After a very long weekend of packing and good-bye's, we FINALLY loaded our family into our van at around 2 pm on Monday. Matthew Ray was very cranky all morning long. We couldn't wait for him to go to sleep on the long journey to Arkansas!!! Not long into the trip he began screaming with a bad headache. We couldn't figure out what was wrong. We stopped many times trying to console him and giving him pain medicine. Nothing was working. We stopped about 1 1/2 hours south of Memphis and discovered he was running a high fever. After calling our pediatrician she told us to go to the nearest children's hospital because she feared he may have menengitis. We arrived at the hospital at 12:30 am on Tuesday morning. Thankfully, Matt's sister lives in Memphis so she came and picked up the girls. We were seen at 4 am by the doctor and they proceeded to do a spinal tap. The menengitis test came back negative, but his white blood cell count was very high. He had to have an antibiotic by I.V. and then we had to stay in Memphis one more day for him to have another I.V. the next morning.
We arrived in Arkansas at Stacey's parent's house on Wednesday evening. By Friday morning both girls had the same bacterial infection that Matthew Ray had.Pediatricians in the area were not seeing new patients so Meredith and Madison had to go to the Arkansas Children's Hospital. It was a VERY TRYING time!! You know, we should be used to this type of drama-we can't go anywhere without visiting the doctors in the area!!!!
