High Fever Scare

Thursday evening Ethan didn't do well sleeping through the night (which is very unusual for him). He woke up 2 or 3 times, and I rocked him back to sleep each time. Friday and Saturday Ethan was not acting like himself, being very clingy and wanting to be held all of the time. He wasn't interested in playing with Waggles or his toys. Friday he was running a low grade (100-101) fever, and he was slow with his eating. That, along with a clear runny nose and slightly swollen gums, led me to believe that this was due to teething. However, Saturday late afternoon Ethan felt like he was burning up, and when we took his temperature with the forehead scanning thermometer, it read between 104 and 107 with even a couple of readings that had no numeric value and just said "HIGH". We thought that couldn't possibly be correct, so I scanned my own forehead for comparison, and it read 98.5 I called the on-call pediatrician right away, and he said to put Ethan in a lukewarm bath and keep his forehead damp. We had been giving him Motrin every 6 hours, but the Dr. recommended Motrin at a higher dose alternating with Tylenol every 3 hours. Poor little guy didn't sleep well Friday night, and Saturday night (following the Dr's instructions), we woke him up every 3 hours to give more medication and gave him 2 more lukewarm baths. His temp came down this morning to 100-ish, but spiked back up into 104-106 range this afternoon. We nearly took him to the ER a couple of times, but we called the pediatrician back and he said that it sounded to him like a nasty virus and that we should keep up what we had been doing (baths/medication) and see how he did over the next couple of hours. Fortunately he started acting much more like himself and his fever came down quite a bit this evening. We are continuing the medication regimen and hope that he is back to 100% soon. I think that this was caused by teething in combination with a viral infection. He was back to playing like normal this evening, but he is refusing to finish his bottles and is also refusing even pureed solid foods. He behaved this way with food the last time that some teeth were close to breaking through the gumline. I'm praying that his temperature stays down and that he's back to eating normally very soon! Seeing him acting so out of character and looking totally miserable this weekend was really scary.