And, boy, was it a doozy.
Almost 11 months in, my girl luckily hasn’t been touched by any bit of sickness up until this point. And I do whole heartedly mean that luck is involved because she has been all over the country, through snowstorms, crazy weather, airplanes, airports, hotels, you name it. Maybe the early exposure to the world helped, who knows.
But when this first sickness took root, it was a pretty dramatic intro for her parents.
After the worst parts of it showed face, we would find out in those latter-hours that Stella had contracted COVID. But we wouldn’t know she was sick at all until the peak day of her illness when she was just shy of being over it.
At 2:40 a.m. on a random early morning, Stella woke us up with cries from her bedroom. This was sort of unusual as a whole, because Stella is a kid who loves her sleep and rarely wakes ever in the middle of the night. When I picked her up out of her crib, I immediately noticed how hot her skin was. And when I say hot, I mean sizzling hot, since the girl is one to typically run warm on a normal day (naturally getting this from her dad, who is a literal human furnace). I then proceeded to feed her a cool bottle with Tylenol while LT went searching for the thermometer.
It wasn’t 2 minutes after Stella had finished the bottle that the air in the room just changed. I can’t explain it, and even now looking back on it, I feel like I’m watching a movie of someone else’s life. Stella suddenly locked up in my arms and began to seize and convulse. Then, I was just outside of my body, unsure of what was happening or what to do, but at the same time going into this automatic reflex of action. Saying her name and patting her on the chest and back as I turned her over on her side. It lasted only 20 to 30 seconds, but you couldn’t convince me it wasn’t an eternity. As soon as she snapped out of it, LT already had 911 on the phone, and Stella was instantly cranky. If she could speak, her words would have certainly been, “Leave me alone, Ma, gah! I just wanna go back to sleep, get off!”
When the paramedics arrived, they told me it was fine to let her go to sleep—good, even. But in that island of a tortuous moment I was in, there was no way in hell I was letting that child close her eyes. Her cries of frustration with me were the most beautiful music to my ears, and ironically reminiscent of those first few seconds after she was born.
An ambulance ride and several hours in the children’s E.R. would round out our night, and when we finally headed back home, we were full of new information, new terms like “febrile seizure”, and a diagnosis for all of us in the form of COVID.
I’d never heard of a febrile seizure, which is sometimes more referred to as a “fever seizure”. If you haven’t heard of it, either, this is the gist: In short, a febrile seizure is something that can happen in babies and kids up to the age of 6 or so, and it comes on when a fever shoots up too quickly. It’s not about the actual temperature, but the rate of that rise to get there. And while it is one of the most terrifying and traumatizing things a parent can probably go through, it’s remarkably common and most times harmless for the kid going through it.
From the EMT’s to the ER nurses and doctors, to Stella’s actual pediatrician, the consensus was one and the same. This won’t affect her later on, she’ll be just fine, and there is a very low chance this will happen again. All I can ever do is try to keep her fever down for future sicknesses, but if a seizure is going to happen, there’s not really anything I can do to stop it. Same thing goes for when the actual seizure is happening. Staying calm, keeping her on her side, and getting her to the doctor as soon as possible afterwards is the only “control” we have as her parents at all over the situation.
I imagine this to be the first of about a million things over the course of her childhood/life that will stop my heart, take my sleep, and make me want to do nothing but snuggle and kiss on her 24/7.
It only took a couple more days of sniffles and (thankfully) no fevers for Stella to be at 100% again, with her doctor proclaiming that she’s in perfect health at her follow-up appointment. As for Mom and Dad, we’re trucking along, at the ends of trying to shake the COVID crud ourselves. I’m pretty sure the majestic scent of Lysol has permeated just about every surface in our home, including our own pores.
All is quiet in the wood, you could say, and that alone makes us breathe a little easier. Currently, I’m wondering if I’ll ever sleep again, or not exist in a vacuum of checking Stella’s temperature every 2 minutes for the rest of time.
But we did it. We survived and came out the other side.
And if that doesn’t constitute a big eggnog under the Christmas tree lights, then I don’t know what does.
So thankful for Stella pulling through like a champ. Gets that’s from mom and dad alike. 💛💛💛
What a frightening night.