New Mommy lesson of the week: Be SURE that your baby’s doctor has your current contact information.

If I had thought to give the doctor’s office my new cell phone number, I could have avoided my SCARIEST moment in parenting thus far…

So last week (Tuesday), we took Jaxton to the doctor when he had a rash. Because of fevers and irritability, they did a throat culture to rule out strep. It came back negative and so she assumed he was recovering from whatever bug or virus he had picked up. The rash cleared up by Thursday and he seemed back to his normal self in no time.

But yesterday I went to the mailbox and found a sloppily hand written letter from Jaxton’s doctor’s office.

It said :

We have been unable to reach you by phone. It is VERY IMPORTANT (underlined) that you call the hospital and have Jaxton’s doctor paged. She needs to speak with you about Jaxton IMMEDIATELY.

What?! Are you kidding me?! I couldn’t get up my driveway fast enough. Seriously, I was in my golf cart and it was going so slow…. I called the hospital and they paged the doctor. In the time that it took for her to call me back a million things were going through my head…. He had meningitis, he had cancer… why hadn’t they just sent the ambulance out to get him if he was so sick?! Who sends a LETTER in 2011?!?!

Thank God it only took the doctor about 4 minutes to call me. Once she realized who I was and who my baby is she said that his culture grew. So my poor little baby had strep. BUT he doesn’t have meningitis…or any of the other life-threatening diseases that I had diagnosed him with since the mailbox. She said he was probably over it by now but she still wanted to run some antibiotics to be sure.(On a side note, I am bummed that he has already had strep at 7 months. I struggled with throat infections for years and finally had my tonsils removed at 23. I would hate to see Jax suffer the same issues. But for now, I’m just relieved it wasn’t something worse).

I can’t even describe how scared I was in those 10 minutes from mailbox to phone call. It was HELL. I thank God every day for my healthy baby boy. I have all the admiration and respect in the world to the amazingly strong parents who care for babies with health problems. They are the biggest heroes in my eyes. I like to think that if need be, I would be strong for my baby. But after that scare, I’m not so sure how useful I would be. I was a mess!

Last night as we went to bed, I kissed my baby boy about a hundred extra times and while I thank God for baby and his health every day, the man upstairs got an extra earful of gratitude from this relieved mommy last night.

So, my *tip* of the day: avoid receiving a scary note like I did and make sure your doctor has your current phone number! I lost my phone in June and it didn’t occur to me to tell the doctor’s office that I got a new number. What a mess!