Wedding Woes

Our Saturday started out well. We went to the wedding of Graham's cousin, Evan and his beautiful bride, Nicole. But it ended rough, with Ava taking her first visit to Urgent care. The wedding was wonderful, as I think all wedding are. Evan and Nicole were married in a lovely church and had their reception at a gorgeous garden. So while we were waiting for the bride and groom to take their pictures we decided to venture off and take some of our own.

But shortly after dinner was served Ava needed a diaper change. So off Graham, Ava and I went to clean her up. She had a dirty diaper and while changing it I noticed it looked a little 'off'. Nothing worrisome, but different. We got her all freshened up and returned to the reception. A few minutes later Ava needed another diaper change. So she and I went off again to change her. This time there was blood in her stool. I got a little nervous, but she had been trying a lot of new foods that day and was acting fine so I decided it was most likely an irritation to a new food and decided to watch her. Another 20 minutes and she needed another change. This time with even more blood. We decide to call it a day and head home. By the time we get home she needs yet another diaper change. This last diaper was almost all bloody mucus. So we take out the thermometer and put a call into Ava's doctor. The doctor tells us generally with this much blood in a baby's stool it is an indication of an infection and advises us to take Ava in to Urgent care. We take her out of bed and head off to the hospital.

One x-ray, one blood draw, one scrapped and collected stool for culturing, a lot of tears and 3 hours later we leave with a tentative diagnosis from the on-call Pediatrician of a milk allergy. We had been introducing whole milk a little at a time for the last few weeks, but Ava showed not signs of a problem. My ped seemed skeptical on the phone that an allergen was causing this much blood without any other symptoms, but we have a follow up in a few days so we'll see what the cultures shows.

Thankfully Ava shows no signs of being bothered by her condition. No fever, no pain, no nothing. Even the nurses in the urgent Care commented how Ava was the happiest sick baby they had ever seen (prior to the blood draws and x-rays). Hopefully she stays the happy cheerful girl she normally is and this all needs up being nothing.