One wild friday night.

Yesterday, late morning, Chris received a call from Jonas’s daycare saying that he was crying a bit because of pain in his hip and back. He had calmed down and ate lunch and took a nap, and Chris was going to check in a little bit later to see how he was doing.  When he called around 3:15, the daycare said that Jonas had woken from his nap, seemingly ok, but was playing on the carpet and suddenly started crying in pain again. They told Chris that he’d never cried like that before, and was inconsolable.  Chris left work, called me, I called the pediatrician and then also left work.

The pediatrician’s office said to go ahead and take him to the ER since they had equipment to check him out that the pediatrician didn’t, so Chris picked up Jonas and made his way to the ER. I started my drive to meet them there. 45 minutes of trying really hard not to panic. Thankful I had a good audiobook to get lost in.

The Children’s ER here is so great. They hadn’t been there for very long when I arrived, and not long after that did we get into triage. As soon as triage was over, we were taken back to a room. I don’t know if this was coincidence or what, but the other patient sharing the room with us wasn’t there for anything contagious. Thank you, hospital. Because as we walked around, there was so much horrible sounding coughing from kids of all ages. And there was a 10 day old baby there for something and that baby was so, so tiny, and had an IV into the back of his or her little head. Depressing.

Jonas had said that his hip still hurt a little bit, and the more we asked him about it, the more we realized it wasn’t hurting very much anymore, thank goodness. He was still pointing to his abdomen. The nurse made him walk and squat and jump and march, and he said it felt fine. She mashed on his belly, and it was fine. And then we waited. Jonas has done this twice before, once when he broke his heel, and once when he needed stitches in his chin. He’s an ER champ.

When the physician came to see him, she was so great with him. Seriously – her calling was pediatric ER physician, I think. She moved his legs around, mashed on his abdomen some more, pushed up on his legs, all kinds of stuff.

Her diagnosis? Gas pains.

So, yeah. ER trip for gas pains, which sucks because copay, but also, as like the ER doc said, hip pain in a kid that age is more worrisome than abdomen pain since he’s a lot younger than appendicitis typically shows, but she was really glad to tell us that it was just gas pains. And she was very reassuring that his symptoms warranted bringing him in and that we did the right thing. Basically, Jonas had the most expensive fart ever.

Then we went to Super Hero night at the hockey game downtown, and Chris’ sister had gotten some free seats down on the ice and so Jonas was up against the glass to see a hockey game and he had a great time with his cousin, so sure, we spent 2 hours at the pediatric ER, but the hockey game was fun.