24 weeks 6 days

Where have I been??? SICK - That's where.

Well, yes, but not the whole time, so let's start from the beginning anyway. Wednesday of last week my DH and I (with Lily in tow) left for Raleigh where I had a work conference that was to last until noon on Friday. I had come down with a little sniffle/cough on Wednesday morning, but was taking care of it well with Tylenol cold as per my OB. Nothing more to it. And like we do every year after my conference, we decided to continue to head west to the Mtns of NC and camp for a night or two with Lily. I knew this would be our last camping trip like this for a while, and I was very excited about it! I was only extremely disappointed that my nose conched out on me at Mt. Mitchell and I couldn't smell the 'Christmas Trees' LOL! I love to smell that Mtn! Well, by Friday night I was feeling good, but DH was feeling a little more under the weather - I guess actually he was REALLY under the weather, because about half way there he thought he was running a slight fever. We ended up staying in the seasonal barracks at Mt. Mitchell, so at least we had beds to sleep in. Saturday morning when we got up, the decision to stay in the Mtns one more night was made, so we did. We weren't so lucky to have a bed to sleep in Sat. night, and unfortunately we also forgot the air pump for the mattress....

First things first - I DO NOT RECOMMEND SLEEPING ON THE GROUND AT 6 MONTHS PREGNANT! LOL! (Nobody's fought but my own)

Now that I said that, it really wasn't that bad. It got plenty cold that night, and I still woke up feeling pretty good, and obviously my DH was not feeling so good. We packed up camp, did just a few more things on our agenda, took a long, one way only dirt road out and ended up seeing lots of turkeys, chipmunks, an unknown bird of sorts and two bear! Once we hit pavement we headed back to Raleigh to drop off the key to my sister's place(who graciously kept lily for me while I was at the conference!) It was somewhere after that point that things went downhill. Monday morning I woke up running a fever, had a terrible cough, lots of congestion and just felt like crawling in a hole and dying. I was worried sick about Little Bit and how the medications I'd been taking were affecting him, and on top of that, I had felt the baby move a lot all weekend and didn't feel the baby move at all on Monday. I called my OB to try to get my Wed appt moved up, but they point blank told me they would not see me if I was running a fever or had flu like symptoms until I had been cleared from an ER, urgent care center or a GP that it was not the flu. My next adventure was calling everyone I could think of to call in a favor for me, and at five o'clock Monday afternoon, DH drove me all the way to Ahoskie so I could get the flu test. Turns out it wasn't the flu, thank goodness, but the sad thing is that they didn't even look at me, take my temp, bp or anything because they said my OB is the only Dr. who can prescribe me anything. Back to that... I didn't get to see my OB until WEDNESDAY MORNING! I ran a fever the whole time, coughed up a few lungs, couldn't keep anything on my stomach and was MISERABLE!!! Turns out I had a nasty viral infection they've seen going around, that takes 5-7 days just for the fever to break!!! Starts out as a head cold, moves into the lungs and ends up as GI issues - oh yeah - I had that too... They finally put me on an antibiotic (z-pack), cough syrup with codeine, albuterol inhalor, Tylenol, Tylenol cold, Imodium and Robitussin. So in any case - I'm just glad to be sitting up right now :)

P.S. Dear Tommi,

Little bit has loved the fact that you think of him as a 'Little Monkey'. Every night since you have sent me the onesie, as I lay in bed trying to sleep, he decides to play on the 'Monkey Bars' he's got hidden in there! Can you somehow explain to him that 'Monkeys' aren't nocturnal???