DD had her second lot of vaccinations yesterday (3 months old) and since then she's had a few side effects that I'm not sure what I should be doing about. Straight after the jabs she was fretting and not very happy, but that's how she was for 2 days after the first lot and then she just cheered up suddenly on the third day.
But last night at about midnight, we noticed that she had a small rash on her arm (only a couple of cm long) and it didn't go away with a glass pressed on it. So we phoned NHS Direct to make sure it was nothing to worry about. They got an ambulance to come, just because the night doctor service is poor and they wanted someone to have a look at dd. The paramedics said she looked fine and they were sure it was nothing to worry about but they said we could take her to the A&E to put our minds at rest if we wanted to. They said that she should only be kept in an hour while a doctor had a quick look, and then we'd be home again.
So, trying to cover everything, we toddled off to A&E. We waited there for an hour and were then told the doctor was busy so they were going to take us to the paed ward (or whatever it is) as we'd have to go there anyway and it would cut the doctor out. So off we went an waited another hour while they filled in endless forms, took her temp and waited for someone to come and see her. Then a paed and the registrar came and started talking about how they wanted to take blood, put an canula in and leave it in, in case she needed antibiotics, put her in a ward, monitor her for 48 hours etc. All this with barely a glance at us when we'd only gone in there for a quick second opinion!!!
They needed to go off and fill in more forms, so DH and I had a chat about it and decided we'd rather not have her poked and prodded and disturbed all night (this was then 4.30am, after we'd seen the paramedics at 12.30am!!). She was getting even more fretful as it was strange surroundings, nurses kept coming in to fill in forms every few minutes, which woke her up, and they kept doing lots of 'things' to her, disturbing her even more. These were things like putting a 'wee bag' on to try and get a urine sample when, as she sleeps through the night, she doesn't wee much anyway then and suprise suprise they didn't get a drop.
So by that time she'd already had a good few hours observation time when nothing had changed except she'd got more upset by being there and as far as we had been told, she was probably fine anyway. So we told the registrar we wanted to take her home, settle her there and see how it went. That was like blasphemy - that we dared to question their judgement!!! And the registrar made out that she was trying to be very patient with us and suggested a 'compromise' that we stay in until about 10am when the main paed would be doing his rounds and could have a look at her. But if she stayed the same they'd still want to do all the blood tests, if she got better great, and if she got worse we'd have brought her back to the hospital even if we had gone home. So we couldn't see the point of staying, when it was obvious she'd be happier (so recover better) at home. We said we wanted to go home and the registrar spent about half an hour trying to persuade us when we'd told her we were sure about what we wanted to do. Then she finally did the forms and let us go, and we got home about 6am!!! But she said that in the morning a HV or doctor would be coming round.
Now dd is still really fretful but her temp has come down a bit, even though she's still a bit hot and she seems happy enough sleeping, and just gets whingey when she's awake. She's not floppy or hard to wake, she's still taking a good portion of her normal feed and the rash is still there but hasn't changed.
Is this sort of reaction normal? Am I a terrible mum not leaving her in hospital (tell me honestly!)? As the HV hasn't been in touch should I ring her or leave it? Should I keep giving dd Calpol to help her temp or just leave her until she seems to need it? Should I stop asking so many questions?