A lot of today has SUCKED. I’ve suddenly come down with the cold from hell. It started as a nagging but mild cough yesterday or the evening before. However, sometime last night, it turned into the Martian Death Flu. My cheeks are actually tingly, I feel dizzy, and worst of all, I’ve got a dry, wracking cough that makes my chest burn like the fires of hell.
So I went to CVS to get some medicine for me and to pick up the correct amoxicillin for Gus. (I found out yesterday that the UC doc gave him WAY too low a dose. As if I don’t have enough misgivings about using antibiotics for an ear infection. I finally decided to go ahead with it this time, due to his age and the greater illness. But it never even occurred to me to double check her dosing. It was literally 1/4 of what it should be at his weight and age. Grrrrr.) I decided to grab some juice to use as a “chaser” when I take the nasty cough medicine. The juice was on the bottom shelf of the fridge, my hands were full, and I didn’t grab it carefully enough. It slipped out of my hand, caught my left thumbnail, and broke it halfway down the nail bed. I seriously almost puked from the pain. I was crying right there in the middle of CVS. Lovely. And even better, it didn’t come all the way off. So at some point, the rest of that sucker is going to have to come off. I’m bandaging it diligently in the hopes that I can grow it long enough to make that painless.
But.
I still have to look at the day as an overall success. We saw Gus’s ortho for the first time this morning, and he feels good that the scoliosis is something Gus will grow out of. There’s no way to know for sure, but he said the scoliosis looked “flexible” not “fixed” and Gus showed no other signs of neurologic damage, which apparently goes hand in hand most of the time with serious infantile scoliosis. Not always, but it’s a good sign. And hey, it was still nice to hear from a specialist that my kid appeared to have a completely normal, functioning brain.
And in even better news, we went straight from the ortho to another follow up with Nate’s eye doc. There still is no sign that the tumors are reactivating and leaking again! This is the most important part of Nate’s long-term prognosis. Of course, he could always develop new tumors, but this hasn’t happened in awhile, and the eye tumors tend to stop forming in the 30s. Not always, but it’s a decent rule of thumb. So we’ve got a really good chance that Nate’s eyes are now stable and we won’t need to worry about his vision again for a long, long time.
That makes all the broken nails and hacking coughs in the world seem much better.
