I've actually started to understand the notion of never to getting too caught up in any one place emotionally.
The ground under our feet shifts so often... it doesn't make sense to accept feelings of devastation or elation.
I just go with the flow, and that flow keeps moving me to new and unexpected places.
Yesterday night at 9:30pm I sat in the waiting room of the local Children's Hospital emergency room with my four year old son who had been diagnosed 26 hours earlier with orbital cellulitis.
I hadn't heard of this before, and was really surprised by the diagnosis. (I'd thought maybe he stuck a rock up his nose at recess, causing the redness.) I wasn't emotionally prepared for an infection near the eye that could rapidly progress to loss of vision, meningitis or infection of his brain.
When she told me that he would need to be hospitalized on IV antibiotics if the oral antibiotics didn't work within 24 hours, my entire gut clenched. What? Hospitalized? Within a single day?
It seemed surreal.
When I went to pick up his extra strength augmentin prescription, my pharmacist friend told me that he was being dosed at the highest possible level before toxicity for a person of his size. Tears poured down my cheeks as I signed for the medicine.
"He'll be okay," she smiled warmly. "He's a fighter."
(Like me, our pharmacist has been through many of his injuries and illnesses over the last 7 months.)
At that moment, all I wanted in the world was to go back in time. Back to the prior weekend when he and his brother and I spent a fabulous four hours washing the car, blissfully ignorant that we'd soon be facing another crisis.
* * *
After the diagnosis it was touch and go for 24 hours. I hovered over his bed, taking his temperature every few hours. We started the medicine at 8:30 - his fever broke at midnight.
The doctor saw him for a followup in the morning and was pleased - even though his swelling had not gone down, the redness had vanished. "That is a very good sign," she said.
Just when I'd begun to accept that this was over and we could go back to life as normal, he began to complain of feeling dizzy and lightheaded with a headache.
"Are you hungry?" I asked. "Could it be a side effect of the Augmentin?"
We called the pediatrician's office. The doctor on call (not his actual doctor) recommended that we rush to the ER to get a CT scan... to make sure that pressure wasn't building behind his eye due to the cellulitis infection.
Yet, looking at my little boy I had the strongest feeling in my gut that he was in fact well. He seemed enormously healthier than he had one day prior. I believed he would be okay. My sensitive mommy radar ~ acutely aware when any of my children are remotely in danger ~ was silent and still.
When we arrived at the ER, the head nurse validated that feeling. "He looks pretty good to me," she said. "We'll take a look at him if you like but usually children who have orbital cellulitis are a lot more swollen than he is. If you ask me, his antibiotics are working."
"I know!" I responded. "I think he's looking much better too! I don't really want to expose him to all of the radiation in a CT scan unless it is essential."
"Have you tried giving him ibuprofen or Tylenol for the headache?" she asked.
"No."
"You might want to consider doing that to see if it helps, before you check him into the emergency room... we'll still be here in a couple of hours, if that doesn't ease his pain."
"Thanks, I appreciate your honesty. We'll talk it over," I told her.
My son and I went to sit down with a stack full of paperwork to fill out.
"How is your head feeling, buddy?" I asked.
"It hurts," he responded.
"Okay, then we'll stay!" I began to fill out paperwork.
My son looked around the room at all of the other sick children waiting to be seen. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed him taking it all in - children coughing, crying, moaning, sleeping on their parents' laps.
As I started to fill in the last row of questions, he spoke up.
"Mommy?"
"Yes?"
"My head feels much better."
"What?"
"My head. It feels better."
"It does?"
"Yes. It doesn't hurt me anymore."
I looked at him very, very closely. As before, I still felt he looked much better - almost normal. The redness covering his sinuses had vanished. Swelling was down. Fever long gone.
"Are you sure? You want to go? I'm way too tired to come back here tonight. You need to be certain because if you need to come back in a few hours it will be daddy that brings you, not mommy."
"Okay. I'm sure. I want to go home."
"What about your headache?"
"It went away."
Moments later I turned my packet of paperwork back to the woman at the front desk and explained to she and the head nurse that we were going to return home.
The nurse nodded.
"We'll be here all night. If he gets worse, you can always come back. Honestly, I think he looks really good. I'll be surprised if we see you here again tonight."
"Me too," I agreed.
We drove home in silence under a wide starry sky.
Upon arriving home I bathed him, he ate a second dinner, we read a story, he fell fast asleep.
Nine hours later we awakened to a brand new world.
Fever still gone, swelling mostly gone, redness gone. We spoke to his real pediatrician and she confidently gave us clearance to take the little family vacation we'd been planning for months.
"If his fever has been gone for 36 hours now," she encouraged, "I think you've seen the worst of it. You should go. He can take antibiotics anywhere."
So, we went.
* * *
If anyone had asked me last night in the ER where I would be tonight, I would've said:
"I'll be happy anywhere as long as my boy is healing and not in a hospital ward."
Two days post-diagnosis finds me sitting in the living room of a darling Catalina Island cottage, 32 miles off the Southern California coast where we boarded a ferry this evening with three (healthy) children, a bicycle, a stroller, a precious bottle of Augmentin Extra Strength and an impressive amount of luggage.
The wind on the water was strong as we crossed and our ferry, one of the smaller boats in their fleet, rocked and rolled across the waves with large sprays of whitewash casting over its sides.
My little boy cuddled into my side; his toddler sister hunkered down in my lap.
Every time she cried when we hit another powerful wave ("I want get out of boat Mommeee. I want go home,") I told them both to pretend we were riding a rollercoaster.
"Here we go!" I laughed as the big waves kept smacking into our boat head-on. "Say Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!"
"Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" giggled my little son.
Together we rode the big waves toward a snug and safe harbor.
I am SO glad you are where you are right now!
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