Warning – long whiney rant ahead

Consider yourselves duly warned, and feel free to just shut your browser window now, because i am sure this will not be pretty.

Today has just sucked.

It started at 1 am with Kendall dropping her sats suddenly in the middle of a pretty good sleep, and when i got to her bedside she was exploding diarrhea out of one end while violently vomiting out of the other, and choking on it. Bodily fluids are everywhere, i have no glasses on (so am blind as a bat and relatively useless) and i can’t find the nurse call button. Luckily she saw kendall’s numbers drop like a lead balloon and came pretty quickly. It was so gross I didn’t even know where to begin once we got all the vomit cleared from her airway. So it took two of us an hour to get everything stripped, cleaned, bed remade, everything hooked back up and her back to sleep. So  I was JUSt about to go to sleep when the nurse came back in to tell me that Kendall WAS scheduled for a barium enema at 9 am. Good, so if the stars aligned that meant i could possibly get 5 hours of sleep, (sleep being a deceiving word in the hospital, meaning a more loose form of napping while lying supine on a hard foam cushion).

So this morning at 6 am the parade of gung-ho residents and med students starts. EVERYONE wants a new complete history. EVERYONE wants to know what tests have been done. I can barely form coherent thoughts at this point but i think i managed to convey to all of them that we don’t KNOW what’s wrong with kendall, that’s THEIR job to figure out, and thus far very little testing has been done, hence my child sitting in the bed right there in front of you. In between all of these people coming in, a nurse comes in with Tamiflu for Kendall. This is the flu medication that is currently being used to treat swine flu. Umm, thanks but yeah my child does NOT have swine flu. At least not now, at least that we know about. Good to know you’re on top of your charts though and didn’t maybe mix up my child’s meds with someone elses!!! Always a reassuring feeling.

So at 7 they turn off Kendall’s feeds, she takes a small nap now that her tummy is getting a break finally, and by 9:30, after two more residents have told me that Kendall’s preliminary results are back from her enema (ummm, again, please check your chart because either they took some other poor unsuspecting child back for a barium enema, or you are reading the wrong report because SHE HASN’T HAD ONE YET!!!!!), I go out to ask the nurse to please call transport and see what the hold up is. Yes she’s still scheduled, they’re just running behind. I want to scream at someone that I know the way to radiology and could walk with kendall in my arms, holding her chart, AND be blindfolded and still get to radiology because we are there so fricking much!

So we get there and they are prepping kendall for the procedure and they ask when her last rectal stimulation was (and if those very words don’t send shivers down your spine then check your pulse!) – to which I replied that she received a suppository yesterday, as she does every day, because she doesn’t poop on her own, HENCE THE NEED FOR THIS TEST. I do not understand why crap does not get written down and then dispersed to important persons in this hospital! Anyways, they stop the prep and say, “oh this test can’t be done until 72 hours post-stimulation”. WHAT???? why did no one tell us that? why did the doc who ordered the stupid test not tell us that? He even DID a rectal examination!!!! I burst into tears. 7 long months of waiting for someone to finally start ordering tests for kendall, and now they can’t do it. Which means we either go home with no answers, or we wait till tomorrow to do this preliminary test, wait for the results to come back late friday afternoon, wait over the weekend because NOTHING happens on weekends here, and then HOPE we can get into an OR on Monday to do the full scope of testing that needs to be done. 

I am just spent. I am out of money, out of clothes, out of ways to try to keep kendall happy, out of hope, out of luck, and most of all, out of coke. And things just always seem worse when you don’t have a good cold coke to help you cope.

But at least she is sleeping right now. And for that I am grateful.

I don’t know WHY this admission has turned into such a fiasco. But I do hold firm to the belief that God does have us where He wants us, he is just asking me to be patient enough to fully lean on HIm, to trust that His ways are higher than my ways. I don’t HAVE to understand this, I don’t HAVE to know all the answers –  I just have to believe in the One who does. I have to believe that there is a greater purpose here because otherwise it is just too frustrating to cope with.

I miss the girls so badly i tear up just thinking about it. This is no way to spend a summer vacation. Sure they are having fun with their Memaw, and hardly even notice that I am gone because of all the “special privileges” they are talking my poor mother into (riding bikes around the block, getting special treats at the store, and having daddy’s ice cream drumsticks for breakfast among them), but its not the same. It’s not what i WANTED for them. I wanted to finally have our act together enough to enjoy our zoo membership, and instead I am now going to have to time errands and everything around the humidity so that kendall isn’t exposed to too much outside air. I wanted to have time to get all my stuff for work at the church organized, and that is also falling by the wayside. All my best laid plans….

so I have to find something else I can do while we’re here on lockup for a few days. I have a few ideas brewing in my head but am not sure yet how to flesh them out here.

But we are here for a reason.

frustrations and all.

there IS a reason.

Thank you for your prayers, and for reading this far if you have. I’ll try to have a happier post up to replace this one soon. But for now, these are my thoughts and feelings and emotions, so up they go.

peace out, for a little while at least.