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Everybody at Team Hearn has been fighting a nasty cough for the better part of, oh, 2009. It’s just going back and forth; Charles came down with it first, then I got it, went to Sarah, back to Charles, back to Sarah, back to me, back to Charles again. It’s icky. Worse yet, it resulted in Charles waking us up at 4am last Thursday with a 104-degree fever.

We gave him a big cup of water, which he chugged, and then threw up on my pillow because he drank it too fast. Sarah mopped it up with a towel, but he refused to sleep near it, instead taking up almost my entire side of the bed. I, an official Large Person, had to sleep in a section of bed roughly 9 inches wide.

In the morning his temps were down in the 101-102 range, but we decided he shouldn’t go to my parents for the day as he would normally do, so Sarah stayed home in the morning and I came home around noon so she could hit the office. He perked up a bit in the afternoon, which was good to see. He had napped intermittently through the day, which messed up his sleep schedule, so he came into our room at 2am early Friday wanting to play; his temperature was 99. Yay!

Friday morning, however, he was back up to 104. We medicated him as usual, and then Sarah had doctor’s appointments of her own, so I took him to my parents. But his temperature didn’t come back down as it had the previous day, so the decision was made to take him to the doctor. Sarah called our usual family doctor’s office, but despite the fact that they have something between 8 and 19 doctors on staff, no one could see Charles that day. Not one doctor had 15 minutes to look at our sick son. Sarah and I are baffled by this. I could understand if we saw one pediatrician, but this is an office full of MDs and DOs and other various and sundry post-nominal letters! Not one of them had a moment to spare.

So we were forced to take him to the ER at AI Dupont Children’s Hospital. I met Sarah there and was tasked with carrying Charles, since he was 40+ pounds of sadness and plush giraffe. He was miserable. The only things he was willing to say were:

• I don’t wanna see the doctor!


• I wanna go home!


• Daddy, make my beaver [fever] go away.


• There’s a jeep.

(Even in his saddened state, the boy’s Jeep radar remained active.)

The hospital staff had us triaged, documented, hand-stamped, tattooed, and retina-scanned (I may be hazy on some of the admission process) in half an hour and in a doctor’s care in under an hour. Yay doctor! She took one look at his ears and determined that both were infected, and prescribed Amoxicillin for the infection and Tylenol for the fever. Within a half-hour of dosing him up, he was asking for food and polished off a bunch of crackers and some Froot Loops. A half-hour after that, he was running out of the place under his own power to go look at ambulances.

In short: boo usual doctors, hooray AI Dupont Children’s Hospital!