  Last night I came home from class to discover that my two year old was running a fever. I asked my husband, who had been home with her for three hours previous, just when he was planning on telling me that I could fry an egg on our daughter's forehead.
I guess he hadn't noticed. So before going to bed I gave him the drill. You Know Your Child Has a Fever When: - all of the "key" body parts are hot: soles of the feet, palms of the hands, armpits, neck, back of neck, and forehead.
- her eyes are glossy - she doesn't want to play - that thing we call a "thermometer" has little numbers in the window that read higher than 98.6 At 2:00 am she was 102.9 and she had taken the maximum dose of Motrin just a couple hours before. So we took off to the E.R. During the car ride there I knew she would be fine, but that is what we moms do. Your child is ill and you need to confirm what you already know: that she will be fine. Instincts are powerful and, most of the time, accurate, but God forbid you listened solely to that instinct and it turned out you were terribly wrong.
So you drag your tired self, who really, really needed a good night's sleep, and your sick baby, who really, really is going to be okay, to the hospital where the staff knows why you're there--to confirm what you already know--and they are happy to oblige. They even gave her a teddy bear, a small consolation prize, in my opinion, for the everything they put her through. 
