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Thursday, August 04, 2011

Sampling

Today I found Miriam in the bathroom, sitting on the potty with her pants at her ankles.

I think she's officially potty trained...at least during the daytime. We had a little setback this week and she started having accidents like crazy. On Sunday afternoon between 2:30 and 5:00 PM she wet her pants nine times.

NINE TIMES!

At first I thought she was just having issues adjusting to being back home from camping but when she started saying "ouchie pee-pees" I knew we had a bigger problem on our hands.

Luckily I was able to get an appointment for her on Monday. I had to help her get a urine sample, of course, which is usually pretty tricky when you're only a year old but since Meme's potty trained it was a cinch. Or at least it should have been a cinch.

They gave us a little plastic "hat" to sit in the toilet to collect her urine. It looks just like a top hat. Only it's white. And instead of pulling rabbits out of it I was making Miriam pee into it. She was really excited about this and the way the nurses praised me for getting a urine sample out of a baby you'd have thought it was a real magic trick.

"Yeah, about that," I told the nurse who took the sample from me, "I, uh, may have gotten a little water in there and by a little I mean like, a lot."

There was an automatic sink in the bathroom, see, and I had just removed the "hat" from the toilet and was in the process of dumping the contents into the actual sample container when Miriam started mucking around with something. So I quickly put down the containers on the sink counter to stop Miriam from doing whatever she was doing—I don't even remember what she was doing but it seemed important to stop her at the time.

Well, the "hat" triggered the sink to turn on and even though I moved it out of the flow split seconds later the volume of liquid in the hat had dramatically increased.

The doctor said water shouldn't affect the test results.

They successfully found blood in her urine and so he prescribed an antibiotic even though they wouldn't get the cultured bacteria back for another couple of days.

A nurse called us yesterday to give us the results of the test. Kind of.

"Yeah, we weren't actually able to culture Miriam's sample," she said, "So the doctor said to just watch Miriam and to bring her back in next week if she isn't feeling better by then."

It's really no wonder they weren't able to culture it. I think it was upwards of 60% water.

Miriam's been feeling much better though. She stopped wetting her pants yesterday and by this afternoon she'd stopped saying "ouchie pee-pees" and/or crying while trying to pee. I'm glad that's over; she was such a sad little baby!

I have a lot of experience taking urine samples. I mean, between two pregnancies, Rachel's little urethraritis episode last year, and working at the fitness center* in town I've done my share of sampling urine.

* When I worked at the fitness center we had mandatory random drug testing and I was randomly selected no less than five times, which is ridiculous considering I only worked there for two years (or something). I still think it was a huge waste of time and effort for them to test me—I can think of a few former coworkers whose testing might have actually revealed something scandalous. 

1 comment:

  1. Awww, poor little girl. I'm glad she's feeling better. It sure is not fun to have a little one crying when they have to go to the bathroom. Sydney still fusses about that from time to time, but mostly because she didn't wipe well enough. Blech. Great job on the potty training though!

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