Mireya has been very ill since Thursday night. She has had an ongoing fever that has been difficult to bring down. At one point, her temperature even spiked to 105 degrees, which had me terrified. She saw her pediatrician yesterday and he said that because she had no other signs or symptoms, it was probably a virus, but there was a chance that it could be a urinary tract infection. He said that to test for the UTI, we would have to put a catheter into her bladder to retrieve a urine sample. Deja-vou.
Ok, wait, flashback to several weeks ago. One afternoon as I was changing Mireya’s diaper, I noticed that it had an unusually strong odor. I had Jason smell it and he said he thought it just smelled like urine, but my mommy instincts were on alert. When I realized that every diaper smelled that way over the next day or two, I got concerned. I made an appointment with her pediatrician and I took in a sample diaper. I was told that it didn’t smell unusual to them and besides, the only way to get a urine sample was to use a catheter.
Absolutely not was my automatic response. She is tiny and I still remember how traumatizing it was when I was in second grade and I had to have a catheter. I negotiated until they let me take a cup home to see if I could get her to pee in it. That failed and everyone around me acted as if I had lost my mind: the baby was fine.
I decided to just take a wait-and-see approach, but I did continue to voice my concerns. Nobody else could smell what I was smelling and they didn’t have my motherly instincts that were going haywire. I even noticed within a week that I could smell it even if she wasn’t really wet. She had an 18-month wellness visit and I asked another pediatrician about it then too and I got the same response– She’s fine, quit worrying, besides she would have to have a catheter and be traumatized for life.
Ok, back to the present. When Mireya’s fever hit 105 degrees, I had Jason call the pediatrician while I got her immediately into a lukewarm bath to bring it down. Guess what? The pediatrician wasn’t concerned at all. EXCUSE ME!? She is running a very high fever and she is not acting like herself at all! How can you not be concerned!?!?
Today I had had enough of her being miserable and we took her into the Instacare. They said that they would have no problem retrieving a urine sample, all they had to do was glue this little baggie onto her. When she peed, it would catch it and we were to bring it back in and they would test it. Simple as that. SERIOUSLY!? Why couldn’t the other doctor have done that WEEKS ago? Well, we did it and it was positive. Mireya has a UTI. I had known it all along, but no one would listen.
I’m clearly frustrated at the doctors, but I’m also frustrated with myself. It’s my job to keep my baby safe and healthy and I knew something was wrong. I should have continued to push the doctors, even though they thought I was crazy. Mireya may only be 19 months old, but every single time my motherly instincts have gone off, I’ve been right. I need to learn to trust myself, even when the rest of the world disagrees. It’s hard sometimes, because you don’t want to come across as the over-bearing, over-protective mom who is paranoid about everything. Whenever you disagree with a doctor, they seem to lump you into that category. I just don’t get it.
Poor baby. She had two bright orange bandaids after the shots, and all day she pointed at them and said, “Owie!” Here’s a video of her doing just that: