Category: CRAP

Please Pray

It’s 9:30pm on Tuesday night and Angelica just came downstairs – she had been sleeping – complaining of a sore throat and coughing.

She looked a bit flushed and so we took her temperature (because her counts are so low).

It’s at a 37.4F

Normally her temp sits right around 36.5F so this is a whole degree up from that. If she reaches 38F then we must take her into the hospital right away because she has NO infection fighting ability.

Please pray. Pray that whatever is bothering her will be gone. Pray that she will be healthy. Pray that we will be able to hold it together if she does need to go into the hospital. Pray that it’s not bacteria. Please just pray!

Ending It Off With A Bang

Well, we sure ended Spring Break with a BANG!

We had a big family lunch on Sunday Afternoon and before evening had hit, Xandra was barfing. As the evening wore on the symptoms grew until she was feeling pretty crummy.

On Monday morning, Jeremy woke up with some of the same symptoms, but he managed to make it all the way until after lunch time before he joined her in some sacrificial giving to the porcelain god. We kept them home on Tuesday because I’m a big advocate of the 24 hour rule – “wait for a complete 24 hours after vomiting or diarrhea before sending children back to school”.

I don’t like my kids to share germs – not even with each other but especially with anyone else.

I woke up extra early on Wednesday morning in ROUGH shape. I ran to the bathroom and made it with seconds to spare. And that begin my day of sleeping, and rushing to the toilet. Yesterday was NOT a good day. I’m not sure what the deal is because I didn’t feel nauseous at all, but I had such a SORE tummy. Like, lay on the couch moaning and whining about how bad it was…..while clutching a hot pack to my stomach.

I slept, in the morning; and slept again in the afternoon and then went to bed at 7pm. I might have been able to sleep it off, BUT……Judah was awake every hour from midnight until 6am. And this afternoon, I finally thought to check if he might have a tooth, and if that might be the reason for his crappy night. Sure enough, it looks like he’s getting a top tooth. He’s actually had a string of good nights recently. For the past week, he’s been up once a night and some nights not at all……..

I felt pretty crappy throughout the night and twice asked Jon to heat up the warm pack. I also felt bad, because if my kids were feeling this bad, I had no idea and could have totally given them a warm bag to cuddle.

I do feel better today – not a hundred percent – but definitely better.

I managed to get the house fairly tidy and even have a roast in the oven for dinner. What I didn’t get done…….the MOUNTAIN of laundry downstairs in my room. I have probably 5 loads that need to be folded, BUT…..I have NO laundry to do. That, I did manage, to get done.

So, I’m not as far ahead as I’d like to be, but I do have a moment to sit and pound this out. So that’s something.

I have a few things that I’d like to post about if I can just find the time to type them out. Hopefully soon.

I had a chat with the kids on the way home from school and we are back into our “routine”. We didn’t follow it while they and I were sick and so they are working on homework right now and hopefully we will get to sit and watch a show together as a family if they stick to the schedule tonight.

This is one of the things that I want to share with you……can you guess?

Out with the Old

Behind the Scenes….

This is what has been happening at our house, last night and this morning…

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We had a great family get together yesterday afternoon and then Xani started barfing. Between last night and this morning she barfed 7 times….and we won’t event talk about what else was going on “behind the scenes” if you know what I mean….This morning she woke up with a fever…..this is so frustrating.

We moved Xani’s mattress into the TV room mostly to keep her and Geli separated. We are desperately hoping and praying that this “whatever it is” will skip Geli.

Over the weekend, Geli had a reaction to a bandaid and we think it’s a combination of the adhesive and the one chemo drug that she’s getting. Something similar happened once before. She has a bunch of blisters on her arm around where they drew blood on Wednesday and it hurts really bad. We have been applying Polysporin and praying that it just goes away and doesn’t cause any big problems. Her counts are high enough that we are hoping that she will be able to fight it off herself.

She did throw up her breakfast this morning though which scored her the right to stay at home today. And seeing as she is fine other than that barf…..I’m saying that it’s chemo related and not sickness related….at least it seems that way.

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Jeremy also woke up this morning with his own “behind the scenes” action and he’s been alternately laying on the couch and laying in the bath this morning…..really not feeling very well at all. He keeps threatening to barf and we have a bowl close by, just in case.

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There is a lot of soup and weak peppermint tea being handed out and we are praying that whatever this is….that it just stops now.

I was SO looking forward to everyone going back to school and Jon and I being able to relax on his one day off and nope…….so I’m pouting and whining a bit. I’ll be ok, but I’ve had enough of vomiting and diarrhea to last me a life time….

While I’m cleaning up vomit and other behind the scene messes…..do you have any humorous life stories to share with me? I’d love to hear from you….and I could really use the laugh today!

Siah’s Super Clips

Siah gave the babies those cute little hardwood teethers, and yes, to those who have asked. I would definitely be interested in selling some so talk to me if you’re interested.

When it came to the rest of the siblings and cousins, we didn’t figure that wooden teethers would be very much appreciated and so we needed to come up with a different idea.

I had seen these wooden clips before and I wondered if we could replicate them as well. They are basically a large wooden clothes peg…..sorta?!?

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They are perfect for creating tents and forts. The wooden clips are big enough that they attach to most furniture and the strength of the clasp can be adjusted using the elastics. I imagine that they could be useful for other things as well. We’ve already thought about adding a set of 4 or 8 to our camping gear as we figure they’d be really handy to keep the tablecloth ON the table and possibly useful for holding up wet towels or even tarps.

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He wanted to play, not do pictures

One of the nice things about them is that they are just made from regular lumber and can use up the offcuts that might be laying around; and even if the elastic breaks….you can just get another one and wind it around a bunch of times.

Jon made these up and once again, Siah helped to play with them and then wrap them up. We gave Siah a break this year……well, we gave ourselves a break, too. This year it was just easier to do it ourselves and to give his gifts to him to give, as opposed to recruiting his help….which wouldn’t have been very helpful at all. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye out for something that he can actually “do” mostly by himself for next year.

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I find them laying around my house all over the place, and while I dislike them laying around my house….I love that it means that my kids are playing with them.

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Enough already! I just want to play and finish whatever snack I have in my mouth!

Can you think of any other ideas that we could use these clips for?

In other non related news – Judah woke up early this morning with a fever. I believe that it’s just a virus, but I was particularly stressed because of the issues relating to his bowels. He had no other symptoms initially, but now he is quite stuffed up. His temperature is hovering in between 37.5 and 38 degrees Celsius and so it’s a low grade fever. He is nursing and eating and playing, but is definitely “off” and wants to be held and is quite clingy. I’ve been mostly awake since 3am this morning and hove done well up until now. Now…..the lack of sleep has caught up with me and I’m exhausted. He’s finally gone down in his own bed for a nap and has been sleeping for about 20 minutes. The longest he’s napped all day today.

I’m not sure what’s going on as Siah also has a runny nose, but no other symptoms. The stress of my family’s health wears on my heavy and so if you could pray that we’d be healthy and that I’d not stress so much, I’d greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

2 Stitches

As if we didn’t have enough drama in our lives right now, Siah decided to shake things up a little last night.

Jon, Jeremy and Siah were down in the basement playing a video game. Siah was sitting on the arm rest of our futon and he unbalanced himself and fell forward hitting his head on the corner of a wooden toy box.

Breakfast

Breakfast

Mom, the girls, Judah and I were up in the kitchen and heard the thunk. It was that loud. Then we heard Jon yell and then we heard Siah crying and it was “one of those cries.”

I raced downstairs and met Jon at the bottom of the stairs. He handed Siah off to me and there was blood everywhere. I could see that his head was split open in between his eyes. We came up stairs and got a rag to try to stop the blood. It was apparent that he’s need stitches.

First Bite

First Bite

We hoped that we could make it to the local clinic that did Jeremy’s stitches as we’ve talked with them about our challenges of dealing with germs and sickness due to Angelica’s suppressed immune system, BUT….it was 7:30pm and they were closed at 8pm and they were already over booked for the day and were not even answering their phone.

And so Jon headed to the ER.

The plan was for Jon to wear a mask into the ER and explain the situation and see how they could work with us to get Siah the care that he needed while attempting to keep us as germ free as possible.

The staff at Langley Hospital were amazing.

Deliciousness

Geli’s Delicious Cinnamon Buns

They didn’t have any open rooms at the time, but they planned to get a room emptied and clean out and to bring Jon and Siah in and straight back to the closed room as soon as possible. They gave Jon a small mask for Siah to wear in and out and in the waiting time, they stayed in the van to minimize the possibility of picking anything up from other ill people.

They waited in the van and the triage nurse came out to the van to assess Siah and yup….he needed stitches.

It took a few hours, and in the mean time, Siah fell asleep.

See Food

See Food

When the room was finally ready, Jon carried the sleeping Siah in. He said that they got quite a few looks, as he’d been in and out with his mask on and now they were carrying a limp child in with a mask on….can you imagine that others in the waiting room must have been wondering what was wrong with this child that they had to wear masks????

Jon tried to wake Siah up to explain what was about to happen, but he had tired himself out so badly with his initial screaming when it happened that he was NOT waking up. He was in that drowsy state where you’re not really awake but not really asleep. They finally wrapped him like a burrito to keep him from being able to move his arms and the Dr checked to see that Jon was okay with what was going to happen and once he was sure that Jon wasn’t going to flip out….they started.

They had already put on a fast acting numbing cream and they started injecting the freezing and that’s when Siah woke up for real. So in his mind, probably, he went to sleep and was woken up to some dude poking his head with a needle. AWESOME! Jon said he screamed until he wasn’t breathing. Brutal! The Doctor only put in two stitches because he figured that was about all that Siah could handle and even though he was being quick, it was still pretty traumatic.

He told Jon that the cut was extremely straight and that it should heal amazingly because it was such a precise cut.

2 Stitches

2 Stitches

They masked up again and came home. Siah settled down pretty quickly once Jon was able to hold him and was almost asleep by the time they reached the van.

They got home before 11pm….not bad considering the waits in ER’s now a days.

He went to bed right away and slept through until 6am when he crawled into bed with us.

This morning he seems to be doing okay and so we are just gonna take it easy today. Geli’s doing pretty good this morning too. We were attempting to adjust her meds schedule around so that we were not having to wake up at 3am to give her a dose, but that meant that she might be a little barfy this morning. She did feel a bit off and dry heaved for about 45 minutes off and on until the meds finally kicked in. Her and Siah are back downstairs in the basement this morning. She is teaching Josiah how to play the original NES Nintendo Super Mario Brother’s game. He’s thrilled and she’s distracted and it’s good.

This is now the 4th of our 5 kids that have gotten stitches in their head…..when she was about 8 years old, Geli wacked her head open on a floor heater and needed 3 stitches. When Xani was about 10, her cousin went all vmapire on her and tried to take a bite out her head while they were jumping on a trampoline and she needed 3 stitches. A few weeks ago, Jeremy got 3 stitches in his chin and now Josiah has had 2 stitches in between his eyes…..GAH!

I’m really hoping and praying that Judah stays safe and protected.

Do you have any cool stories about “that time you got stitches” or your kids……Please share!

Exhaustion….

is having your 3 year old son come to bed at 1am only one short hour after you’ve gone to sleep and having him awake and thrashing around in bed when at 2am you hear your daughter barfing. Then to have your husband fully wake you with the knowledge that your daughter has a fever of 38.1F.

Any fever is treated as serious and severe and warrants an immediate trip to the ER at Children’s Hospital.

The magic number that earns you an immediate trip to the hospital is 38.5F and so we called in to the oncologist on call to see what they’d like us to do…seeing as she wasn’t far off. Just so you know, her normal temp hovers between 36.4 and 36.9. We have to take her temperature daily in the morning and in the evening because when your counts are low, you don’t typically present with normal symptoms of infection…you just get a fever!

So when we talked with the oncologist on call, they said to wait half an hour and take her temp again to see where it was going….At this point I was up and Jon was up, Geli was up and Siah was up….Geli was finishing packing her bag as we were certain that she was heading in for a 2+ week stint of an antibiotics run. When there is a bacterial infection that runs rampant, she gets put on general IV antibiotics for a few days while they culture for the exact strain of bacteria and once they figure that out, they give her the correct antibiotics and then they take her blood every day looking for a test to come back negative for the bacteria. Once they get the negative test, then it’s two weeks on the antibiotics and then she can come home……lovely, eh?

This is what we were preparing ourselves for at 2am on a Wednesday morning. Jon was getting a last minute snuggle in with Siah. Geli had a bag packed and was laying on the couch and I was frantically cleaning the kitchen…..all the while trying to figure out how I was going to “do” everything especially when there was no way that Siah was going to sleep anytime soon, and honestly neither was I. Although I could go and lay down, I seriously doubted that I’d be able to sleep until I heard an update from Jon.

Finally, the half hour was up and her temp had gone from 38.1 to a 38.4 and so Jon rang to let them know they were on their way and that the temp was creeping up and they headed in.

I brought Siah back upstairs to my room and put on a movie for him on my laptop. He watched Enchanted, while I lay there waiting for an update. In the early morning hours time seems to stand still, but Jon finally messaged me and really had no update other than they were there.

He kept messaging me with what little information that he had and the end result was that things looked kind sketchy because she had a fever while already being on antibiotics and who knows what that meant and yet her counts weren’t indicating a bacterial infection and they weren’t admitting her, but they wanted her to say until the Oncology Clinic could assess her and it didn’t open until 8am so they were gonna try to rest and hang around until then. Siah’s movie finished after 5am sometime and I convinced him to fall sleep.

I finally fell lightly asleep around 6ish and then Judah woke at 7:30am to eat. Siah woke up for good just after 8am and I’d not heard anything regarding Geli yet.

Jon finally messaged me that they were giving her a IV dose of a big antibiotic and sending her home thinking she was dealing with something viral and that she could recover just as well at home as at the hospital…. She does have to come in tomorrow morning for some follow up blood work and another dose of antibiotics.

It was nice to have them come home. We have no idea where she could have picked this virus up, but this does speak to her compromised immune system. We feel fine, but somewhere, somehow she’s picked up something. Fortunately, her counts are just on the high-ish side of low, enough so, that she can be at home. Were her counts lower, that would not be an option.

But, this is one of the reasons why we must be so careful right now….Her system is just so fragile.

She’s been sleeping on the couch since 10:30-ish about half an hour after they got home. Jon took Siah upstairs and convinced him to fall asleep with much wailing and tears, but in spite of his exhaustion….Jon couldn’t sleep. Sucks!

I’m surprised that it’s already 2pm….I’m hoping that the rest of the day flies by until the moment I can crawl into my bed and that there are no more hiccups and especially that Geli starts to feel better so SO soon!

Safety Matters

Yesterday (Saturday) was a pretty boring day.

After the chaos of the past month, this is not a bad thing, but it also leave you feeling a little lost, as you try to fill the time and space and “come down” from the stress and attempt to figure out some “new normals”.

That’s a lot of quotation marks, but that’s a little how life feels right now…..punctuated by pauses (………) and “quotation marks”.

Angelica had a bit of a better day emotionally, although she’s had a pretty brutal headache for the past 2 days. On Friday it was her back that was bothering her terribly and now she’s had a brutal, brutal headache. I’m wondering if her back is out and we are going to try to book an appointment with our chiropractor for Monday to see if that will help her. It’s so hard to watch her be in pain and to not know how to help her. Because Tylenol can mask a fever, and basically fever is how her body will manifest an infection, we are not supposed to give her Tylenol and so we called in to Children’s today and they are getting her some Codeine. We’re hoping this will help alleviate the pain, and also help her to enjoy herself a little. Because of the pain, she’s been basically laying down and sleeping. I’m not so upset that she’s catching up on some sleep, but it’s hard to see her so “down” or “low” and I’d love to see her cheerful and enjoying herself again. It’s so hard to watch your children hurt.

We did have one moment yesterday that managed to break the monotony of our day….

Josiah has been climbing the counters recently…well, he’s been doing it for a while, but just recently with Geli and the baby requiring a bit more supervision – he’s managed to actually scale the counters and one day Jon found him up on the very top of the cupboards. Not cool!

Jon found these very nifty locks at Children’s Hospital and bought one to “try” at home. He figured that if it worked, we’d just pick up a few more the next time we were there.

He and Jeremy installed it on Friday evening…..I hate it. It’s a magnet lock. There is a magnetic key and the locking mechanism. You install the locking mechanism into your cupboard and once it’s closed, unless you have the magnetic key, you cannot get inside. We decided to keep the key in the cupboard above the pantry (that has the lock installed in it.) That way it was close enough to get at, but Siah couldn’t get it.

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You need to have both hands free to open the lock and then you have to remember to put the key back up in the cupboard where it gets stored.

We had one scare where I thought I had locked the key “inside” the pantry, but after a few moments of panic, we found it over on the counter.

Yesterday though, we really did lock it into the pantry and we did not have one magnet strong enough to open the lock. The key doesn’t feel like it’s a very strong magnet and yet….surprise, surprise IT IS!

We tried EVERY magnet we own and NOTHING worked. Some were almost strong enough and we could hear the lock clicking but nothing was actually strong enough to actually unlock the stupid thing.

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Finally Jeremy googled and found out that there is a SUPER STRONG magnet inside a Hard Drive and Jon had an old one of those kicking around……amazingly enough, it worked….

Here you can see the little white key sitting on top of the spaghetti sauce jar!

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The locks are currently flicked into the “unlocked” position while we try to figure out what we’re going to do going forward. At the very least, we had some entertainment on our boring Saturday!

Trying to Hold It Together

We had one of the Residents who has been assigned to Geli’s case come in and talk to us this morning.

It seems that her blood counts are currently too low to allow for her to go home, but there is the possibility that they could raise enough by the weekend……BUT……she then announced that the Infectious Disease People like to see 2 weeks of negative counts before they will release a patient and in Gel’s case I guess they were testing for 2 different things and on the 27th had one neg and one pos and on the 29th both were negative for any infection…this would push our release date from Sunday to Tuesday.

I’m not gonna lie….I’ve been fighting tears ever since they said that. I don’t want to cry and upset or bother Geli as she’s not really said anything yet, but I just want to go home so badly. I’m so upset. I was concerned about this and now feel a bit like, “what’s gonna change as of Tuesday and keep us in here for another few days”….its so stupid.

I’m struggling today.

Really, Really struggling!

We want to go home

I’ve walked the hallway from Children’s Hospital to Women’s Hospital more than 50 times in the last two days. It’s been such a blessing to have both Patti and Geli on the same floor, just down the hall from each other, but at the same time it’s been a hassle.

Geli had a “bad” day yesterday. She was “NPO” which means no food or water from the midnight before and then was taken downstairs for another bone marrow biopsy and then a Lumbar Puncture (an LP is a hole made in the back to get some spinal fluid so they can do a biopsy on that.) For the procedures she was sedated and then received an anesthetic, and a side effect can be nausea. Then she received more chemo (there are multiple forms of chemo that attack different things), which also causes nausea. So yesterday afternoon she had a slight fever, nausea and was throwing up.

There is also the risk that she has picked up an infection somewhere and the symptoms of that are… nausea and fever. (hence the post from yesterday.) There is a magic number of 38.5 C. If her temp goes above 38.5 then we get an automatic treatment of antibiotics and 10 more days in hospital. She stayed below, albeit just below and has been feeling better today, but she hasn’t completely rebounded. She had a few tests today and everything was within an acceptable range, but they are still monitoring her. If there is a fever that develops then our chances of going home soon are gone.

We are asking for serious prayer that she has NO INFECTIONS, that her temp stabilizes, blood sugar stabilizes and that she is able to eat and drink normal amounts. Patti has just about stayed as long as she will be allowed in the maternity ward and really does not want to go home to 3 kids with a newborn and no husband to help.

Please pray.

Screamfest 2010 – April Edition

I’m sitting here in the dark listening to my boys scream their heads off.

It’s AWESOME!

No really, It’s even better than awesome!

My boys are over tired and flipped out and for some reason they’ve decided to melt completely down. Both of them! At the same time! And Jon has taken the girls to a music practice and I’m alone with the screaming banshees. And it’s every bit as awesome as it sounds.

Well, what I haven’t shared is the back ground, and seeing as all i have is time right now…..let’s git ‘r done.

I went to my exercise class tonight and when I came home just after 5:30pm….there was nothing done for dinner. The girls had just left to pick something up from the store, but they were planning on stopping at the library on their way home. Jon was unbelievably on edge because Jeremy and him had clashed while trying to “do homework”. You’d think that Jon would be the most understanding of Jeremy and his struggles because they deal with the same issues…but if you’d think that….you’d be wrong. Jon gets easily frustrated with Jeremy which is terribly frustrating for me…..then everyone is frustrated. It’s so AWESOME!

*****the screaming is winding down in pitch……I give them another 10 minutes before they are completely SOUND asleep*****

So, I asked about dinner and mentioned the practice tonight and well….he’d totally forgotten and by that point is was too late to make dinner and so…….he ran to get McDonalds……YUCK! How nasty.

Jeremy was in top form tonight and egging Siah on like crazy. It was BRUTAL!

Then Jon and the girls left and the boys pretty much melted down and started crying and asking for a movie and wanting to sleep in my bed, and wanting to take a bath and wanting more food and wanting to play on the computer….and the list goes on and on and on and on. AAAAAWWWWWKKK!

I don’t even really remember the last half hour, except for the crying and pleading and begging and fighting to get jammies on and fighting to brush teeth (I gave up with Siah) and I put them in their beds and they have pretty much almost screamed themselves to sleep.

You only wish that you were in my shoes, I know. I’m not sure how I had the patience for all of this tonight. I didn’t scream or flip out or yell or anything. I just calmly herded them upstairs, put them in their pajamas, attempted to brush teeth, and when that didn’t work, I put them in their beds and sat down in the rocking chair in their room to kill some time.

It’s worked.

Both boys are sound asleep and I’ve got a few things to do so I’m off.

How is/was your Wednesday evening? Better than mine started out to be, I hope!?!