That does indeed sound like a very scary thing to go through with a baby, Penni. And it doesn't sound like you got very compassionate medical care, either. What a jerk that surgeon was!!!
Briana fell repeatedly on the same knee when she was four while she was learning to ice skate, and ended up with osteomyelitis. It took days for the cultures to come back before she was diagnosed definitively. So I had a little girl who was limp, with a high fever, who slept most of the time. Very unlike the child of a few days before.
When the cultures came back the pediatrician called and said she would have to be admitted immediately. She ended up being there twenty-two days, on an IV. It was like torture putting it in. She was scared, bored and everything else that goes along with being an ill child. I was not sure at first what osteomyelitis was, and then I wondered if they were really telling me the whole story. Since there was no broken skin on her knee osteomyelitis was sort of a weird diagnosis, and I was afraid that she really had leukemia, and they weren't telling me the truth. All of that is very scary for parents. I remember walking away from her room the first time and going outside and just sobbing.
Thank goodness they had very skilled play therapists there who spent a lot of time with her, reassuring her, as I did, that she did not get sick because she did something bad, or was a bad person. But the whole experience was a serious event in her little life. One day when I got to the hospital, she said, "Mommy, I am depressed!" I didn't even know she understood that word, but she did.
Incidentally, what did Spock say or believe that was weird? I can't really remember much with which I disagreed.
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