A long run and a broken head

This past Friday I took the day off from work so I could get my long run in and then drive up to the mountains for the 4th of July holiday.  My Dad and step-mom have a house up in Blowing Rock and the family and some friends were all gathering for a fun holiday weekend.  My brother even flew in from Hotlanta and rode up to the mountains with me.

I had 10.5 miles on the training schedule and headed out to the American Tobacco Trail (ATT) for some flat, dirt, shaded love.  It was about 8 in the morning when I got started and my brothers plane was set to land around 11:30 and I figured I would drive to the airport when I was done to pick him up.  I set out on the trail and since this was only my second time running it I had a new adventure to see where this direction would take me.  I ran the opposite direction last time.  I found it pretty funny that after only a few miles I ran into another county.  I had no idea that I was so close to the county line.  Another new adventure was using the Gu gel for the very first time.  I have been wary of the gels because I have a thing about texture.  I bought the Chocolate Outrage hoping that if it was chocolate it couldn’t be that bad.  Oh Mah Gah.  It was NASTY.  I thought I was going to hurl after the first little bit I put in my mouth.  I sucked it up though and knew I had to get it down.  I managed to get it all in me and without losing the contents of my stomach.  I will stick with the Chomps from now on, thank you very much.

My run was pretty uneventful for the most part.  There weren’t many people on the trail, but enough that I passed someone every 10 minutes or so and I wasn’t too nervous being out there alone.  I took my phone with me though just in case.  At one point I passed an older lady on a bike for about the 3rd time as I was nearing the end of my run and she said “Oh my, you are going a long way!”

I also have to mention the “bathrooms” on this trail.  Bathroom is a loose term.  They have four walls and a door.  The toilet is essentially an open septic tank.  No, really.  It is.  Think of it like a porta potty that doesn’t port.  The container for the pee and poo is much bigger but you still get the full effect of the smell.  There is also no sink or water of any kind.  There was hand sanitizer though.  That was the second time I wanted to hurl.  I think I will just pee behind a bush from now on.  It would be much more pleasant.

I finished up my 10.5 in about 2 hours and 15 minutes.  Now for the broken head part.

As I made my way back to my car, stretched and got ready to go to the airport I got a phone call from my son’s school.  He fell on the stairs on the playground and split his head open.  I have to mention that he has split his head open once before at home.  What is it with the kid and knocking his head around.  He gets his lack of coordination from me.  I had so many x-rays as a kid, I should glow in the dark.  This is what it looked like when I rushed to the school to go pick him up.

The gash

I don’t know if you can see it in this picture (I can) but the scar from his previous head wound is just to the left of the new cut (it is a vertical scar).  Ian was a trooper and only cried for a bit when it actually happened.  His teacher was a bit traumatized by the event though.  Of course my brother sends me a text when I am driving to the school that he has landed.  I had to coordinate with my husband to go get my brother while I picked up the kid and took him to the Doctor.  Don’t forget, I just ran 10.5 miles.  I am sweaty, in my running clothes and starving.  I apologized several times to the staff at the Doctor’s office for being so smelly.  They were nice and said they couldn’t smell anything, but I know they were lying.  Ian got his head glued back together (I LOVE DERMABOND!).  I am so glad we haven’t had to do stitches so far.  Ian was pissed when we had to hold him down to glue the skin back together, but he got to pick a prize and got some lollipops so it was all worth it in the end in his eyes.

Here is his freshly glued head.

All better!

After all that insanity, I had to run home, shower, pack and hit the road to the mountains!  A post about the trip is coming soon.  I just gotta find the time to write it.

Housewife Wanted

Just when I was starting to get a routine figured out my husband’s schedule changed.  We knew this was going to happen, but I really wasn’t prepared for it when he told me last week his shift change would start the next week (Monday was the first day).  He was also out-of-town this past weekend and I was flying solo with the kid.  Sunday felt like the never-ending day of cleaning, shopping, cooking, entertaining and then preparing for work and school the next day.  I don’t think I sat down for more than 20 minutes all day Sunday.

The new routine is a bright and early start to the day at the OH MY GOD IT’S EARLY HOUR (6 AM) with a run if it is a run day.  It’s off to work after that since Jack is in charge of drop off on this schedule.  After work it’s a race to the daycare to get Ian and then home to make dinner, try to get Ian to eat, cleaning up after dinner, random housework, bath for Ian, bedtime routine and sometimes exercise if it is a crosstrain day.  Makes me tired just typing all that!  So yeah, I am TIRED.

I need a housewife or a househusband.  Either one works.

This two working parents thing is hard.  Have I said that enough yet?  I have heard from friends about how hard it is and I knew we were in for change.  I just didn’t know that it was going to be THIS HARD.  I knew Jack had a tough job being at home all day with Ian and I appreciated what he did.  I admit though that I took some of those things he did for granted.  Like cooking dinner.  Cooking dinner after working all day and commuting home is so not what I want to be doing.

Take last night as Exhibit A.  I pick Ian up from daycare.  I didn’t plan any dinners when I went grocery shopping this past weekend and decided to pick them up as I decided what to make during the week.  Yesterday I decided to make spaghetti.  My brain says this is a simple, quick meal.  Hahahahaha.  Someone should have slapped me for thinking that.  Yes, in the grand scheme of cooking this is simple.  Very little prep.  However, the multi-tasker in me just had to do other things while trying to cook the ground turkey, warm the sauce and boil the water for the pasta.  This resulted in me not paying attention to the sauce boiling a bit and shooting sauce rockets all over the kitchen.  A meal that I thought would take 30 minutes took me an hour to make.  The part that took forever was for the water for the pasta to boil.  You know the saying…a watched pot never boils.  Words were never truer tonight as my son kept yelling from the kitchen table, “Mama, I want my pasghetti!”  He is not usually one to go sit at the table and wait for his dinner either.  We usually have to call him to the table at least 5 times.  Having him sitting at the table asking for his food in the same fashion of ARE WE THERE YET?! as if this was a 10 hour car ride was pressure I just wasn’t equipped to handle in that moment with burning streams of marinara flying at me.

I appreciate all those meals that my husband prepared for me before I got home from work about a million times more now.  Especially the ones that required A LOT of prep.  I also appreciate left overs because tonight I can reheat spaghetti in the microwave.

Photo courtesy of ib84

Say Ahhhhhh!

Ian had his first visit to the dentist today. The good news is it appears he will NOT have the orthodontia issues I had as a child, whew! (my mouth was a mess – appliances, teeth pulling and braces)

He did pretty good for a 3 year old getting his mouth messed with.

Picture Day

A friend of mine says I don’t put enough pictures on my blog.  So, for my friend JPM…I give you, picture day.

Handy Ian

Before surgery

After surgery 😦

Playing Lego Robots with Daddy

Having fun at the park

As you can see I am addicted to Hipstamatic on my iPhone.  Regular pictures just seem so boring now.

Losing the battle, but winning the war…sometimes

The medicine battle has become more of a spat now.  We have found a combo that works for the antibiotic and that is grape juice mixed in with the grape flavored med and it takes away the medicine taste.  Put that in a cup with a straw and Ian will drink it.  The Tylenol is an ebb and flow battle still.  Sometimes we hand him the little cup and he sucks it down like it is no big deal.  Other times he has to be threatened with no TV or taking away whatever it is that he really wants at the moment to get him to drink it.  It all comes down to control and if he feels like he has it or not.  The only time it isn’t completely about control is when it is the middle of the night and he is in a lot of pain and just doesn’t want to swallow anything.  That was last night.

There is nothing worse than seeing your kid in pain, knowing if he drinks the tsp of medicine it will help at least for a little while and the kid REFUSES to drink it.  I felt so bad for him, but I was also losing every bit of patience I had because he wouldn’t listen and take the damn medicine!  I don’t know why I was trying to reason with a hysterical 3-year-old, but I was.  Note to self: logic doesn’t work with a 3-year-old.  Anyway, last night was a rough night.  He slept with us in our bed and woke up periodically in pain.  I am hoping that last night was the worst of it and we will be on the down slope from here.  The Doctor told us that day 6 and 7 would be the worst and he was right.

Even after the night of hell we went through with Ian’s first day of pre-school today.  He will be going to school for 3 half days a week.  He was so excited to go play with his new friends and he actually had a very good day.  I freaked the teachers in his classroom out when I told them Ian couldn’t get to rowdy because his blood pressure couldn’t go up too much due to a risk of bleeding.  I just didn’t want him running laps around the playground when they went outside.  Still I think the teacher was like Oh God, don’t let this kid have an incident on the first day of school.  Everything was fine.  I surely didn’t want to be those people with that kid.

I will have to get a picture of Ian with his Star Wars lunch bag that he picked out for school.  I was shocked that Star Wars beat out Buzz Lightyear.  But, I think Yoda is much cooler than Buzz, so I can’t really blame  him ;).

The One About After The Surgery

We had to be at the hospital at 7 in the morning yesterday to check Ian in for his surgery.  The hospital is in North Durham.  We didn’t make it at 7 and got there around 7:30.  I got up at 5:30, but we can never seem to make it out of the house on time when we have somewhere to be in the early morning hours.

We got checked in and didn’t have to wait long before they took him back to pre-op.  I was happy to see that every person we encountered asked what procedure he was getting and were thorough in taking his medical history.  I think I have seen too many Dateline’s or 20/20’s about people that had the wrong operation performed on them.  All the times I thought about the moment they would take him back for the operation I just knew I would fall apart.  I actually stayed very calm.  I think the staff made me feel like they knew what they were doing and Ian wasn’t upset, so it was fine when they rolled him away.  The surgeon was spot on when he said the whole thing would take 45 minutes.  He came out pretty much on the dot to tell us it all went fine.  It took more time than they told us it would to call us back to recovery and that was a little nerve-wracking.

When we saw him in recovery he was crying, no surprise there, but he was also dealing with a side effect from a pain med they gave him.  His nose was itching like crazy.  Poor thing.  I got him calmed down once I held him for a bit and then it only took about 30 minutes to get wheeled up to his room.  I thought for sure we would have a terrible time trying to get him to eat or drink anything.  He shocked me by eating french fries from Chick-fil-A just a couple hours after surgery.  After that he ate some pancakes and drank lots of chocolate milk.  We even got a few popsicles in him.  Jack left the hospital around 6ish to go home to let the dog out and sleep at home.

Ian and I did okay for a while until about 11pm when it was time for pain meds again and he was well past the time for a dose.  His throat was hurting and he was in no mood to drink a little cup of medicine.  This is where the battle of taking his medicine begins.  I spent a good hour trying to get him to drink a Tablespoon of Tylenol.  After that our night didn’t get much better.  For one hospital beds really suck and I was sleeping next to a kid that woke up every 30 minutes or so cause he couldn’t breathe through his nose and had to mouth breathe all night.  The mouth breathing led to a dry throat, which led to more pain when he had to swallow.  We also had the fun of his IV being blocked up at 5am.  When the IV thing happened the nurse also discovered some blood on the sheets and we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.  That freaked me out.  Turns out his IV had come out of his arm and the blood was from the fluid mixing with blood from his arm.  The good part about the IV debacle was the nurse just went ahead and took it out.

I think in total we both got maybe 4 hours of sleep.  When we did get to sleep someone had to come in check his vitals.  How can anyone get “better” in an environment where you can’t get any sleep.

Today, the battle of take your medicine has raged on.  My kid used to be a champion at taking medicine.  He was on reflux meds for the first year of his life and never gave us a problem with that.  Motrin and Tylenol have never been a problem until now.  It’s obvious this is a control issue.  That doesn’t stop me going batty though when it takes 30 minutes for him to drink an itty bitty cup of Tylenol.  We tried the syringe method and the kid is a master at spitting it all back out.  And for the first time in his life he has to take an antibiotic.  We did find a method of mixing the antibiotic with grape juice and getting him to drink it that way, but again it takes FOREVER!  My husband says it actually tastes fine.  I will have to take his word for it since the drug is amoxicillin and I am allergic to it.

His eating today has sucked.  He ate a soggy bowl of Golden Grahams this morning, a popsicle this afternoon and some chocolate ice cream for dinner.  They did tell us the pain would get worse as the days went on so I expect this trend to continue up to about day 7.  I feel bad for Jack since he has to fight the medicine battle alone tomorrow.  This weekend is going to be F-U-N.  Days filled with keeping a 3 year old from over exerting himself and getting him to drink a tiny cup of medicine.

In the end I know all this will be worth it.  I just can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel on 10 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours.  Hopefully, tomorrow is a better day.

The One About Surgery

We finally had our follow-up appointment with the ENT today to find out if Ian will need surgery.  The answer is yes.  During the sleep study he had 4.5 episodes of sleep apnea per hour and they want to see 1 or 0.  During REM sleep he had 12!  That means that he would wake up like every 5 minutes.  He will have surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids on the 13th.  While I am happy that this will allow him to breathe and sleep properly, I am freaked out about the fact that he has to go under general anesthesia.  And the fact that he has to have things cut out of his throat.  And he is only 3!  My kid has spent more time in a hospital than I have in my entire life in his 3 years.  I keep telling him that we really need to stop getting so familiar with the entire medical community, but he doesn’t seem to be listening.  He is probably too tired to concentrate on what I am saying.

Sick of being sick

I have a cold.  I have had this cold for about a week now.  I haven’t been able to run since I can’t breathe through my nose and just really don’t have the energy.  This no exercise thing is making me a little nutty as it usually does and I am losing the little patience I have with everyone around me.  This is the most noticeable with my rambunctious little boy and I feel guilty about it.  I am going to try running today and see how it goes.  I have to get out and do something before I lose my sanity.  I may end up walking more than I run, but I figure something is better than nothing.  It is rare to never that I go for a run and come back feeling worse than when I started.  Endorphins are my friend.

Update on Ian – We haven’t been able to schedule the follow-up with the ENT yet.  The sleep center is dragging their feet on getting the results to Ian’s Doctor.  I am annoyed and trying not to yell at people on the phone cause I have found that rarely helps the situation.  I am hopeful that the results will be sent today…

My superpower is my Mommy Instinct

For a while now I have noticed that Ian seems to stop breathing for very short periods of time (about 5+ seconds, but less than 10) when he is sleeping.  It was happening often enough to freak me out.  The kid also snores so loud that it is almost impossible to sleep next to him if you actually want to get some sleep yourself.  Both of these things became very apparent to me after he had Croup.  I honestly never noticed them before he had it.  I don’t know if that virus caused a change in his airway or if I started paying attention to his breathing more after he had it.  Either way, I haven’t been the only one to notice that his breathing is different since having it.  My Dad and Stepmom have also made comments about how loud his breathing is just when he sits on your lap and is awake.

Ian also seems to have issues with focus/concentration sometimes.  I started to wonder if he had ADHD, but felt that he was a bit young to notice that kind of thing.  I started looking up symptoms of ADHD in preschool age children and a lot of the literature was pointing to sleep deprivation as a problem with concentration.  That led me to look up sleep apnea in kids.  I always thought sleep apnea was an adult problem and mostly an overweight adult problem.  It isn’t.

All of this led me to ask my husband to make an appointment with our Pediatrician to have Ian’s anatomy checked in his nose and throat.  I have larger than normal tonsils and figured it was possible Ian inherited that from me and it could be causing problems with his airway when sleeping.  The Ped didn’t see anything to alarm him, but said we should go to an ENT and take some footage of Ian sleeping to that Doc appointment.  My husband did all that and the ENT said that he thought he saw some breathing issues on the footage and ordered a sleep study.

I was very worried about how the sleep study would go.  Ian is not a fan of people he doesn’t know touching him.  I figured it was going to be hell to get him to not pull all the electrodes and stuff off of his body once he was all hooked up.  Turns out I had absolutely nothing to worry about.  The tech that worked with us was great with kids.  The tech said he worked with all the kids that came to their facility and he did a great job putting Ian at ease.

Ian with all the stuff hooked up for his sleep study

Ian did everything the tech said to do and didn’t try to pull anything off.  The only thing Ian didn’t like was an airflow meter that was supposed to stay in front of his mouth and under his nose while he slept.  I wouldn’t have wanted that thing on either and can’t blame him for wanting it off.  The tech said we could remove it since there were other monitors around his chest to monitor breathing.  Ian actually went to sleep fairly quickly once everything was hooked up and we were in bed.  I did not go to sleep quickly and got very little sleep that night trying to doze off next to little jet engine asleep next to me.  Throughout the night the tech had to come in to put leads back on when Ian would knock them off in his sleep.  That kept me awake too.  I honestly can’t complain though since a lack of sleep is all I had to deal with that night.

The next morning the tech told me that Ian did have some episodes of a reduced oxygen intake.  He definitely has a partial obstruction of his airway and I think they call that hypopnea.  His snoring is also not normal for a kid his age.  He doesn’t stop breathing completely and so he doesn’t have sleep apnea, but the reduced oxygen intake is concerning.  The problems with his breathing are leading to fragmented sleep.  Ian isn’t getting the rest that he needs and in the long run could have a major impact on his development, if it hasn’t had some impact already.  The tech said his best guess is that the ENT will want to take Ian’s tonsils out and maybe adenoids too.  However, we will have to wait for official results.  I am hoping that the sleep center gives the results to the ENT today so we can schedule our follow-up appointment and determine the next steps.

I have learned to trust my Mommy Instinct.  There is nothing stronger.  I was worried that I was a little crazy to think that Ian stopped breathing in his sleep.  I am glad I didn’t allow my doubt to overshadow my instinct.  I would much rather be wrong than find out later that he did have a problem and I didn’t do something when I first noticed it.

Hiccups

No, I don’t have chronic hiccups.  I have had a lot of training hiccups here lately though.  My training in the month of October was spotty at best.  I hit my 33rd birthday on October 16th and it all went downhill from there.  The weekend of drinking and debauchery threw my weekend run out the window.  I managed to get back on the horse for my usual Tuesday run the following week, but then I caught the plague that is going around our office and was down for the count for a week and a half!  I managed to get off the couch on Halloween and go for a little 2 mile run and felt like I was sucking air through a straw.  My pace was still pretty good though considering (12:30).  I am hoping I can get back into the swing fully now since I was also able to go for my usual Tuesday run yesterday.  I hit a local green way trail with coworker, Caroline, instead of running in the office park.  It was a nice trail that was pretty flat and I look forward to running it again on Thursday.

In other non-running related news, we had a very eventful Halloween.  Unfortunately, it didn’t involve trick-or-treating or pumpkin carving.  While we did carve pumpkins, Jack’s was left half-finished because we had to make a dash to the ER with Ian.  He was sick all last week with a fever and body aches, but no other symptoms (no coughing, sneezing, runny nose).  We gave him Motrin to control the fever and that seemed to be doing the trick.  He was still playing and his normal self for most of the week.  Then on Friday he lost his voice.  It was strange.  We figured it was just a side effect of the cold or mild flu he had.  Saturday morning came and his voice was completely gone.  He wasn’t really coughing all that much or anything just no voice.  We called his  Pediatrician emergency line and they said to watch him and call back if he developed a rash, a fever over 101 again or had trouble breathing.  All was fine until we put him down for his nap.  He never fell asleep and ended up crying and coughing and spiking a fever again.  It sounded to me like he was having trouble breathing cause he was making a squeaky sound when he would breath in.  He was lethargic and just generally unhappy.  So, we called the Pediatrician emergency line again.  After some discussion the nurse listened to him over the phone and said to bring him in.  I figured that was going to happen.

Off to the ER we went.  We also had to go to Big WakeMed because they have a children’s ED and can admit kids if needed.  None of the hospitals closer to us can do that.  We got there and got into a room fairly quickly and they gave him some liquid steroids for inflammation in his throat and a breathing treatment.  They also had to start an IV which sucked big time.  Ian was pissed about the nasty steroid medicine, having the breathing treatment and now they were holding him down and sticking needles in his hand.  Poor kid.  They also x-rayed his throat to see narrow his windpipe was.  After a few rounds of x-rays they thought they saw something deep in his throat and said the best way to get a picture was a CAT scan!  Ugh.  I have to say through the x-rays and CAT scan the kid was a trooper.  All the technicians that worked with him were amazed at how well-behaved he was and of course said he was adorable.  When he was getting the CAT scan my heart almost broke as his chin was quivering and he was asking to get OUT OF THE SCARY ROTATING MACHINE.  I was thankful that I was able to stay in the room with him during the scan though and hold his hand.  After all the tests, the results came back that his throat was fine and his labs were clean.  The official diagnosis was Croup.  The Doctors were concerned though about his ability to breath overnight so they admitted him for observation.  Yay, a night in the hospital.  Just my kind of Halloween.  We didn’t get into a room until almost midnight and then Ian woke up like every hour crying.  When he cried his oxygen level in his blood would dip and send the meter he was wearing to monitor it into a frenzy of beeping and I mean REALLY LOUD BEEPING.  I was in the hospital bed with him and Jack was sleeping in the most uncomfortable recliner ever made.  I think everyone got about 2 hours of sleep.  Ian’s voice came back a bit on Sunday and he was fed Popsicles and ice cream or anything under the sun to get fluids in him and prove to the doctors that we could get liquid into him.  We all just wanted to go home.  We were freed right before lunch time and were so happy to be home.  This past visit makes Ian’s 3RD trip to the ER.  I told him that we really didn’t need to have a number 4.  He is on the mend now though and we just celebrated his 3rd birthday on Monday.  I hope that year 3 can be hospital visit free.