My daughter came home today with pink eye. Apparently it’s been going around the preschool and sure enough, she’s got it. Should make for an interesting few days as we all try to avoid catching the virus.
Category: Health
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Flu Season
Been slow to post anything the last couple of days, mostly because we have the flu in the house, and we’ve been nursing sick kids. It’s mostly run its course, but turned into an ear infection in our oldest, and we got antibiotics for that today.
And no, we didn’t get flu shots. I’ve never bothered to get a flu shot, and have never gotten the flu. If I caught it from the kids (hey, there’s a first for everything), it turned into a head cold that’s pretty much gone. Of course, I rarely get sick as it is, so maybe I just have an iron-clad immune system.
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Support
Jake over on UtterlyBoring is having some serious back problems and could definitely use some support. So, if you can, donate to Jake, or maybe buy something from his Orty.com store. If things are tight, hey, I understand, just send him some email or link to his site. Every little bit helps!
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What are all the colors of the rainbow?
Our trip to Portland today was definitely one of the odder ones.
In short: The good news is, Kaitlyn’s eyes are as good as they’re going to get, according to the doctor, which is pretty damn good. No more surgeries. The bad news is, the doctor recommended a second eye surgery for Brandon, before he turns 2 if possible. Definitely not what we want to hear.
As for the (gory) details of the trip, this is a doozy: Brandon threw up on himself and he and the car smelled like puke the rest of the day. We had to buy him a new shirt at Goodwill because the one he was wearing stank so bad.
Then Sherri managed to spill a bunch of orange juice all over her lap and seat while trying to fill the kids’ cups with juice. That wasn’t as bad as the vomit, though.
After the eye doctor we went to the Lloyd Center Mall and had a highly mediocre cheesesteak lunch from a food court restaurant called Steak Escape (yes, they actually have a website).
On the drive home, we saw the brightest rainbow I have ever seen when driving through Madras. I wish I could have taken a picture of it; it was truly spectacular and almost made it all worth it.
Incidentally, the answer to the question in the title is: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet (purple). Seven colors. Sherri didn’t believe me that there are 7 colors and that indigo was counted, until we got home and she looked it up online.
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Frustration
Two days ago my daughter Kaitlyn underwent surgery on her eyes to correct her congenital esotropia (lazy eye). This was the second surgery for her, the first occuring when she was only six months old (she’s three now). We drove up to Portland Wednesday afternoon, had dinner with our good friends Justin and Raegan, and had the surgery Thursday at Casey Eye Institute.
Turned out to be an even worse day than we’d imagined; Kaitlyn had a pre-op appointment at 11:00, to be followed (we thought) by surgery at approximately 12 noon. Unfortunately, the appointment ran long, and the doctor told us the surgery would be around 1:30 or 2:00, as a baby was in surgery ahead of us.
Well, it wasn’t 1:30, and it wasn’t 2:00 either. We got bumped again, and finally Kaitlyn went into surgery right about 3:00. At that point, we had been pretty much led to believe that we’d be getting into surgery between 2:00 and 2:30, because they let us bring Kaitlyn back at about 1:30 for an oral sedative to calm her down, which she needed because she was completely freaked out about the whole deal. So, from about 1:30 to 3:00, I held Kaitlyn (who was groggy with sedative, but fighting it), waiting for surgery to start and desperately hoping it would be soon so we could get the hell out of there.
The thing is, we were apparently originally on the schedule for a 2:30 surgery to begin with, but nobody told us that— we were led to believe she’d go into surgery around noon right after her pre-op. No one told us otherwise, until after we got there and checked in for surgery. And since patients can’t have any food for six hour prior to surgery, we had to get Kaitlyn up to have a light breakfast at 5:30 that morning. So when they finally took her in, she’d been without food for 9 hours.
She’s doing fine now, and her eyes are red but straight. It’s amazing how fast kids bounce back from something like this. Still, I’m not happy with the runaround on the day of surgery. If they schedule us at 2:30, fine. If a young baby has priority over us, fine. But nobody told us until it was too late. That’s what burns me up. We were there jumping through the hoops they laid out for us, but they didn’t even have their shit together enough to tell us what was going on.
Enough venting. Kaitlyn is good, things are good and the whole ordeal is behind us.
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Echinacea Master
Staving off sickness all around me. A kid at Kaitlyn’s daycare had hand, foot and mouth disease, and a co-worker’s kid has strep. So I’ve been sucking down echinacea like it’s going out of style, because Tuesday I felt like I was starting to get sick. Just lovely.
Also, don’t forget to read up on the new video game cable channel, G4. There’s a Yahoo news story here, a CNN article here, and Slashdot commentary here. Yep, that’s right. A video game channel.