When you have a fun vacation planned. . .inevitably--someone will get sick!!!

Granted, the sick person is not usually admitted into the hospital the day before the trip as is the case with our little Mabel right now. We have been planning our trip to Utah for several months. We bought the tickets and made plans with as much family and friends as possible. We were planning on flying out of Birmingham on Tuesday at 4:30 in the afternoon. Well, today, Monday, Mabel decided, no thats not accurate, the doctors decided that Mabel needed to be admitted to the hospital. (Mabel certainly would have vetoed the decision had she been given a choice.) When the doc first took her temp this morning it was 104.7 degrees. Mabel has had this fever since Wednesday. They also found a really high white blood cell count, enough that they said. . .off to the hospital for little Mabe.
Here is the most annoying thing about a hospital--we answered the same questions at least 5 times to at least 5 different people. Both nurses and doctors. And each person wrote down the answers to the questions on a seperate piece of paper. We were in the admitting room for four hours. Four hours is a long time for a 2 year old little girl (Emmeline). For crying out loud, it is a long time for a 27 year old man and a 25 year old woman. (Mabel was too lethargic and tired to really care where she was.) Why not have one person ask us the questions and then let that information be available to everyone else who needs it instead of the marathon-lets have everyone in the hospital ask the Picketts the same questions over and over again senario. Okay. I'm sorry for the vent fest. I'm done. We finally got up to our room and everyone was really nice. They are even giving me free meals since I am still nursing. Thats good and the chicken fingers they gave me for dinner were four stars, even though they were hospital food. (Perhaps I was just really really hungry.) Anyway, despite the long day in the hospital, Emmeline did really good and was a really patient girl. She was very sad to leave Mabel and me at bedtime. But she promised to come back in the morning and have breakfast with us.

A quick update on Mabel: she is doing very well. Her fever has gone down considerably. The last time they checked it, it was just over 100 degrees. Hopefully it will continue in this positive direction and we wont have to be here at the hospital for long. Hopefully we'll be able to be on our way to Utah in a couple of days. Who knows, maybe with a little luck and some quick recovery, we can be out of the hospital tomorrow morning and on the plane by 4:30. However, if we have to talk to the same 5 nurses and doctors we talked to this morning. . . I sure wont be counting on it. :)