The prior posts – part 1, part 2, and part 3 – all explain how I got to this point. With any luck, part 5 will be the final chapter of this multi-week saga.

One step forward, one step back: just as ds is finally on the up-swing (in day care two days in a row, completely fever-free), dd goes down for the count with a late-day fever. Oh joy.

We got our third round of shots yesterday morning, with the same general timing problem as we saw at the last go-around. The joy of having a patient-centered medical home is that the care is coordinated across all the doctors YOU see…but when you get to coordinating across a family, the timing can get a little wonky. But hey – at least we didn’t have to truck around to multiple offices!

When it came time for the kids’ shots, dd wouldn’t stop covering her arm and struggling against me. As annoying as it was when the Nurse Practitioner walked out to double-check that the dosage in the syringe was accurate, it gave me an opportunity to have a heart-to-heart with dd about why the shot wasn’t optional.

As she wriggled and writhed to try to get out of my arms, I told her – gently but firmly – that we don’t yet have a treatment for rabies. And if one of us were to get sick from the bat, the doctors would only be able to help control the pain but wouldn’t be able to cure it. She asked me point blank if you would die from it, to which I responded – “Yes”. Really, what else is there to say? How much can you sugarcoat the possibility of death with a 6-1/2 year old?

I tried to give it a slight softer edge by explaining that what we were going through was far better than the alternative, and she calmed down a little. Of course, when the NP went to give her the shot, she still tried to get away from me – but I held her tightly enough that she was able to get dosed. Over the course of the next 15 minutes, on two separate floors, we managed to get the rest of us three all shot up with the rabies vax…and on we went with just another school & work day.

Well, at least everything was normal until dd took a nap before friends came over to play and have dinner. She was a bit groggier than usual, but I figured that was just from being tired. At one point, she came over and cuddled with me, complaining that she was freezing cold. DH then suggested that I take her temperature, and as I saw the thermometer’s reading climb, I knew that we were in for it. The NP told us this morning that there’s a cold going around, something that is accompanied by coughing, fever, nausea…basically everything that ds had earlier in the week. We now don’t know whether dd will end up with a similar fate, although she’s already exhibited two of the three symptoms mentioned by the NP.

And so, here we are, still not quite fully repaired (in body, as well as spirit) nearly two weeks later. Let’s hope that things are calmer by the time we get that fourth and final round of shots.

This is the continuation of our batty saga…you can go back to read part 1 and part 2 if you need to get caught up. (Or go forward to part 4 or part 5.)

Our second set of shots was yesterday morning. As I explained during my last post, the “rabies course” is a 4-part series of shots. Day 0 was last Friday, so Monday was Day 3. We still have two more shots left in the course – Day 7 (this coming Friday) and Day 14 (next Friday).

In the interim, ds got sick. The immune globulin shot(s) (HRIG) are chock-ful of antibodies, but – ironically – the introduction of the antibodies can actually lower your immune response. I assume it has something to do with someone else’s antibodies calling the shots in your immune system. Anyway, while dh, dd and I all came through this okay, ds started acting a bit droopy Sunday afternoon. I gave him a cuddle and realized that he was quite a bit warm. His temp registered a little north of 101F, so not only was I keeping him inside for the remainder of the afternoon, I was pulling him from going to daycare the next day. He was so exhausted and unwell at bedtime that the poor little guy conked out within about 5 minutes of my putting him in bed. Truly, there are few things worse than having a sick kiddo. You just feel so helpless…

When we woke up on Monday morning, ds’ fever had broken. He seemed perkier – even bringing a small banana toy with us to the doctor’s office to be his “banana phone”. As we explained to one of the people in the waiting room for the Internal Medicine folks, we figure it’s the next generation after the iPhone.

The wait at the doctor’s office screwed us up quite a bit. There was a scheduling mishap in the Internal Medicine area, and though we’d been told by them that we could book at Pediatrics and they’d “match” the schedule so that we could do everything in one go, they expected us at the same time as when we went into Pediatrics. I explained to the nurse that it’s unlikely I’d leave my 6yo and 3yo with the Pediatrics folks on one floor while I went to Internal Medicine on another, and she got the idea that perhaps they should stagger our appointments by about 20-30mins. BRILLIANT!

In other words, if you ever run into this type of scenario (which I never hope any of you ever do), and if you have a family (which is fine, except for the whole rabies thing), I recommend you make sure that your doctors’ offices/receptionists/scheduling peeps understand how to build a block schedule so that you’re not waiting twice in one day for a shot that takes 20 seconds to administer. Just a suggestion.

My day was a blur – I was constantly behind at work, thanks to the time lost to the doctors’ offices – and I was disheartened to hear that ds was running a temp just under 102F early this afternoon. So, he’s home again today with dh and we’ll see if he can kick this nastiness in time to make it back to school on Wednesday. I suppose we’re lucky that only one of us got downed by the HRIG’s side effect, but even one is too many in a household where there’s too much going on at work and home.

I can’t wait for this rabies course to be over and done. I’m slowly starting to get comfortable in the house again at night, although I do my nighttime planks with considerable fear that something will come flying out from the fireplace and land on my back. The likelihood is so incredibly small, and yet now the phobia has been planted. Every little noise in the house at night seems like it must be something that I don’t want in our home. I’m trying not to become the most anxious person in the world, but it seems like it at times.

I should probably just say “This, too, shall pass” (plus a few rounds of OM) and see if that resettles me back into feeling safe in my own house. Perhaps it’s just part and parcel of living in an exurban area that’s got lots of green space; critters and things are likely to be in the vicinity. But the city girl that I am still can’t quite fathom the idea that I had bats in my house. i suppose the small bandaid I sported last night on my shoulder was my reality check.

This post is a continuation from the prior “Going Batty” post. If you haven’t read that one yet, I recommend reading it so that you have context for this post. After this one, you can move on to part 3, part 4, and part 5.

So, we went to the ER yesterday afternoon to get our shots. We live about 20 minutes away from the nearest hospital, so it was an easy enough thing to pick up the kids from their respective schools and trot on up the road – in quite a bit of a monsoon (Tropical Storm Andrea) to the closest ER. The place was empty when we got there, prompting me to stupidly remark about how we were the only ones there. Of course, a queue showed up and the front desk people tried not to hurl staplers at my head.

As soon as our paperwork was done, we were ushered into a “Fast Track” Exam Room, where we then proceeded to wait for a whole hour. This prompted some complaining from dh about how the healthcare delivery system isn’t reliant on customer service, so there isn’t any…at which point I reminded him gently that there are people who come to the ER for things a bit more traumatic and perhaps in need of urgent assistance than the family that moseyed in for rabies vax a week post-exposure.

The doctor who came in about halfway through our wait asked a few questions about the exposure, then he confirmed our weights so that they could get the dosage right. The Human Rabies Immune Globulin (HRIG) that’s administered before the hot pink rabies vaccine is dosed based on weight. The most amusing part of this entire process was seeing the double take from the doctor when I told him my weight and he thought I was kidding because I didn’t look like I weighed that much. Sigh. I wish I didn’t weigh as much as all that, especially when my “skinnier” jeans aren’t tight on me. Oh well.

Eventually, a nurse came to claim dh and he returned about 5 minutes later, looking pale as a ghost. I put on my brave face for the kids and scooted out with the nurse after I confirmed with dh that he was, in fact, okay. Being that I’m the heaviest of the bunch, I got the most shots (all based on that HRIG). While DH got four shots (or five – he can’t remember), I ended up with six: five of the HRIG and one of the rabies vax (Novartis’ RabAvert). Thank goodness we weren’t turned away at the door. It wasn’t until I went to go grab links for this post that I saw there’d been any kind of concern (now lifted) about rabies vax supply!

Natch, all the shots are intramuscular – so the pair of nurses administered four doses in my legs (thigh muscles), one in my glute and one in my upper arm (the last being the RabAvert). All of the remaining shots are going to be in the arm and they’ll be of the hot pink RabAvert vax. The funny thing is, getting all kinds of shots in my legs didn’t hurt nearly as much as the ONE shot in my arm. Go fig.

After my shots, I collected ds – who was a MASSIVE TROOPER and didn’t even cry or flinch – and then dd, who completely blew past her own expectations and was similarly a BOSS at getting her shots with nary a whimper. Both kids just did wonderfully with their shots. Hopefully this means that we’ll have a slightly easier time with the remaining shots, since it’s only ONE needle and not several. (They each had two shots – one of the HRIG and one of the RabAvert.)

Once we got our shots, I got us through the discharge process – $400 in ER copays for the lot of us – and we were off to dinner at Friendly’s. DS ate pretty poorly, but he drank most of his dinner. I can relate; I’ve had nights where that was a solid option. Of course, seeing as how he’s only 3, “drinking his dinner” constituted 1-1/2 plastic cups of milk.

The process of explaining to the kids what was going on was really pretty similar to how you don’t tell your dog you’re neutering them until they’re at the vet. Until then, it’s all, “Hey, boy! Let’s go for a ride!” We waited until dd was in the car and we were almost to ds’ day care to let her in on what had happened. She had questions that were sometimes tough to answer, such as “Was the bat in my room?”…but not answering just seemed wrong. What I did say, repeatedly, was that we’d located how the bats got in and we’d gotten it fixed. The more I said it, the more I wanted to believe that I could finally take it to heart and stop having my pulse race the second I hear any sound late at night. I’m still so jumpy, and I want not to be.

Our next set of shots is on Monday morning; the whole family goes in for the first appointment of the day, and then we’ll disperse to work and school. I let the school nurse at dd’s school and the assistant director at ds’ day care in on what’s going on, and everybody’s been very sweet and accommodating. My boss is being fantastic about it and is giving me the space I need to just get this all sorted out as efficiently as possible. They all just feel so badly for us. At this point, I want the shots done so that I can say, “We had a problem, but we did the remediation on the house and we got our treatment, so it’s DONE AND NOW WE MUST NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN.” Oh, how I hope we can get to that point soon.

Hopefully, this also won’t be a leg-breaker of a cost for us. We already sank $700 into the bat-proofing from the wildlife company, and now we can add another $400 in ER copays to the tally. Assuming that the remaining vax visits are coded properly, we should be able to call it a day on the financial costs of this nightmare – immunizations are fully covered benefits for our health plan, thanks to Health Care Reform (aka Obamacare). That potentially saves us another $240, but I won’t know for sure until all the claims are processed. I did call our insurer Wednesday night and they said that this is how things should work out. We’ll see.

So, the saga continues, but hopefully it’s all uphill from here. I’m so incredibly impressed with how well the kids did this afternoon. And now it’s time to soldier on…because, really, what else is there to do?