Happenings

Connor's doing fine today-- he's back to his usual happy self, and spent a lot of time giggling and asking me to play peek-a-boo, so I guess he's feeling pretty chipper. We've got a neuro appointment set up for next week, and hopefully they'll be able to help us out, as I'm not thrilled about the recent seizure excitement.

We had two other appointments today-- in urology and nutrition. We'd gone in to the urology department for something fairly minor, but the urologist looked up Connor's medical history, saw he had only one kidney and a recent UTI, and completely freaked out. There was much arm waving and gnashing of teeth and wondering why the other doctors didn't get us an appointment the second they found out Connor had a UTI instead of letting us make one through the slow hospital system. We now have a call in for an appointment to do a renal ultrasound, in which they will check and see if there's any scarring or swelling or weird looking stuff on Connor's remaining kidney, and depending on how that goes other tests may be scheduled. Apparently having a UTI as a three year old with one kidney is rather more serious than I thought.

We walked to our nutrition appointment directly from the urology department. Our nutritionist decided to keep Connor on his current diet, though he's not gaining weight as fast as she'd like. He was putting on the pounds at the snail's pace of 5 grams a day, and now with the g-tube he's been promoted to sloth status at 8 grams a day. This might have been affected by the fact that for the first two weeks or so after the g-tube placement he didn't want to eat anything by mouth, so while he was still taking in calories, it wasn't quite the number of calories he would have been getting had he been eating and also getting food through the tube. Oh well. We'll go in for another weight check in a couple of weeks, and maybe we'll be booking it at a more respectable turtle pace by then.

Connor has a behavioral hearing test (probably a BOA) scheduled for tomorrow. I do not have high hopes for this test, as the last time they tried to test his hearing without using the ABR method he responded as profoundly deaf, when in fact he has a mild-moderate loss. We'll see how it goes-- maybe he'll play along this time. After his test we'll be headed over to Connor's new school district to drop off some paperwork, and then it's back to shuttling loads of our stuff over to the new apartment.

We heard back from the hospital about Connor's g-tube, which has to last us another month and has begun splitting at the intake end. They told us to duct tape it. This will go nicely with the Frankenstein-stitched other end.

~Jess

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Medical Monday To Bring You An Important Message About Poop

So this, being Monday, should be a post about something medically related. However, I haven't done my homework today. This is because Jer recently purchased himself a copy of Fallout 3 and had most of the day off. That's my excuse, anyway.

So I'm not going to have a Medical Monday. I'm going to take a break and talk about another theme that for some reason pops up periodically in this blog: poop.

That's right. This is yet another post about poop.

So Connor has been having some GI troubles lately. Prior to his g-tube placement, constipation was the issue. Well, no longer. Now on any given day I'm changing between 6-10 diapers. This is not particularly my idea of fun. I'm going to tell you about an event so horrific I believe I am now traumatized for life. The squeamish may wish to go find something else to read. It's not going to be pretty.

The day that shall forever go down in infamy as the day of the Poop That Would Not Die started out pretty much like any other day. Of course, Connor did have that as-yet-undiagnosed UTI and so was rather crabby, and also I'd already changed four diapers, but other than that we were just going about our usual business. Jer was away at work, and Connor and I had just eaten lunch. I was happily sitting with one hand tucked under the little guy on my lap at the computer desk, checking my e-mail, when Connor's rear end emitted the kind of noise that makes scientists monitoring volcanoes push the big red alarm button and run for the hills.

Connor, who felt that the noise might not have tipped me off, immediately stuck his hand down his diaper and emerged with unquestionable and very disgusting evidence that he needed changing. He's into experimenting with exotic flavors right now, so the hand immediately headed towards his mouth. With a grimace of horror I grabbed his wrist and held it away from his body. I then gingerly picked the little guy up with the other hand and trotted down the hallway to his bedroom to change him.

Unfortunately for me, I neglected to do two things: oversights which I would have ample cause to regret later. The first that was while maneuvering Connor out of my lap one-handed, I failed to keep him perfectly level. The second was that I didn't pin his other hand.

I got about two thirds of the way down the hallway when I realized that the hand underneath Connor's rear end now seemed to be damp. I glanced down and saw to my horror that my entire hand was now covered in what looked like chocolate syrup, and not only that, but we had left a trail all the way down our beige carpeted hallway. I sprinted the rest of the way into Connor's room, leaving poop puddles in our wake, and plopped the kid down on one of his washable rugs.

I now had a dilemma. I had one free hand, currently covered in poop. The other relatively clean hand was clamped down on Connor's wrist. After ineffectual attempts to get Cricket to dial Jer on the phone (if little Timmy fell down the well, Cricket would shove the well cover the rest of the way on and take a nap on top of it) I finally managed through a creative use of diaper wipes to at least rid my hand of the worst of the damage so I could concentrate on getting Connor cleaned up.

I wiped off his hand, cleaned up his rear, took off his soiled clothes as well as mine, bundled all of them up in the now soiled rug, and threw the whole mess into the washer. Then I scrubbed my hands, started a bath running, found the carpet cleaner and took care of the poop trail that led all the way back into the office. I grabbed Connor and plopped him in the bathtub, which is where I realized that his OTHER hand was also somehow completely covered in poop. Connor got a thorough scrubbing. I gave myself a quick bath, dressed Connor, and then set him down clean and wonderful into his crib so I could put away the cleaning supplies and get dressed.

I was in the bathroom, reaching up into the cabinet above the toilet, when I happened to look into the mirror. I froze.

There was poop in my hair.

Not just a little bit. There were large streaks of poop all down one side of my head, lovingly applied by Connor, who apparently wanted to spruce me up a bit and thought dramatically stinky lowlights would be just the thing. Being a reasonable, intelligent adult, I did the only thing possible in this situation.

I freaked out. I believe my exact words were something along the lines of:

"YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!"

Some people just can't stand roaches. For other people, snakes cause them to leap in terror atop the nearest available chair. Not me. I have no problem with any creeping, crawling arachnid, insect, reptile, or rodent. I'm the type of person who not only carefully catches jumping spiders and deposits them gently outside my house, but then I go look them up in my identification book so I can call my Dad and tell him about them later. Well, I have now discovered my phobia. Poop in my hair reduces me to a gibbering, frantic crazy woman. Thank God my razor was in the other bathroom, or I probably would have grabbed it and shaved myself bald.

As an aside: I think they should make you sign a contract before having children. It would contain a clause saying: "WARNING: HAVING CHILDREN MAY CAUSE APPLICATION OF POOP TO YOUR HAIR." Give it to the girls on prom night and watch the teen pregnancy rate plummet.

Anyway, back to the story. I hurtled into the shower, my screaming now interspersed by language that I will not be recording for posterity, and turned the water on as hot as it would go. If it was possible using only hands and a washcloth to scrub one's hair and scalp completely off, I would have done it.

After having shampooed and rinsed my hair for the eighteenth time and inspected it minutely to make sure not a single particle of offending poop remained, I toweled off, got dressed, and dragged myself back into Connor's room. Connor, no doubt resenting not only my leaving him in his crib for so long but also my rejection of his hairdressing attempts, was pitching a royal fit. I leaned over, picked him up, and singing him a little soothing song, bounced him on my hip.

He pooped all down my leg.

~Jess