Check-ups and Thing

We had two doctor's appointments this morning at 8 and 8:30. Not a good time for our family, except for Mark who is used to early rising. But it means we were the first appointments and only had to wait about half an hour to see the doctor. This is perhaps the only doctor I would ever be willing to wait for, and we wait evey time. The wait is always worth it. She really listens to us, spends more time with each patient than any other doctor I've ever seen, asks intelligent questions and is completely focused.

Our little man has struggled with severe eczema his whole life. Food allergies are a big culprit, but not the only one. He can't have wheat, dairy, eggs, legumes, nuts, corn syrup, pineapple and other fruits or flax seeds. We haven't tried new foods with him lately, but have been able to expand his repetoire lately as his tastes change. In the past month, he's developed a love for yogurt - soy and goat. The goat yogurt is much better for him, given it has 8 grams of fat a serving and is a simpler food than soy yogurt. His belly button is, for the first time, an innie. He looks less and less scrawny every day and we are thrilled. His eczema is better, he has two spots now; around his mouth and behind his knees. A year ago he was a full body, bleeding mess. And the chinese herbal treatments have strengthened his immune system to the point where when he gets a cold, it's very short in duration. The rest of the family has experienced this as well.

For my part, I had accupuncture for the first time today. It was the most relaxing thing I've ever done! She gave me needles to help my ankle pain and help with weight loss, after a regular office visit. I had them in for 45 minutes or so and feel fabulous now. It could just be that I rarely have 45 minutes to myself to do nothing but be. I wish I hadn't resisted accupuncture for so long, particularly if it gets me over the mobility and pain issues. With one car, Mark had to take the kids shopping and come back to get me. I was in there for two hours, so maybe the needles were in longer.



And here is my thing for the day. All the things up at http://www.thing-a-day.com/ are so interesting! I've been dreaming of ways to use up my fabric stash. It's clogging the basement and cluttering my life. But I can't just throw it out, most of it. I need to weave rugs, a stair runner, knit blankets, etc. Big plans for big fabric. So, last week I got out an old dress and cut some strips to make beads with. There were fun to make, I especially like the fringe. Then I made a box out of card stock and glued them to the top. Someday I'll open up an Etsy shop...

Surperstitions

I'm not particularly superstitious. And usually my glass is half full. But lately I'm beginning to wonder about how the planets are aligned and how it is affecting our daily life. There is definitely a bad energy swirling around my family lately. Aside from my oldest child's freak ear injury, my youngest falling through the ice, the strange appearance of food in the child center of the gym, here are some other dark spots:

• After the freak accident resulting in Buddy's ear injury, we somehow forgot his retainer at our friends' house. We were not exactly focused on teeth when the cause of concern was the ear. She found it, but we put off making the trip to retrieve it as no one wanted to sit in the car for an hour and a half. We didn't have a good, distracting movie. Now it is lost again. Probably thrown out or hidden by a toddler in a special toddler place. It was new.
• Mark and I decided to get ourselves a Happy Light for Christmas, as we both seem to suffer mood swings with our latitude's lack of sunlight in the winter. Somehow I added two to my Amazon cart and did not discover the error until it had already entered the shipping system. They both arrived yesterday.
• Our dryer is no longer drying. The hose is not clogged, the drum still spins but it does not heat. It's 15 years old. Planned obsolescence.
• I seem to have triggered by father's obsessive worry about weather and travel when I called to tell my parents about the big guy's ear injury. My father has called me maybe 5 times in my life, he is very phone-adverse. He's been worse since his hearing got bad in his 70s and Parkinson's has affected his speech. He called yesterday to tell me that they would have ice on Sunday and I should cancel my plan to come out to see my siblings. Two days and 60 miles away, as if I wouldn't have access to the same information.
• Mark is on duty through Boxing Day. That was the day we were to go out and celebrate Christmas with my family, we won't even be able to see his family until January sometime. The ear specialist only had one appointment to see the bleeding ear at 4 p.m on Boxing Day. My parents live an hour away, we will miss almost the whole day with aunts, uncles and cousins we haven't seen in a year.
  
  Now, all of this is easily fixed. We'll get a new retainer after the New Year once our FSA is re-filled. We'll use some of the money we were intending to pay down our debt with to buy a new dryer. I'll ship back the redundant Happy Light. My Dad would have started worrying about weather and travel anyway with his far flung off-spring traveling from New York, California and New Mexico to see them. And maybe, just maybe, the nurse practitioner today will say that we don't need to come on Boxing Day to see the doctor, that the ear is healing, that the hearing loss will return and that we should have a Merry Christmas.
  
  But it does seem like our house needs an air and light change, we need to alter the energy field or something.

Even More Kid Dangers

Buddy has no eardrum.

The doctor's words were "There is no membrane. It's just gone." Not a good sign, really. We had a lot of hope upon first inspection when she saw just a "flap of debris." But after clearing out all the blood and wax, the debris turned out to be the membrane that blocks the outer ear from the middle ear.

So, we are on a path we haven't walked down before. Other paths haven't seemed this hard, maybe because have a good understanding of food allergies and asthma. We've been in the ER for croup, asthma attacks and anaphylaxis. Oh, and for the usual accidental overdose, fractures and sprains. Ear trauma is uncharted territory for us. And so close to the brain.

After the Little Man fell through thin ice, he caught an unrelated bug that involved vomiting, fever and diarrhea. Through a miracle of goodwill and timing, a friend was able to pick my Girl Scout up for the Christmas party and take my oldest along for boys club. I happily sent them off at 8:30 a.m. and worried only about my still sleeping little guy who was sick. There was a fleeting worry about sending Buddy out with only Christmas party supplies, one epipen for the two of them, three huge frozen pizzas, gifts for their secret sisters and brothers and bags in case they got car sick. Mostly I was worried that I had not included snow pants for boys club and Buddy would get all wet. Then the Little Man woke with the runs and I spent time cleaning him up, doing normal mom things in the aftermath of a mess.

The little man and I had one quiet hour together working at the sewing machine, making gift bags in lieu of disposable wrapping paper for Christmas. He ate breakfast, chattered incessantly about Santa and presents and where his siblings were. I sewed around and despite of him.

Then the phone rang. My wonderful friend Kim of http://www.relaxedhomeskool.com/ and http://www.chicagohomeschoolhabitat.com/ was in a panic on the phone. I have a strange, calm response to other people's panic. I could hear my oldest screaming in the background, so my response was doubled. Thankfully doubled. A bag of sticks carved and groomed into wands had been brought to the boys club Christmas party. One of them had been shoved so forcefully into Buddy's ear as to be broken in half. Screaming his head off in shock and pain, he wouldn't let anyone peer in beyond his bloody hair.

Now, I know my children and this one has a very low tolerance for pain. My other two are more like me in that regard. My oldest takes after one of my siblings. So, it was difficult for another mom to judge the extent of his pain, but I made my way out the door. Unfortunately, we live 50 minutes away on a good day with good traffic. Unfairly, I called Mark from the car and asked him to Google sticks and ears. I called my friends every ten minutes or so and for the first 40, my big boy was still screaming. I hit every train and light on the way, making it almost an hour trip. He was calm, but in pain, when I got there and looked in to see that the blood was coming from deep inside the ear canal. Not gushing, but a slow, steady drip.

Girl Scouts being almost over and having the location of an ER and an Urgent Care facility, I set to making a decision. We waited for Little Missy and then for the one epipen among us to be returned after she forgot it at Girl Scouts. I left the house with a not-quite potty trained child with diarrhea and not a single diaper on me. Friends supplied those. Friends returned the epipen. Mark helped me decide to call our regular doctor first. We hit the road.


Our regular doctor couldn't fit us in until 5:30, more than 4 hours after we got home. She squeezed us in between appointments, probably cutting into her dinner. I put a diaper to Buddy's ear to collect the blood, set him up with Harry Potter, tended to the flu ridden little Man and asked my girl for more help than is fair to an 8 year old. She read to him, played games online, brought her big brother drinks and took care to keep me calm in the midst of chaos.

Dr. Wu saw us in the waiting room and was visibly relieved over which boy was in trouble. She shooed us into an empty room and peered in. She scraped out the blood, looked with her scope and thought it was OK, just a flap of debris that needed to be flushed out so she could get a better look. She ran out to take acupuncture needles from someone, asked her nurse to prepare an irrigation solution and got tied up for an hour. I called home and set the wheels in motion to tell everyone there was no damage to the ear drum. We were moved to a room across the hall. My boy read his Harry Potter and I worked on a mitten, because my first response to stress is to start a new project.

When the doctor returned to irrigate, she took the hair clip out of her own hair to pull back my rock star boy's hair and get to work. The more she irrigated, the more gunk came out. Buddy peered into the tub. I sat down with nausea. The she got to some more serious looking and said "The membrane is gone. It's just gone." The light she had seen before was just reflecting off all the blood. He has nothing protecting his ear from the outer world. He can still hear, which confounds me, but it is muffled by the blood now. We need to keep it clean and dry, he need to be inactive to stop the bleeding so the membrane can heal itself.

I've taped gauze over his ear. I've purchased waterproof tape and plugs that cover the ear canal without going into it for protection during a shower. He is grateful for his hair covering the gauze. I'm terrified of his hair carrying bacteria and infecting the ear. He's on the dreaded antibiotic to protect against a infection leading to hearing loss, and a huge dose of probiotics to protect against his usual response to antibiotics, getting every cold and minor illness for the next month. It's been a good two years since he's been on an antibiotic.

But how does one keep a 9 year old from being active? He's read probably 200 pages of the LAST Harry Potter book today. Only 80 left. I re-dressed his ear this morning and by this evening, it was soaked in blood. Another inactive day tomorrow. I'll need to run out and get more movies. He didn't want to watch TV all day today.

He has no hearing loss yet. The membrane can't heal until it stops bleeding. I'm hoping for the best. I'm hoping our string of bad luck will end now. And I'm hoping not to end up with an irrational fear of sticks much like my irrational fear of the ice. This week has done nothing but justify my irrational fears. What this week has done is restore my faith in humanity. Without friends and family working together, I don't know where I'd be.

More kid dangers

We woke to light snow on Saturday morning, but not more than an inch. It was a scheduled work day at the forest preserve where we volunteer. We took two cars because not everyone was up at the same time. It was such a beautiful morning, cold and it had the feel of impending snow. I got there with the sleepy-head boys a few hours into the work and six or seven brush piles had been lit. My daughter already had several sparks land on her coat, revealing the fluffy insides of outerwear.

We've been to several burns now and enjoy it every time. There is something really magical about a burn in the snow, how hot the fire gets and the crackling sound of the logs and brush. The kids breakfasted on marshmallows and had a good time. Then they wandered off through the wetland area and played nicely while the adults chatted by the fire.

I put Mark in charge of monitoring the kids around the ice. It's one of my areas of unreasonable fear, mostly borne from personal experience. Growing up we had access to a fantastic sledding hill on a neighbor's property. We had a large toboggan to seat all four of us and sometimes my father. The hill was treacherous with a dip in the middle, woods on either side and random trees throughout the tracks we made. At the bottom of the hill was a little pond the neighbors maintained as a skating pond. It was great winter fun. Several times, however, we sledded or tobogganed right into not-quite frozen pond. I have painful memories of going home cold and wet, dangerously cold and wet. Dangerously crying in the cold and wet. I remember how hard it is to keep your hands and feet warm months after dunking them in freezing water on a freezing day.

So, I didn't want to ruin the kids fun if it indeed was not a dangerous situation. And I didn't want to know too much about the ice. Mark checked and asked them to move to another location, which they did. Half an hour later the little man was crying in pain and the older two were saying "We didn't know that was ice." So much for homeschooling, right? More likely they were trying to cover up their guilt over the little guy's predicament. Mark brought him to the fire as we assessed the situation. His little boots were filled with water, his mittens completely soaked even after I wrung them out. I removed his soaked socks, Mark held him closer to the fire to warm a bit. Then we put my coat on him - upside down with his legs through the sleeves at the suggestion of another volunteer and took him to the car. Not a graceful exit, but a necessary one.

In the meantime, because you can't have just one tragic, frightening event happen while being a parent of three kids, my oldest snuggled up to another fire and managed to melt the seat of his snow pants. He didn't burn them, we don't think. He claims to have not sat in the fire, but we weren't really paying attention to him with a potentially hypothermic almost four year old in our arms.

Once we got to the car - and we walked fast through the woods, we wrapped him in another warm layer of a beach blanket and I got him home within five or ten minutes. Now he was wet and sandy and miserable, but not crying any more. I marveled over his resilience.

He's OK, but his boots did not dry enough by the next day to go sledding after we received our new six inch layer of snow. And when we've been outside his hands and feet have been cold. I'm making him new mittens from old wool sweaters I've felted. As long as we have a supply of dry mittens to exchange for the wet snowy ones, we should be OK. And Buddy now has the most colorful butt in snow pant land! I covered most of it in patches, but had to resort to duct tape when it wasn't enough. Little Missy turned her coat the other way out, but I saved a white patch to cut out snowflake designs to patch her coat.