The story...

So I kept Dovi home from school on Friday because he was a bit crisisy...not terrible, just vaguely off. A little retchy, a very low grade fever. I was home doing the great clothing switchover (all moms know what I'm talking about, and it was majorly compounded by the fact that my house is a bomb right now due to the basement. I said on Friday morning that my house really, truly looked like an episode of Hoarders)

Friday at about 6 pm we went to my in-laws for Shabbos dinner. I dropped Benjie, Elisha, and Jakie at shul and took Dovi and Shana over to the house to wait for them. Shana was reading a book. So was I, and Dovi was laying on the couch next to me with his head on a small pillow. He was coughing, and I told him to give a good cough and clear his throat. I realized that he wasn't answering me.

I looked over and saw that he was dusky in color and his eyes were rolled back in his head. I started screaming and yelling at him to wake up and sat him up. When I realized that he wasn't responding to me, I screamed (ok shrieked hysterically) up to my mother in law to come down and call 911. He was breathing, but very erratically and not responding. I'm not going to tell you what I was thinking. I literally slapped him in the face three times to try and get him to come back. 911 told me the paramedics were on the way and to lay him on his side. I did so and he gave a big shuddering cough and woke up, crying and upset.

My mother in law and Shana had run to shul to get Benjie. About a minute later the paramedics came and checked him out. His blood pressure was really high (160/120) but his oxygen levels were ok. I called Dr. Axelrod and she told us to take him in. At this point Benjie ran in the door (he told me he was really confused because he thought Dovi was nonresponsive and came back and found Dovi standing in the window). Since he seemed to be stable we didn't go in the ambulance to the ER because they would only take us to the closest ER and we did not want to go there.

So Benjie and I hopped in the car and went to the ER that we've always gone to. We stopped at home and grabbed insurance cards and Refoenu cards. The ER was expecting us because the paramedics called ahead and we went right in. They took blood and a chest xray and established that he had pneumonia. They decided that he needed to be admitted. And this is when it got interesting...