Just when you think you can’t possibly…

Be any more tired than you already are –

 

Your kids get the flu.

or in our case – some nasty case of pneumonia with vomiting as a free bonus and a touch of RSV for the 10 week old.

Actually Monty, I’d like to change my mind and take whatever’s behind door number 3 because i am DONE with this.

I rarely get to the point of breakdown, crying. I pride myself on being a strong person, a strong woman, capable of doing it on my own and not having to call my husband home every time I can’t deal with life. But today I hit the limit. Kaylen has been puking nonstop since late tuesday afternoon. Luckily Ben was still home for the first wave of pukeness – including catching it in his hands in the middle of the Kohls shopping excursion we attempted to take. The second something hits her stomach – back up it comes. This is only complicating the fact that she has spent the past 4 weeks basically hacking up a lung coughing and unable to breathe. She has been doing ok as long as we keep her steroid breathing treatments pretty regular. Then Tuesday she starts with the puking. After puking up all through the nite and the next morning, she spiked a 103 fever so I called to take her in. They wanted to look at kendall too since she has been coughing pretty hard all nite too. Sure why not? What’s a few hundred dollars more in medical debt when you’re already in six figures, right?

So i have to go pull Kealey out of school early in order to get Karissa from preschool on time and make it over to the dr’s office. Apparently it is harder to pick up your own child from school than it is to break into the federal reserve, so half an hour and three sheets of paperwork later I have my child with me. I had to truck the two babies in with me for this fun adventure so thank God that Kaylen managed to not puke the whole time we sat there. That would have just topped the cake. But we make it to the dr and she listens again to Kaylen’s lungs and decides to send us for a chest Xray. The baby sounds pretty clear but fits the criteria for RSV so she says, “all the test will tell us is that yes, she has RSV. Otherwise we just treat it like any other virus and let it run its course. ”  Great, let’s save ourselves a trip to the ER and a nasal swab and just call a spade a spade and get on with my miserable virus-surviving existence. BUT they are worried about kendall’s sudden breakout of blood-filled diapers so they decide to take some blood. After the nurse puts a hole the size of Lake Michigan in my baby’s finger we are sent on our merry way to pack BACK up into the car to drive over to the Edwards Outpatient building to get chest X-rays for Kaylen, then we’re told to go to Target to pick up the Zofran to see if Kaylen can keep a dose of that down, then come back to the dr office so they can read the Xray results and go from there. Which, you know, is just a BLAST of fun to do with four little kids, two who can’t walk on their own, two who are starving, in the ten degree weather. Did I mention that at this point its been almost two hours since we left home and I am about to explode a gallon of milk from the mammary glands??? Not fun.

So we get the Xrays which involved me having to leave the older two with the baby out in the lobby area while I went back to try to hold  a very sick baby still long enough to get her chest xrayed. Talk about having to decide between the lesser of two evils. Thank God i have really good kids. They sure were troopers with all the running around. So anyways – we get the Xrays done, run up to target where they DOn’T have our prescription ready because it never got sent from the dr’s office. so the pharmacist calls the dr who has the nurse tell us – no no no, you were supposed to come right back HERE after the Xrays, we’re waiting for you!  Oh – my bad! Cause i thought it would be FUN to get all four kids out AGAIN and tramp into Target to get a lecture on how i was supposed to go BACK to the dr’s office first!!! GAHHHH!!! PEOPLE! I just wanted to scream at that point, but back we all go out to the car, back to the office, back in the stroller…..all to find out that the lungs are clear, Kendall’s hemoglobin is fine (so she isn’t having massive internal bleeding as evidenced by the bloody poop), so “Well, I guess they must just both have a virus! Call us if they get worse!”

And that, my friends, is why i HATE the medical model in the US today.

If it’s not knocking on death’s door, its just a virus – take two tylenol and call us in the morning.

So Kaylen is STILL puking all day today. I can’t keep up with the laundry. Kendall is clearly in pain from something somewhere that I can’t fix. I put Kaylen in the carrier on my back and hold Kendall in the front and walk. Around and around and around the living room – hallway-kitchen loop. I have walked so many laps today I lost track. Just trying to keep my babies happy, myself sane, everyone happy. Except i am failing miserably.

I got three hours of sleep last nite between having to hold/feed Kendall – set her down so I could clean up Kaylen’s puke and hold/rock her for an hour till Kendall woke up again and start all over again. This goes on till 4:30 – back and fforth and back and forth.  Till we all passed out from sheer exhaustion and slept till 7:30. I think that to say I am running on sheer adrenaline at this point is an understatement. I think I ran out of adrenaline sometime around 9 am this morning and now its just the toxic fumes of coke and coffee and a few egg sandwiches.

To top this day off, I got home FOUR MINUTES after the bus dropped Kealey off (we had to wait till Kaylen woke up from her four hour nap, get the puke cleaned off of her, clean up more puke, run to target and get her prescription that the dr’s office finally managed to call in and wait while they filled it). She was SOBBING.  Apparently the four longest minutes of her little life.  So Kendall is screaming, Kaylen is still covered in puke from the three times she threw up WHILE we were in target and is whimpering about that, Kealey is having a breakdown and I just gave up. I joined in the crying and justheld them all for about 15 minutes on the floor. Cause really, what else are you gonna do?

So – there. I admitted it. I do cry. And now that i have started it is hard to stop. I think I am just so tired I can’t even function.

Ben comes home tomorrow afternoon. i will hold on till then, then have a mini-breakdown, then be fine. It’s his birthday on Saturday and I am sure that a catatonic wife is just the ultimate in birthday fun.

there was one bright spot today though – in a moment where i only had one of the babies crying, karissa told me she wanted to record something.

here is her cooking show – i hope you enjoy it as much as i did!

 

The sun’ll come out tomorrow, right?

terra