrong. She was having trouble settling Sigrid down enough to hear lung sounds (the non-screaming kind of lung sounds, anyway), so she called in another nurse with a Baby Whisperer reputation, and that nurse did an OK job of quieting Sigrid down, but then pissed me off by suggesting that it was probably gas. Everyone blames crying on gas. Whatever.

There was a lovely moment in all this, though: after I'd been walking around with poor screaming Schkernky for a while, a woman came up and gave me a bottle of water, totally out of the blue. That was really kind. I'll have to pay that forward.

And more kindness: Chris drove all the way up to the hospital with food and distractions (knitting, video games) for me even though it was Soren's nap time and there was a risk of wrecking the rest of the day by screwing up his nap. Thank you, dear. I'll plan on paying that back rather than forward.

After not too terribly wrong -- perhaps they wanted to move the screaming to a different room? -- we got a triage room in the back and were seen fairly promptly by a doctor. This doctor did wacky things like cleaning the wax out of Sigrid's ears so she could actually SEE something with the otoscope! How crazy! During the ear cleaning, the screaming increased a hundredfold, which was a clue to the problem, and then the doctor finally saw that there was inflammation and gross stuff in there, so it was ruled to be an ear infection with ruptured tympanic membrane, which sounds awful but is apparently routine. Some Tylenol, bubble-gum flavored antibiotics, and we were on our way. Except for a crappy period today when I waited too long to give Sigrid her dose of Tylenol, she's been feeling better. End of story. All's well that ends well. Oh, except for the four-hour wait and hundred-dollar copay that we could have been spared if the pediatrician had examined Sigrid's ears. Right. I was holding on to my anger about that long enough to blog about it, and now I think I can let go. Closure is a beautiful thing.

Happily, we got to go up to Brian and Edith's house for a Super Bowl party in the evening! It was really nice to get out of the house and see friends and eat pigs in blankets. Much nicer than being at the hospital.