In Which I Have Married The Bionic Man

The little guy had a really rough night last night-- probably due once again to the eczema, which is now in full-blown breakout mode. He even has it on his eyelids. It looks extremely uncomfortable. My guess is that this breakout is due to stress, and possibly also because he's around other kids now, some of whom may be from households with parents that smoke, use heavily scented detergent, etc. The kid is extremely sensitive to that sort of thing, though it's gotten better. When he was really tiny I couldn't even use scented soap or shampoo without him breaking out, which was sad because I think unscented soap and shampoo are terribly boring. Except for the oatmeal honey kind of soap, which smells pretty good.

But I digress. We'll take it super easy tomorrow with the little guy (he has Wednesdays off from school) and hopefully he'll start clearing up.

This morning Jer and I headed up to the hospital to have his casts, stitches, and staples removed. His feet and legs look really good, considering. His left foot does have several wires sticking out of the skin (they'll be pulled out in a month or so), which is a little disconcerting. The skin graft site is also pretty crazy-- because they perforate the skin in order to make it stretch farther, it ends up with this really interesting grid pattern over the whole graft site, which it will apparently keep for a long time. Between the wires and the grid his left leg has a very sci-fi look too it-- though with the staples out it's not quite as industrial as it was before. At any rate, it's pretty awesome, or at least as awesome as anything involving your husband getting half-blown-up could possibly be.

So now he has some air casts, which are kind of like really expensive (or actually after looking it up and comparing the prices, really cheap) Air Jordans in that they have a system of pockets inside you can inflate to cushion the foot. They also have heavy-duty treads on the bottom, which is kind of misleading since Jer still won't be doing any weight bearing for at least the next three months. Jer can remove the casts to do his range-of-motion exercises and for bathing, though he's still not allowed to get the skin graft wet so the word "bathing" is rather a misnomer, as what he'll actually be doing is "washragging."

It ended up being a really, really long day (it took over two hours just to remove the staples and stitches) and we spent all told about seven hours at the hospital, so we'll be glad of the break tomorrow, too!

~Jess