Today when I was driving home from getting Willow’s medicine (my mom is right, I am running a hospital here) I saw a bumper sticker that made me laugh. I’m sure I’ve seen it before, and it’s not even that funny. It said:
I miss my ex a lot. . .
but my aim is improving!
It did make me realize that I’m grateful to not have to spend energy actively hating my former husband. So poisonous. On that front (one which I usually skip), the kids are going to start spending a LOT more time with their dad. I am so relieved by the thought of it, I can almost feel my muscles relaxing a little. Of course at the same time I want to cry at how much they’ll be gone. I don’t want them away so much. And, I do need a break. Guess what I do to myself? Feel guilty for feeling relieved, and then think I’m overly-attached and stupid to feel guilty for wanting to take care of myself for awhile, and then sad that so much more of their life will be so unknown to me, and WHY can’t I just think about other things like how I’d like to get another digital camera so I don’t have to share, or my burning desire to redo the front yard?
Sophie is still sick. She puked from 2 am on Tuesday until 4 am on Wednesday, beginning and ending all over me. I don’t mind the barf as much as the poop, though. She’s moved to poop. (heh) I took her to the doctor on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, as she was getting dehydrated and couldn’t even keep down ice chips. She narrowly missed a stay in the hospital for IV fluids (thanks to the power of breastfeeding, though I’m still past ready for her to wean). Now she doesn’t want to eat much and sleeps a lot and is not at all herself. Her feet are like ice cubes but she’s too hot to wear clothes. No fever. Her heart rate on Tuesday night was 138 beats per minute. If you’ve had a newborn, that might sound familiar since it’s normal for a newborn, not an almost four year old.
Willow is a little better. I finally got her to the doctor Thursday evening. When the doc came in and asked why we were there I told her that Wil had been seen about two weeks earlier for an ear infection and that she’d taken meds, but only her left ear had cleared up. I said that the right was still infected, and that I’d done all the home care I knew how to do and that I was ready to try another round of antibiotics. She looked at me like she wanted to spit and said, How do you know it’s infected? Yeah, with that tone. I told her I have an otoscope and that it looked very red. She looked in the left ear and said it looked fine and then in the right and seemed surprised that I was right. I almost asked if she preferred dumb patients, but then she was nicer about the purple lips, though she did repeat a few times that neither she nor her colleagues had heard of a case where someones lips turned purple without other symptoms. She said she’d put in a cardiology referral, just to check it out. I’m 95% sure that her heart is fine, but that 5% is stubborn. She was cleared when she was a few months old for the holes that were there when she was born, and the doc at the visit couldn’t hear anything. But, she’s not had any scans and something is causing the purple lips. The doctor said she didn’t think anemia would do that and that Willow didn’t seem at all anemic.
The medicine she’s now taking may give her an allergic reaction, since she’s allergic to penicillin, so I will spend the next 15 or so days obsessively checking her for rashes and breathing difficulty, which means even less sleep than usual. I will also be carrying the benedryll that I had John pick up with me wherever I go. But, at the end of those 15 or so days my older three children will, in theory, be spending the weekend (weekend=friday night to monday morning) with their dad and I will sleep as much as I can. Or do some crazy housecleaning. Or sew. Or refinish a bookshelf and night table for the girls room. Or rip out the front lawn. Or purge all the closets. Or reorganize my kitchen. Maybe I should stick with sleep the first weekend, though. Sleep and books and movies and playing with Willow.
The case of Terri S. in Florida is really awful. I know that she didn’t want to be kept alive artificially, but why does her husband have say over her parents? She didn’t write down what she wanted, and frankly, I don’t think it really matters at this point. I mean, it would seem that she doesn’t know she’s being kept alive by machinery anyway, and if the parents feel like she has some chance at recovery, however slight and rejected by doctors, they should get to keep her. If that were one of my kids, and I thought there was some hope. . . Ick. I don’t even want to imagine that. Does the guy get some insurance pay out? And if he’s moved on and has children with another woman, why doesn’t he divorce her? Would that be illegal? I don’t know. The whole thing just doesn’t sit right with me. And, by the way, if it’s me in the hospital, feel free to use all the gadgets you want (unless I’m really old and have lived my life). I recently ran into a girl who had been comatose and not expected to recover much if at all. Her story was in all the news for a few months last year. She was doing really really well. What the hell do doctors know anyway; except for my grandfather, who is one and taught me about the little hooks in the corners of your eyes. You know, the ones that make them stick when you look cross eyed? But all the rest of them. Quacks. How do I know it’s infected? Sheesh.