YEP. AGAIN.

Paco and I spent nearly all of last night at Sacred Heart children's hospital with Gracie. Turns out she's got meningitis.

Yep, again. Can you believe that? This girl likes to play the odds.

It started out yesterday morning with a slight headache..which isn't that unusual for her. She spent some time at Grandpa's, and then the headache worsened. (not because of Grandpa! HA!) By the time I got there and took her home, she was in agonizing pain. Paco came home from work early, we dropped Cole off with Lesley and Jeremy (Paco's sister and her husband), and began our VERY long night at the ER. We got there at 7pm and left about 1:30am. By the time we all crawled into bed it was 3am.

The Doctor believes that she has viral meningitis, which is the less dangerous strain of meningitis. We never did find out which strain she had in January due to the antibiotics that were already in her system. The spinal tap culture wouldn't grow because of this, so they chose to treat her for bacterial meningitis at that time to be on the safe side. This time, her symptoms seem less severe, so we chose not to put her through another tap right now. If she were to get worse, we will reconsider.

She is taking anti-nausea medication and tylenol with codeine for the headaches. For those of you who aren't familiar with meningitis, the headaches are excruciating. Its hard to watch her suffer with them. Fortunately, the medicine controls it fairly well, and watching Gracie on codeine is quite entertaining!

I think she is improving, and seems to be feeling pretty good today. She's much better than yesterday! It's unlikely that the rest of us will contract meningitis. There is the possiblity of catching the virus that causes the disease, but the literature I read said something like a 1 in 1000 chance of it actually developing into meningitis itself. We believe she still has a weak immune system, and may not have completely kicked the strep throat from a few weeks ago, which could have made her more vulnerable.

Like I said, she seems to be feeling pretty good today and is hoping to feel well enough to stop by "back to school night" tomorrow to meet her teacher and see her classroom. We'll see what tomorrow brings!