SICK

On Wednesday evening, Samantha began to refuse her dinner. By midnight, she was up throwing up. By Thursday, she couldn't keep anything down. Her pediatrician surmised that it may be rotavirus, and said that if she was still vomitting by that evening, we may need to take her to the emergency room for fluids. But before that, we got a prescription for Zofran, an anti-nausea pill, which seemed to do the trick. No more vomitting, at least for the time being. Friday, Samantha refused all fluids and food. When I got home from work, we took her to the emergency room, where, after being tortured a bit by catheters and vein-searching. The hospital confirmed that she indeed had rotavirus and that she was pretty dehydrated. We were there for about 5 hours, and were home by 12:30am. She slept through most of the fluids, while Steve and I sat and watched tv and drank delicious cups of fresh coffee the nurse made for us. Steve went for a few visits outside to have a cigarette and actually saw, separately, 3 people he knew! Two were the parents of one of the adults he works with (he works for the county part-time with adults with intellectual disabilities) and he also saw one of the guys with Down syndrome that he coached in the Special Olympics training last spring. Such a weird coincidence. Anyway, yesterday (Saturday), Samantha was doing much better. She was a little nauseous, so we gave her another Zofran and she ate a few bites of a waffle, some goldfish, some apple sauce and half a piece of toast with honey. She drank pretty well, too. Now today is another story altogether. It started off well, with her eating a whole waffle, but she refused to drink at all today, or to eat anything else. We finally managed to con her into drinking about 2 1/2 straw cups of juice (Powerade and Vitamin Water and Motts for Tots) and some apple sauce, but that was IT. Of course, I'm totally worried about her. I can't imagine having an empty tummy for so long. She's extra tired and particularly cranky, but otherwise still behaving somewhat normally. I'm really, really, really hoping for a turnaround tomorrow. Any advice? We really don't want her to end up back in the hospital. I guess not eating is okay, as long as she's hydrated and that we just have to wait out the normal course of this virus...? Poor little thing has been sick since about Christmas. She had a virus at Christmas, then a cold right afterwards, then a runny nose that wouldn't go away, then an allergy to Penicillin, now this.