urgent care

On Sunday morning Jakobe woke up with this terrible rash on his arm.  It didn't hurt, but it was swollen, and I hadn't really ever seen anything like it...  It looked kind of like rug-burn, or something, but we couldn't tell what had caused it.  Anyway, since we didn't like the look of it, we decided that our best course of action was to make our way down to the urgent care center to have it looked at.  

There are some things about urgent care on Sunday morning you should be aware of:

• it's really busy
• for some reason, Jakobe's insurance thinks that they need a $75 co-pay
• almost everyone waiting to be seen is a small child, under the age of 4
• you have to wait forever to be seen
• there are babies everywhere, or cute toddlers with gorgeous ringlets
• so, not really the place for an infertile couple...

But anyway, we get there about 9 am, and then we wait for a long time to be seen, and because I'm just getting over the plague (fever, coughing, sore throat, utter yuckiness) and I'm still coughing, and slightly contagious, I get to wear the oh, so sexy, yellow face mask. (did I mention that I have this little claustrophobia problem, that I absolutely hate having anything over my nose and mouth, and that I have to move the blankets on our bed or when we cuddling so that there is absolutely nothing covering my nose and mouth?  Well, I do.)  In any case, when we finally get back to see a doctor I have come up with a laundry list of things that Jakobe should have checked out, or at least discuss, since we're already there.  Like his arm, his cough, his sore throat, his stuffy ears, and oh yeah - his frequent vomiting.

So - His arm turns out to be petechiae (broken blood vessels in the skin) and he somehow scraped himself or did something else like that to his arm while he was sleeping.  Unless it shows up somewhere else on his body, the verdict is that he somehow did it to himself in his sleep, and that it's nothing to worry about.

His cough - well his lungs sounded fine, so they didn't worry about it at all. His sore throat - got a strep culture - negative.  His stuffy ears - he's got fluid behind his eardrums, and one of them looks a little pink.  Normally, they wouldn't do much of anything for something that mild, but at one point, Jakobe had the both of his inner ears completely rebuilt surgically, and since there aren't bones in there anymore (just shaped pieces of cartilage) he has to be really careful to not get a bad ear infection, or he could maybe go deaf again.  So he gets to go on kick-ass antibiotics.

The vomiting - I finally got some backup on the fact that he really really needs to go to the doctor on this one. It wasn't until I had bugged him about going several times that he explained that he was vomiting up black stuff when he get's these attacks, stuff that maybe looks like coffee grounds.  The Urgent Care doc didn't do anything about it today, but really stressed that Jakobe needs to have it checked out and make sure that something serious isn't going on - because he could be vomiting blood.  Now maybe he'll actually make an appointment.