Revoke my geek license

Let’s just say that perhaps the stress of this week is getting to me, or maybe its just the normal chaos of dealing with three children and their various medical issues. Or maybe its this god-awful heat zapping what few brain cells I have left, but in any case, the issues which have prevented me from posting have been dutifully fixed by my amazing GENIUS brother once again, Josh Read of Ainsworth Studios. Although I typically can pride myself on being able to fix MOST computer/web-related issues that I run into, this one was a doozy. Ok, it was really just idiotic, but it was hard to unravel. I changed my admin password so that i could remember it, and then i promptly forgot it. There. I said it.

You may now take my geek license away.

Not to be restored until I have reached the pinnacle of technology, owning an iphone and making it work with mobileme. Someday….someday.

It’s been….a week. You know, just one of those weeks. The kind you hope to not have to repeat again for a long long time. Ben left early Monday morning. I don’t recall him leaving because it was so early in the morning that it was during my comatose sleeping time. Did I mention yet that we were up ALL NITE with karissa puking? yes. fun. From the time we woke up on Monday till….now, still, actually, it has just been non-stop bombardment of my energy, mom skills, sanity, you name it. 

Had early dr. appointments for Karissa and Kaylen monday morning. They were also supposed to go to the chiro but i knew that wasn’t happening in the short time frame we had. So we moved the chiro appts to the afternoon, and made it to the ped’s office in time. Started out the morning in cute new matching outfits. Karissa promptly puked all down the front of her shirt within about 13 seconds of me putting it on her. Nice. Got told that Karissa is “technically” at the overweight level. I asked her to please stop looking at the chart on the computer and to actually put her eyeballs on the waif-like child standing before her and explain to me exactly WHERE was she overweight at. I said,” this child cannot possibly GET more active. What other activities besides dance, gymnastics and running around outside for hours on end every day would you like me to have her do? SHE’S FOUR!!!” The dr. did concede at that point that not all charts were perfect and that perhaps Karissa is just getting ready for her upward growth spurt. Lord help us if she does, her and Kealey will be in the same size clothes! As it IS, I did not realize until monday afternoon that Karissa’s feet are actually two sizes larger than the shoes I have been buying her. No wonder the child wears flip flops all day every day! I thought she was an 8, but the new shoes we got the other day that fit nearly perfectly? Size 10. Bad mom award badge number 1.

So on to Kaylen’s appt where I was told she has croup. At least there is a reason why she was hacking up a lung and acting cranky and being a snot machine, but honestly? CROUP? in a 1 year old? in the middle of the hottest summer I can remember?!?!?! Only my children I tell you. Other than those two random factoids, it was a relatively uneventful visit. Kaylen got three shots and screamed bloody fricking murder the whole time. She had already been at her breaking point with tiredness because the appt’s happened to be during her naptime, but this was just the icing on the cake.

Anyways – we make it home, rest a little then get back out to hit the chiro’s office and shovel down some fast food before making the mad dash to VBS. Which is at Naperville Christian Church. Which, if you have never been to, is like, the singularly most impossible church to get into and out of. Its on the far side of 75th street, and you can only get into the parking lot if you are headed west on 75th. this requires a LOT of pre-planning, or being hella handy with the turning radius of your gigantic beast of a truck. Which I happen to be. On a dime, baby. Anyhoo. We’re sitting in traffic waiting to get to the church and i watch a fender bender happen right behind me. Just random. Thankfully the dude right behind us had stopped a decent amount of space away from us or he would have then ran into our back end and I think I would have just started bawling right then and there and given up on the rest of the week.

We make it to VBS, I endure the chaos of driving home with a tired kaylen who i can’t really put to bed because I will just have to wake her up in an hour anyways to go back to pick up the girls. We survive our semi-quiet time together and head back to get the girls. VBS gets out at 8:45. I don’t really have an alternative plan for an evening VBS, because if you start earlier then people aren’t home from work and can’t eat dinner, but if you make the time shorter then you’re kind of gypping the kids out of important stuff….but oh my lord. a whole week of them getting home at 9:15 and in bed between 9:30 and ten – I cannot believe they are still functioning. I barely am…

Anyways, pick them up monday nite and get talked to by karissa’s teacher about the fact that Kealey mentioned to her that Karissa had been throwing up all day. Had a nice friendly discussion with kealey about the fact that certain medical facts can be kept just among family and don’t always need to be shared with everyone in church. Truly, I thought Karissa was just reacting to the heat. She wasn’t, at that point, really acting sick, and had stopped puking that morning around breakfast time. Granted, she didn’t eat or drink anything after that, but really, I didn’t think she was SICK. Plus she WANTED To go to VBS and was acting fine that nite. So I let her go. Here’s where I earn bad mommy badge #2. That nite at about midnite, she comes crawling into bed with me. Now this child does this with quite a bit of regularity and its VERY hard for me to find that balance between immediately taking her back to her own bed, and enjoying the fact that she is still my baby and wants to sleep near me. AFter two hours of getting kicked and punched and breathed on though, I had had enough. I made her a bed on the floor and put her down in it. She asks me in the most heartbreaking voice “Why I has to seep on da fore mommy???” oh, it still stabs me to think about it…Come to find out the next morning, she obviously has a RAGING ear infection. I mean, green pus-like stuff oozing out of her ear like I have never seen or hope to see ever again. ( I know you needed that detail to make your life better today.) So I called her ENT doc, whom I love. He is the most endearing soul at a time when you are ready to rip your eyeballs out from dealing with children who have ear infection after ear infection and are just constantly sick and nothing is helping. If you ever have need of an ENT, I can heartily recommend Midwest ENT Specialists, mostly Dr. Kaszuba. So anyways, I call. I explain to the 5th person I am transferred to, finally a triage nurse, that she has been puking for two days, now her fever is spiked high, she is totally lethargic and there is green pus coming out of her ears. Have you seen that part of Tommy Boy where the airline lady can get him to Salt Lake City by 3:00 tomorrow afternoon? (except he is trying to get to Chicago right NOW) – that was the communication breakdown I was having with this kind soul. She offered me an appointment in their Wheaton office for next Thursday. Ummmmm…..green pus. Fever. Puking. How about NOW??? I mean, any first year med student could look at this ear and tell me she has an infection and give me Amox. That isn’t what she needs. So again with the momma bear routine, and we get an appointment for later that afternoon. AGAIN across town. AGAIN right before VBS. Which by now, Kealey is IN LOVE with. Bad mommy badge #3. My own daughter has never been to VBS and is now the world’s biggest fan, just soaking every minute of it up like a sponge.

So in the ENT we go where he takes one look at her ears and says, “well mom, looks like its time for some outpatient surgery!!!” Except he doesn’t say this in a doctorly somber tone. He is like excited about this. he says it in a “oh my gosh let’s take all the kids to the circus today and have a blast!!!” kind of tone. sometimes he scares me. he DID do me the sanity-saving favor of first checking Kaylen’s ears for me. Her tubes are firmly in place and no infections loom on the horizon. I think if I had gotten news that she also had an ear infection, I would have immediately dropped to the floor under the chair and started sucking my thumb and rocking. So anyways, Happy to do Surgery doctor and nurse head down to outpatient surgery unit, and I am left to follow with Karissa on one hip because she is so sick by now she can hardly stand up on her own, pushing Kaylen in her stroller, and Kealey knowing that something bad is about to happen. We get in and they’re like “yeah, she’s probably not going to like this, and its just easier if you lay on her to keep her still vs. strapping her down.” Ya think!?!?!?  So no local, no straps, no nothing, just me, smothering my daughter with my weight while she endures having her tubes removed via miniscule devices and large vacuums in her ear. Just me, pinning her to a table while she wants nothing but to cling to me and make it all stop. Me, doing what moms do, which is anything we have to do, whatever we have to do, to make our kids better, to relieve their pain, wishing we could absorb their pain as our own, even as our own hearts are breaking. By this point Karissa is frantic, Kaylen is now crying watching me hold Karissa down (oh yes, we were all in the room together!!!) and Kealey, bless her little firstborn, full of responsibility heart, is doing her best to be so strong, to be a good big sister and helper for Mommy. She is shushing Kaylen and holding her while I am trying to say calming things to everyone, mostly for my own sake, as I can feel my already tenuous grip on reality slipping away quickly.

At last he freed both tubes with minimal damage to her eardrums (one tube was splitting the ear drum, her GOOD ear, and in the bad ear it had become lodged in something on its way out and had created just a MESS of infection in her entire ear canal as far back as he could see. I love it when a doctor, in all honesty, can turn to you and say, ” I have no idea what caused this infection, where it’s source is or where it ends, and I wish there were something I could give you/her for the pain, cause she’s in a lot of it and will be for a while. So for now, we’re just going to attack it with a bunch of different antibiotics and hope one of them works.” Awesome. At least I know the plan. We go back in 6 weeks, when Kaylen is having her hearing rechecked also. I get to find out if my children are going deaf again, if we need surgery again, if I will lose even more of my mind again.

the rest of the week basically followed suit. Everyone was sick. Everyone was crying. Everyone was too hot to function. Ben is on his way home. I have no illusions that I will not fall into a pile of heaving sobs when I see him. I have no idea how I have managed to hold it all together this week. Getting a break with my mommy was about the only way I had enough strength to keep going. God bless our moms. They always know just what you need, even if it is just a good plate of IHOP pancakes and some scrapping therapy.

VBS is over.

Ear surgery is over.

This week is finally almost over.

I need to sleep.

Thank you for making it this far if you did.

May your weekend be gloriously calm.

 

T