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Somehow the month of October passed me by without even nudging me from my befuddlement. I wasn’t asleep, my aching body can attest to that, but I also feel like I’ve just awoken from a daze and, in some scary way, been violated by the ravishings of time. I haven’t felt this worn down and morose in quite a while. Those childhood viruses certainly do more than just make the kids sick: they make Adrianne and I work that much harder to make sure the kids’ needs are taken care of. To make matters worse, Adrianne’s been working outrageous amounts of overtime, it’s the holiday season, and I’ve agreed to research and write a Patent Application for an invention Adrianne came up with two years ago. We’ve already been invited to three parties, and my parents are toying with the idea of visiting twice before the New Year– the first visit’s scheduled within two weeks. We are looking forward to the gatherings and visits, but the work that goes into them doesn’t end when the party is over or the guests have taken their leave. Many times– every time– the work continues on for us well into the night and the following morning. I’ve said this before: people don’t remember what it’s like to have young children. If they did, parties would be held at 10 or 11 a.m. instead of starting at 1 p.m. with dinner being served at 4:30 p.m.; or starting at 4 p.m. and eating dinner at 7:30 p.m.
I’ve been toying with the idea of pausing my blog for a few weeks. Not stopping it, but taking a break … a hiatus, of sorts, from writing. I love writing. Heck, I even think I’m pretty good at it. But the kids just haven’t returned to their normal routines: Taylor’s forgoing naps; Simon is trying to throw his off, too. We are knee deep in Christmas gift making– something we started four or five years ago to ease the expense of the holidays on our wallets, and I haven’t had the time to work on my lathe, write, or even read all that much. Our house is literally littered with incomplete projects from the front door, throughout the kitchen, living room, office, and … the downstairs is a disaster with half turned bowls, mismatched pen kits, and scrap wood covered in shavings; and now this patent…. Quite frankly, I’m sick of the mess and want nothing more to just finish everything in one fell swoop, or throw it all away.
It’s not that I haven’t had much to write about. I do. Yesterday Taylor named one of her stuffed animals. She walks around with her brown, stuffed puppy Casey like it’s a member of the family. “Come on, Casey. Good boy. No, no, no. Don’t touch that. Good boy!” Simon, he’s now at the stage where he is starting to be able to tell us what he needs. There is still a great deal of guessing on our part, but he is starting to string words together to make coherent sentences: “Open window, please.” Believe me, it’s a real exciting time in our house, despite the melancholy tone of this posting.
What is making this decision so much more difficult– or easier– is that a friend of mine just stopped writing his blog. He did it … so can I?
I think what I’ll do is take a week or two off from writing. (I’m going to cheat a little and count this rambling as a legitimate post). If I can find sometime between this morning and the next two weeks maybe I’ll have another post ready to go. Otherwise, I’m afraid, I’ll have to put the blog to bed until after the holidays or I’m finished working on all the extraneous projects cluttering up the house.
See you … then?
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Worries. Part II.
It’s been two days since Simon was diagnosed with Croup, and he is worse for the wear. Yesterday we spent the day at the State Park down the road, walking through the woods, riding in the stroller, and playing on the waterfront. We frequent the park quite often– it’s a nice park. The kids had a great time: they walked, they ran, they played in the woods, tirelessly. We thought Simon was better. His face still looked pallid, intermixed with blotches of red. He still had a runny nose and a slight cough, but he seemed to feel better. At the very least he acted normal, but he wasn’t.
Last night he slept for two hours. I didn’t sleep at all. Adrianne? She slept … maybe … three hours. The problem is that he cannot stomach his prescribed steroids. (We’ve nixed the liquid albuterol– on the pediatrician’s advice– and substituted it with walks in the cool night air or breathing in hot steam from a warm bath. The steroids reduce the inflammation in his lungs, the albuterol, a quick fix, opens his airways– much like an asthma inhaler does for one with allergies.) Oh, we can get the medicine down his throat. That’s no problem. He may be 29 lbs. of solid, determined mass, who hates taking anything by mouth except food and can alligator roll with the best of them, but he’s only 29 lbs. The difficulty does not lay in the swallowing but keeping the medicine down. He vomits. I would too. The medication tastes horrible, vile. I don’t blame him one bit. Actually, I tasted his medicine to see what I could mix it in to mask the taste. One touch on the tongue took two swigs of black coffee to wipe clear the nauseating liquid’s taste out of my mouth. Adrianne, on the other hand, swallowed about 1/16 of a teaspoon. It took her nearly half the morning to rid her belly of the unsavory red liquid.
We’ve tried everything to help him keep it down, to no avail.
A third call to the pediatrician’s office in two days has given us a glimmer of hope. The office still will not give the steroid shot, they do not carry them in stock– the doctor said there was little need and the medication would “rot” on her shelf– but they recommended a medicine-compounding store not too far away. I called the store. The pharmacist, a wonderfully nice woman, explained that she could mix the steroid into a tolerable concoction, but a steroid is a steroid and it will have a bitter aftertaste, no matter what. We figured it’s worth the try.
Long story short, the pediatrician’s office never called the pharmacy, the emergency answering service refused to page the doctor until 6 pm (the pharmacy closes at 5:30 pm), and our insurance did not cover the cost of the compounding because the list of ingredients is not on their “acceptable” list of medicines. We, however, got what we needed before leaving the store. Thank God for compassionate people. Sometimes laws need to be broken for a higher good.
After all this we still decided to withhold Simon’s medications. It was a deliberate, thought-out and researched decision. We believe in modern medicine; we are not holistic people eating dried black berries and tree bark instead of taking Tylenol to relieve cold symptoms, but we still would rather not give our children medications if they do not need them. They have a long life ahead of them. I know when I was younger I received antibiotics for just about every cold. Now, thirty years later, when I was in the hospital for my emergency open appendectomy operation earlier this year, I had to be given two additional take-home doses for an extended time because my body was accustomed to the antibiotics. This, in turn, lengthened my recovery time by almost four weeks. I would rather not have my children experience the same difficulty with some medications as I do later in their lives.
The bad news is that Simon woke up at 1:30 am gasping for breath. The good news is that after 15 minutes in the cool night air he fell back asleep for the remainder of the night. We’re not out of the woods yet, but things are looking better for him.
Now if only his incisors would hurry up and come in … and if only Taylor’s body would rid itself of her cold….
Last night he slept for two hours. I didn’t sleep at all. Adrianne? She slept … maybe … three hours. The problem is that he cannot stomach his prescribed steroids. (We’ve nixed the liquid albuterol– on the pediatrician’s advice– and substituted it with walks in the cool night air or breathing in hot steam from a warm bath. The steroids reduce the inflammation in his lungs, the albuterol, a quick fix, opens his airways– much like an asthma inhaler does for one with allergies.) Oh, we can get the medicine down his throat. That’s no problem. He may be 29 lbs. of solid, determined mass, who hates taking anything by mouth except food and can alligator roll with the best of them, but he’s only 29 lbs. The difficulty does not lay in the swallowing but keeping the medicine down. He vomits. I would too. The medication tastes horrible, vile. I don’t blame him one bit. Actually, I tasted his medicine to see what I could mix it in to mask the taste. One touch on the tongue took two swigs of black coffee to wipe clear the nauseating liquid’s taste out of my mouth. Adrianne, on the other hand, swallowed about 1/16 of a teaspoon. It took her nearly half the morning to rid her belly of the unsavory red liquid.
We’ve tried everything to help him keep it down, to no avail.
A third call to the pediatrician’s office in two days has given us a glimmer of hope. The office still will not give the steroid shot, they do not carry them in stock– the doctor said there was little need and the medication would “rot” on her shelf– but they recommended a medicine-compounding store not too far away. I called the store. The pharmacist, a wonderfully nice woman, explained that she could mix the steroid into a tolerable concoction, but a steroid is a steroid and it will have a bitter aftertaste, no matter what. We figured it’s worth the try.
Long story short, the pediatrician’s office never called the pharmacy, the emergency answering service refused to page the doctor until 6 pm (the pharmacy closes at 5:30 pm), and our insurance did not cover the cost of the compounding because the list of ingredients is not on their “acceptable” list of medicines. We, however, got what we needed before leaving the store. Thank God for compassionate people. Sometimes laws need to be broken for a higher good.
After all this we still decided to withhold Simon’s medications. It was a deliberate, thought-out and researched decision. We believe in modern medicine; we are not holistic people eating dried black berries and tree bark instead of taking Tylenol to relieve cold symptoms, but we still would rather not give our children medications if they do not need them. They have a long life ahead of them. I know when I was younger I received antibiotics for just about every cold. Now, thirty years later, when I was in the hospital for my emergency open appendectomy operation earlier this year, I had to be given two additional take-home doses for an extended time because my body was accustomed to the antibiotics. This, in turn, lengthened my recovery time by almost four weeks. I would rather not have my children experience the same difficulty with some medications as I do later in their lives.
The bad news is that Simon woke up at 1:30 am gasping for breath. The good news is that after 15 minutes in the cool night air he fell back asleep for the remainder of the night. We’re not out of the woods yet, but things are looking better for him.
Now if only his incisors would hurry up and come in … and if only Taylor’s body would rid itself of her cold….
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Worries. Part I.
One would think that having a second child would gradually ease one’s worrying about colds, flues, viruses, and injuries. It doesn’t.
Last night Simon put the scare into us, once again. Not long after he was put down for bed he awoke with a terrible bark and labored breathing. I knew something was wrong with him– his whole body rattled like a cheap maraca; I could feel his sniffling and coughing vibrate through the palm of my two hands and up my arm as he struggled to breath. But he was tired, very tired, and quickly fell back to sleep without fuss or shedding the smallest tear. Strange.
I stayed by his side for awhile, sitting on the light brown wooden toy chest Grandpa made for his room nearly two years ago, watching him, quietly, concerned, unsure what to do. My wife and I checked on him two or three times before retiring for the night, just to make sure he was all right. He looked fine. He slept, undisturbed– at least for a little while.
About an hour later everything changed. Suddenly, without the slightest whimpering, warning, cry or stir, he woke gasping for breath. I thought he was choking. I really did. To make matters worse, as I hastily made my way down the unlit hallway, pulling my heavy-weight tarry cloth bathroom over my shoulders as I speed-walked into his room, I remembered Taylor dropping a small object into his crib yesterday afternoon … or was it two days ago … or was it last week? My mind swelled with an anxiety, a chemical concoction of overly scientific terms, created especially for parents of small children, flooded my head with an overpowering emotion: dread. Did I forget to scoop the object out of his crib? What did she drop in? What’s the quickest route to the hospital?
Something was wrong with him. There was no second-guessing this time. Adrianne ruled out an obstruction rather quickly– she’s knows her medical stuff quite well. Mucus, however, was everywhere– coming out of his nose, his mouth: long, stringy, and spider-like– plastered across his face, hands, and puppy dog night outfit as he cried into the night. Burp after burp after burp, gagging from the effects of the drool down his throat, my son was suffering; and there was nothing I could do about it.
Gag. Burp. Vomit. Nothing seemed to ease his labored breathing.
Adrianne called our pediatrician’s emergency number.
The diagnoses? Croup– a childhood virus, which is characterized by “Sudden onset in the middle of the night, of gasping for breath, hoarseness, bark-like cough” (What to Expect: Toddler Years). The pediatrician recommended we wrap Simon up in some warm clothing, open the car window just a crack and hastily drive to the ER. “The ER?,” I thought. “No, that’s the last place I want to take my child.” Germs. Diseases. The wait … the misdiagnoses I received just a couple of months ago. Maybe I asked, maybe she just said it, ‘Do you have a nebulizer?’ Time, as it always seems to do, has allowed me the distance to think about this question a little more deeply than I did when she first asked. What an odd question: ‘Do I own a nebulizer?’ How many people, or parents for that matter, even know what a nebulizer is– let alone have one at home? Not many, I imagine.
Luckily, we do own one. Simon was given an adult sized dose of Albuterol to open his tightening airways. I also took him out for a walk in the cool night air by the stream in the backyard. The cold air, like an icepack on a bruise, reduced the swelling and, in about ten minutes, Simon was breathing normally again. What a scare! My son couldn’t breath. And I felt just plain helpless.
The following morning both Simon and Taylor were diagnosed with viral infections and prescribed the appropriate doses of medication, which promptly caused Simon to vomit, twice, all over himself, me, and the living room carpet. Oh! Did I forget to mention that Simon is teething and Taylor has a case of poison ivy, too? Or that Simon nearly electrocuted himself by sucking on a “hot” wire plugged into a 120V outlet before going to bed that very night? Aaaarrrgggghhhh! It never stops.
To be continued….
Last night Simon put the scare into us, once again. Not long after he was put down for bed he awoke with a terrible bark and labored breathing. I knew something was wrong with him– his whole body rattled like a cheap maraca; I could feel his sniffling and coughing vibrate through the palm of my two hands and up my arm as he struggled to breath. But he was tired, very tired, and quickly fell back to sleep without fuss or shedding the smallest tear. Strange.
I stayed by his side for awhile, sitting on the light brown wooden toy chest Grandpa made for his room nearly two years ago, watching him, quietly, concerned, unsure what to do. My wife and I checked on him two or three times before retiring for the night, just to make sure he was all right. He looked fine. He slept, undisturbed– at least for a little while.
About an hour later everything changed. Suddenly, without the slightest whimpering, warning, cry or stir, he woke gasping for breath. I thought he was choking. I really did. To make matters worse, as I hastily made my way down the unlit hallway, pulling my heavy-weight tarry cloth bathroom over my shoulders as I speed-walked into his room, I remembered Taylor dropping a small object into his crib yesterday afternoon … or was it two days ago … or was it last week? My mind swelled with an anxiety, a chemical concoction of overly scientific terms, created especially for parents of small children, flooded my head with an overpowering emotion: dread. Did I forget to scoop the object out of his crib? What did she drop in? What’s the quickest route to the hospital?
Something was wrong with him. There was no second-guessing this time. Adrianne ruled out an obstruction rather quickly– she’s knows her medical stuff quite well. Mucus, however, was everywhere– coming out of his nose, his mouth: long, stringy, and spider-like– plastered across his face, hands, and puppy dog night outfit as he cried into the night. Burp after burp after burp, gagging from the effects of the drool down his throat, my son was suffering; and there was nothing I could do about it.
Gag. Burp. Vomit. Nothing seemed to ease his labored breathing.
Adrianne called our pediatrician’s emergency number.
The diagnoses? Croup– a childhood virus, which is characterized by “Sudden onset in the middle of the night, of gasping for breath, hoarseness, bark-like cough” (What to Expect: Toddler Years). The pediatrician recommended we wrap Simon up in some warm clothing, open the car window just a crack and hastily drive to the ER. “The ER?,” I thought. “No, that’s the last place I want to take my child.” Germs. Diseases. The wait … the misdiagnoses I received just a couple of months ago. Maybe I asked, maybe she just said it, ‘Do you have a nebulizer?’ Time, as it always seems to do, has allowed me the distance to think about this question a little more deeply than I did when she first asked. What an odd question: ‘Do I own a nebulizer?’ How many people, or parents for that matter, even know what a nebulizer is– let alone have one at home? Not many, I imagine.
Luckily, we do own one. Simon was given an adult sized dose of Albuterol to open his tightening airways. I also took him out for a walk in the cool night air by the stream in the backyard. The cold air, like an icepack on a bruise, reduced the swelling and, in about ten minutes, Simon was breathing normally again. What a scare! My son couldn’t breath. And I felt just plain helpless.
The following morning both Simon and Taylor were diagnosed with viral infections and prescribed the appropriate doses of medication, which promptly caused Simon to vomit, twice, all over himself, me, and the living room carpet. Oh! Did I forget to mention that Simon is teething and Taylor has a case of poison ivy, too? Or that Simon nearly electrocuted himself by sucking on a “hot” wire plugged into a 120V outlet before going to bed that very night? Aaaarrrgggghhhh! It never stops.
To be continued….
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