Stress? What stress?!
Another week has flown by in a whirlwind of panic. Just as soon as I get one person well another becomes deathly ill, and another day was spent waiting in an emergency room for some good news, or at the very least some answers. We got lucky and got both - not appendicitis, but a ruptured cyst, and eventually the pain will go away and the kid can go back to school and we can get back to normal, whatever the hell that is. I don't know normal anymore. It doesn't exist. She started hurting Friday, so I picked her up at school and took her to the clinic. Three hours later they said it was not her appendix, and that it would stop hurting in the next 24-48 hours - if not, bring her back. So I did what I always do when I can't stop panicking about something - I cleaned the house. I did the dishes and the countertops and the dusting and the vacuuming and the laundry and the ironing and the bathroom and God knows what else. I don't remember. I was on autopilot all day Saturday, practicing watchful waiting. But after church on Sunday I'd had all I could take. We had no improvement, there was no way she could go to school in that much pain, so we headed to Children's. They were reasonably sure after a CT that they could rule out appendicitis, but the guys doing the imaging were apparently fascinated by what they had to work with, because they ran multiple enhancements, which took hours, before they finally made a final diagnosis, which was confirmed with an ultrasound. At 11:00pm, after giving her three shots of morphine and a bottle of pain pills to go, they sent her home. I took two days off to keep up the watchful waiting, and came in for a partial day yesterday before taking her to the doctor for a follow-up. Prognosis? This too shall pass, eventually. Meanwhile, she gets another two days of vacation, while I'm back at the desk, playing catchup rather than solitaire.

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