…But since I have to sit here and drink salty liquids and monitor my BP and HR for a while, I guess I’ll take a little break from holiday prep and, well, just SIT. I was just shopping away in the lemming like manner of the holiday season, when my heart started to go pitter pat and my head started to go WHOOPSIE DAISY and I had to stumble out with some shopping unshopped.
It was a little reminder of the bad old days, c. summer of 2009. I’ve been doing so, so well I almost forgot I was supposed to be dizzy. I’ve been eating any and everything with abandon. I’ve been letting my support hose collect dust in the drawer. I’ve been forgetting to drink and getting very dehydrated and neglecting my salt intake… actually I think this may be where I went wrong today. Hence the liter of Emergen-C and tsp of pink salt I am now attempting to ingest rapidly.
Anyway… Elias has been doing his best Tasmanian Devil lately. I mean, really. Here’s an example from last week. We were all getting ready for school and work in the morning, and Ben, thank god, was still home. I went upstairs to take a shower. Here’s what happened from my perspective: Elias came into the bathroom screaming and with a substantial bloody wound on his wrist. I was, of course, bathing– wet, naked, hair full of shampoo. And since Ben was alive and well downstairs my first question was why did Elias come to me with his bleeding cut? I said, “Where’s Daddy?” But got no reply more than screams, wails and blood! So I hastily bound up the wound in Kleenex and instructed Elias to apply pressure and elevate while I got the soap out of my hair. Then wrapped in a towel, with a towel on my head, I took the little victim downstairs to investigate the cut more throughly and provide proper first aid in the first floor bathroom triage unit.
There I found Ben In a state of high excitement, indeed in full rant, waving his arms and dramatically explaining what had happened. Apparently Elias had accidentally toppled a large box of glass Christmas ornaments in the sunroom, causing a wide area to be covered with broken glass. Ben dutifully got the vacuum and was cleaning that up. During that three minute process, Elias rushed in the nearby bathroom and developed a sudden curiosity about the inner working of the toilet. So he removed the toilet lid to watch it flush. In that process the huge heavy toilet lid crashed to the floor and side of the tub, smashing into many pieces, somehow creating a borderline-stitch-worthy cut on Elias’s wrist as it fell. However Ben didn’t know about the cut. He only knew that he was cleaning up on major mess when another one was created and so he yelled at Elias (one would argue quite justifiably), who then ran (bleeding) up to me.
The cut almost passed the “is it gaping as wide as a Q-tip” test. But I managed to close it fairly well with a butterfly closure and then cover that with a large band-aid. Later on in the day I regretted this when we were at skiing at his wound was gaping open again and a teacher said it looked like it could use a stitch or two, because the butterfly and the bandaid had both fallen off during the day. But it’s been several days now and it seems to be healing up okay. I’ve just kept antibiotics on it and tried to keep it closed and it’s healing from the inside. … One more scar for the collection!! And the moral is: 9 years into motherhood, I STILL cannot take a shower!
Meanwhile. Elias had his epiplocele surgery on Friday. This was basically a little hernia thingy on his stomach. Not that it was so bad that intestines were bulging out of it or anything. It was just a little wide area in the woven mesh that is his stomach muscle, and had a little bump on it, and apparently it had to be fixed. So… medical ordeal du jour. Mostly the problem was the endless waiting with a small, hungry, thirsty, highly active, nervous boy dressed in hospital tiger jammies. The staff were all very nice and did everything possible to make it as pleasant as they could. For instance, when the surgery turned out to be delayed by two hours, they let Elias free from the little room where we were incarcerated. He had already shredded the paper examining table cover into ribbons and exhausted all the possible fun out of making paper airplanes from it and flying them willy nilly. They had a play area outside that room, and it was as fun as could be. There were even awesome yellow elevators with all their pulleys and parts showing going up and down in the glass atrium place that we could watch. And a group of teens in evening attire showed up and performed the Grinch as a musical for a while. The girls started blowing Elias kisses and he was very shy about that (hiding behind the couch to avoid contact with the trajectory of the kisses). But still, the boredom and hunger and fatigue got the better of him many times and after begging to “leave outta here!” He finally slumped to the floor sobbing.
The only scary part was that Elias has this big history of croup (inflammation of the upper airway) and during general anesthesia they put a tube in there and basically inflame your upper airway with it. The anesthesiologist came to talk to me and I could smell his fear about it, and his fear contaminated me with fear also. He said, “Well, it’s likely that he will have a croupy cough after the procedure, and may go into respiratory distress, and need to be intubated again, and may need to go into Intensive Care.” And then he basically shook my hand and left me to ponder this potential. Have a nice day!
So I spent a hour or so totally anxious, attempting to eat bad hospital food (for I too had been starving and dying of thirst along with the boy). The moment when the lady with the surgery bonnet led him away down the hall, hand in hand, with his tiny, trusting, sweet self going along calmly with her, just about broke my heart. But it all went well. Finally I was allowed to come see him. He was totally out and would not rally for the longest time. The nurse brought him a stuffed pterodactyl, which even in his sleep he reached out and snatched and tucked under his chin. At which point I knew that he was going to be okay.
He didn’t have a cough to speak of either. His tummy has been sore all weekend, which is not surprising because Isaac keeps “forgetting” about the stitches and grabbing/punching/squeezing/rolling on/elbowing, etc., Elias’s incision. We did keep him home from TaeKwonDo last night, because, even with gear on, getting truly kicked in the stomach would be bad.
So– the holidays are upon us! We’ve got almost everything done, and before I got so dizzy in JoAnn I managed to snag a lot of new decorations (seeing as many we once had have been smashed recently *ahem*) at 70% off! And now to stabilize my BP and get them on the tree.
The little patient
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