Do I begin with last night, or Friday night? I guess I'll start with Friday.
I had to work Friday afternoon, so the first part is second-hand. Apparently Gabriel woke up screaming from his nap and didn't settle down easily at all. He then started throwing up and continued alternating between general malaise and vomiting for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. When I got home from work, Josh and I took turns holding him, eating, feeding other kids, etc... Around 8ish, I went to change his diaper and noticed something different. There was a lump about the size of a large green grape under the skin just to the right of his penis. Well that didn't look right and I called Josh over. We didn't make the obvious conclusion right away, feeling just a little confused after all about something that we hadn't seen before, but as we were sitting on hold with the after hours clinic, Josh stated the obvious and I had a "duh" moment. Hernia - the regular kind. By the time the nurse came on, we pretty well knew we would be heading to the ER, being that it was now nearly 9 on a Friday night. That's where we went and much to our surprise, after explaining the situation, we pulled back the diaper tabs and our jaws dropped when there was no protrusion anymore. They did xrays to make sure there were no intestinal blockages, gave him some pedialyte and once satisfied that the vomiting was over, sent us home with instructions to return to the ER should it pop back out again. The rest of the night and all day Saturday, Gabe was fine. That night, it popped back out again - so I called in the calvary and hopped back over to the ER with the same results. After another couple of hours (Saturday night on a holiday weekend is not a good time to be in the ER) another doctor reconfirmed it had to be a hernia, but to take him home and get in touch with a surgeon Tuesday, when offices were open. He added that if it popped out again and we could massage it back in, we didn't need to come back. Sunday it did come out again, but I massaged the area, the lump seemed to fade away, Gabe was content, so we stayed home. Monday night (sounding like a broken record? I feel like one) Gabe really started to fuss around 7:30, I checked and sure enough, it was back out but he wouldn't tolerate any touching this time. He wouldn't even put his knees down when I picked him up. The ER docs and the on-call surgeon couldn't coax it back in either. So a little after midnight last night they took him into surgery and fixed it. We spent the night in the peds floor and just got home a little while ago. He is sleeping and I think I want to do that too.
