This has been quite a weekend. Suspenseful in not quite the way I had hoped for, for sure. There’s been something in the air the last few days since Thursday that have caused my “PANIC!” neural pathways to light up and every little thing that happens that is minor cause of concern just keeps hitting those pathways & causing them to light up. Of course, the more frequently that pathway is traveled, the faster & easier everything lights up…
On Friday, my monthly stuff was doing things peculiar enough to make me wonder if the dreaded hadn’t happened. Logically I could figure out that it was highly unlikely, but I couldn’t convince the worry center in my brain to STFU. So I did the obvious thing and bought a test on my way in to work & checked. People — I am not pregnant. Whew. The rest of the day was kind of wacky in similar ways at work. Potential cause to be concerned, PANIC, potential cause to be concerned relieved (or mostly alleviated).
M2 busted out in something somewhat akin to strep throat yesterday. The doctor was shocked when the test came back negative, but said sometimes the five minute test threw a false negative. I asked about doing the 24 hour test & she said, “I would normally go ahead & treat it as strep. I really don’t like giving unnecessary antibiotics to children though” (she says all this as she’s writing up a prescription). Then she turns around and looks at me & says, “you can use the prescription or not, (glancing at M2) let’s do the 24 hour test on her.” By that point, 4:30 in the afternoon, M2 hadn’t had tylenol since 8:30 in the morning. It had long worn off, she had an armpit temp of 102, and was a really sad, miserable, tired, little camper. She went on to say it was ok to watch & wait & if she got sicker we could use the antibiotics & if not we could just hold off. Sicker? No — I don’t ever want to see either of my kids looking sicker than M2 did at that moment. So, the sweet nurse that did the swab test the first time came back in. M2 freaked out, crying, wailing, refused to cooperate. She would NOT open her mouth & nothing I could do would make her. I figured, I have the prescription in hand, the doctor was actually shocked that it wasn’t strep so I’m guessing the odds that it was a false negative were actually pretty high, we have permission to treat or not treat as we see fit… why traumatize the kid further? It’s not like we’re chronic antibiotic abusers — this is only the second time either kid has ever had antibiotics in their lives and it just happens to be M2 that’s had them twice now… As long as it’s not meningitis or something. When she gets strep, it causes all the glands in her neck to swell up so much and the fever makes her muscles ache & then she starts talking about her neck hurting (stiff neck! meningitis! Oh my god! medical emergency! Aaaaaghgghhghghghghgh!).
That said, sick kid means we had to cancel plans with my dad to watch the girls today — no point in exposing more people to the gunk & medicine taking and the like. As P says, something always thwarts us — “we’ll have ‘us’ time when they’re both in college or we’re retired or whatever…” Meh.
I tried last night to shift the panic mode over to my fish, the betta’s tail is being fussy. I don’t really want to do partial water changes twice a week, but my suspicion is that if anything that’s the cause of the tail funk because the rasboras are just not nippy critters. Tanks are funny little organic things as they go through their closed system changes over time.
I went to bed early last night, got a good night’s sleep & am hoping for a very laid back quiet peaceful day today. < crossing fingers >
Time to go help clean…
