Day 18 - Fever

It was a good thing that we started Jakob's treatment yesterday, because today he has been quite sick, running a fever all night and most of the morning, and again in the evening. He has also been in a lot of pain from the inflamed insect bite (or sting, we don't know which) on his butt cheek, so we have been administering the maximum dose of painkiller syrup that the doctor prescribed (4 cc every 4 hours) to him.

Mami and papi are also feeling under the weather, with sore throats, combined with the stress and agony of having their first child being ill for the first time. None of us has gone outside the hotel today. We've all had better days than this!

We felt so sorry for Jakob that we bought him another manjar blanco (see Day 12), and that's all he has eaten today, apart from a yoghurt.

Just before supper time, after he had been allowed out on the patio for some fresh air and had been kicking a ball with our new friends the Australian family for a while, he became very hot, and we gave him a new porton of syrup to reduce his fever, together with the prescribed amount of antibiotics for today. He took his medicine without objections (it is getting harder and harder to believe what we were told: that this child has never been sick before), but he refused to drink anything else.

He was not sleepy at all, so we brought him to the restaurant to see if he would eat a little. But he did the opposite: He threw up all over the table. We left the restaurant in a hurry. It will be a while until we bring him there again.

His medicine being all he had eaten, that is of course what he threw up. Therefore we gave him his antibiotics again, thinking that on the first day of the cure it is better that he get a slightly bigger dose of penicillin than too little a dose.

The doctor, who yesterday insisted that we call him this afternoon with an update about Jakob's health, said that he will come by to check on him again tomorrow afternoon.

We know that it is important to drink a lot of fluids when one has a fever, but the boy adamantly refuses to drink anything except his medicine. We have tried all the drinks he has liked before: water, a dozen different fruit juices, soda, hot or cold chocolate milk, and any combination of the above that didn't seem too gross. In the end we managed to (tea)spoon-feed him some water as long as mami and papi took one spoonful each for each one that he drank.

---

Our case has been processed quite fast in the court we were assigned: On Monday this week we passed phase six of the process (see Day 9), and our case was sent to ICBF for control and confirmation by their appointed attorney for this court.

But today our lawyer informed us that there is a problem: That specific ICBF attorney has been promoted to another job, and his position has not yet been replaced. This effectively stops all progress in all cases that ICBF has with our court (not only adoption cases).

The judge is aware of the problem, and she has promised our lawyer to rush our case (step 8 in the process) in just two or three days if and when the ICBF get their part of the job done. And we have checked that the civil register where Jakob must receive his new birth certificate, is a fast-working one, so that will take less than one day. So in theory we may be ready to leave Cali some time next week, if the ICBF assign a new attorney to our court tomorrow. That would suit us fine! We believe our lawyer when she says that she is pushing all she can to get them to do so.