Jake Update v3

4/15
9:00 AM
The crisis appears to have been averted. Jake slept until after 8:00 AM this morning and when he got up his temperature was under 98 degrees. I am considering it confirmed that the high temp was correlated to exhaustion. Unfortunately, we have another busy week. Hopefully it's not exhausting.

8:00 PM
Well, he didn't have any Tylenol all day and his temperature hasn't exceeded 101 degrees. It was highest right before his nap but came down as he rested.

Thank you for the prayers. They have once again been answered.

11:30 AM
Jake's temperature has been holding under 100 degrees without Tylenol. We are planning to keep him home and quiet for a couple days and allow his body to rest. We are still keeping a close eye on him, but it is appearing to be unrelated to infection or illness.

8:00 AM
Sorry for the delay. Time has been hard to come by.

We had an appointment Thursday to have Jake's stitches removed in the Neurosurgery Clinic. Since we weren't scheduled with our neurosurgeon, I expected things to move relatively quickly...I was wrong. Our appointment time was 11:45 and we didn't get called back until after 12:30. None of us had eaten lunch and Jake had only had a short nap on the ride down. All of that ended up in a thunderstorm of problems. Jake was in no mood to be messed with and he was convinced that his stitches needed to stay in. He fought the entire process. At one point, our neurosurgeon actually stepped in and commented that he could hear Jake screaming in his office. He really stopped in because he had a question for his assistant, but he still made his point. On top of that, I was holding Jake and we were both getting pretty warm from all of his crying. That combined with no lunch and I nearly passed out a couple of times. It was a conundrum.

The good news is that Jake's incision looks really good and is healing well. The bad news is that he still had a little bit of swelling on the left side so the physician's assistant decided to leave some of the stitches in on that side so the swelling wouldn't stress the incision. So we get to do this all over again next week. Even more unfortunate is that all of the swelling was gone by the next morning. Oh well.

Now for the unscheduled. Yesterday (Friday), Jake spiked a 103 degree fever. We have him some Tylenol and he went down for a nap, but his fever only came down to 101 degrees (according to our thermometer). The neurosurgery resident asked that we bring him into the ER for an evaluation. So we quickly drive to Iowa City. Thankfully the ER was not busy and we were almost immediately taken back. The triage nurse took his temperature and it was exactly the same as it was in the neurosurgery clinic the day before. At home, all we have is a temporal thermometer that scans the forehead to the temple. We decided that the blood supply on his forehead must have given a false reading. Since he was otherwise acting normal, we decided to head home and monitor him. On the way home we stopped and purchased an ear thermometer.

Before bed we took another reading at he was again approaching 103 degrees but he was complaining about being tired. We haven't been taken his temp regularly so we thought maybe he has been spiking all long whenever he got over-tired (it's been a long week). More Tylenol and off to bed. I checked him an hour later and his temp was already under 100 and remained there when I checked him at midnight. However, when he woke me up at 2:30 AM, I checked again and he was over 102 degrees. More Tylenol. We woke later at 6:30 AM and his temp was 98.6. Jake was still tired so we slept until 7:30 AM at which time his temp had crept to 99.2. I still consider this his normal range and he is still acting completely normal. We will be keeping a close eye on him today. Prayers that this mysterious fever clears away.