We spent Sunday night with the Harrises in Greeley. By morning, Cassie
had completely recovered, but Colton had spent a second night throwing
up.
As we packed our duffel bags and headed outside to load up the
Expedition, Phil gazed at Colton, cradled in Sonja’s arms. “He looks pretty
sick to me, Todd. Maybe you should take him to the hospital here.”
Sonja and I had discussed that option. We had sat in emergency room
waiting areas with a sick kid before, and our experience was that we could
probably make the three-hour drive back to Imperial before we would be
seen in the emergency room of a metro-Denver hospital. So instead, we
called ahead to Imperial and made an appointment with our regular family
doctor, the one Colton had seen the previous Friday. I explained our
reasoning to Phil. He said he understood, but I could tell he was still
worried. And by the time we’d been on the road for an hour or so, I began
to think that maybe he had been right.
For Sonja, our first red flag waved when we stopped at a Safeway just
outside Greeley to buy Pull-Ups. Colton, who had been potty-trained for
more than two years, had tinkled in his underwear. It worried Sonja that he
didn’t even protest when she laid him down in the backseat of the
Expedition and helped him into a pair of Pull-Ups. Under normal
circumstances, he would have been indignant: “I’m not a baby!” Now,
though, he didn’t utter a peep.
Instead, once strapped back into his car seat, he only clutched his belly
and moaned. Two hours into the drive, he was crying constantly, stopping
about every thirty minutes to throw up again. In the rearview mirror, I could
see the heartbreak and helplessness on Sonja’s face. Meanwhile, I tried to
focus on the goal: get him to Imperial, get some IVs in him, stop the
dehydration that surely must be setting in as this flu ran its course.
We reached Imperial in just under three hours. At the hospital, a nurse
took us back to an examination room pretty quickly, with Sonja carrying
Colton, cradling his head against her shoulder the way she had when he
was an infant. Within a few minutes, the doctor who had seen Colton on
Friday joined us, and we brought him up to date on the situation. After a
brief exam, he ordered blood tests and an Xray, and I think I took a breath
for the first time since we rolled out of Greeley. This was progress. We