Puke part 2

Sorry to keep you on pins and needles, Eric and I were heading out the door to the Spokane County Fair this morning, yay! More on that later. I'm so behind on blogging, OMG! I still haven't even written about Seaside yet. Puke blogging is just so much more interesting and worthy of my time.

Anyway, after Seth was asleep for like 5 minutes and I was thanking my lucky stars, he wakes up and pukes again. On my bed. Somehow it also gets all over his head and his arm. This one could probably technically be classified as spit up, it was pretty much all breast milk. But it had that puke smell. Ick! I was at the end of my rope. I called Eric at work (or maybe he called me?) near tears. I still hadn't completely cleaned up the first puke mess, Seth was all gooey, and by now it was way past his bedtime. Do you even understand how hard it is to get pukey pajamas off an 8 month old without getting it all over yourself and everything around you? I don't think you do. Not to mention the bewilderment I was starting to feel. I mean, why in the world was my precious little angel puking his little guts out?

My night in shining armor came home from work. He cleaned up 99.9% of the puke and changed the sheets on our bed while I called the pediatrician and my mom. Get this - our pediatrician does not have a doctor on call for parents to talk to. Their answering machine message says something about how most insurances have a 24 hour nurse hotline, blah blah blah, "please call back during business hours because we really do want to answer your pediatric questions." Um, what? FAIL! Guess who might be shopping for a new pediatrician? I also could not find anything on my insurance card or insurance company website about any such 24 hour hotline. Meanwhile Seth is just crawling around in the living room in just a diaper, happy as a clam. We took his temperature and it was normal and he did not seem to be upset in the least about the events of the evening. I consulted with my own personal nurse hotline aka my mom and we decided not to worry too much about it unless things got worse. Eric went back to work and I managed to get Seth to sleep without any further ado.

A little later I was laying in bed thinking I was sure I remembered reading something on my company intranet about a nurse hotline available for employees. I found the number and gave them a call just for giggles. Here's a little play by play of that conversation:

Nurse hotline: Hello, how can I help you?

Me: I just had a question for the nurse, my 8 month old son was throwing up a bit tonight for no apparent reason.

Nurse hotline: Um, is this an emergency?

Me: Um, no, not really I guess. I mean, I don't think so...

Nurse hotline: Well does he have a pediatrician?

Me: Yes, their answering machine message says to call the nurse hotline.

Nurse hotline: Well here's the thing. If this isn't an emergency then it's going to be tomorrow before anyone calls you back.

Me: Well that's stupid. If this was an emergency I'm pretty sure I would have called 911.

Nurse hotline: I don't know what to tell you ma'am, I'm just an answering service.

Me: Forget it. *click*

Can you even believe that crap????? I am so annoyed. I immediately e-mailed my HR department and told them what I thought of their so-called "24 hour nurse hotline."

So much for making a long story short. This morning Seth was fine and he hasn't shown any signs of illness or other abnormal behavior except for the record FIVE poopy diapers today. FIVE. We haven't had that many in one day since he was a newborn.

And for the record I have since decided that puke is definitely worse than poop. At least poop is usually in a diaper and not all unpredictable and all over the place.