Our Christmas
Well, it’s been not exactly fun at the Jones’ household over Christmas this year. Several factors contributed to it, but here’s the brief rundown:
1. Lack of Christmas traditions. Laureen and I discovered that pretty much every Christmas had been spent somewhere else. We barely have the tree up, and the ornaments that would normally go on it are probably hidden in the attic. Now that Jacob’s here, we’re having to redefine our traditions in the sense of “What the heck do we do at this time of year?” I’d appreciate any ideas.
2. Jacob’s health. As some of you knew or didn’t know (wait, everyone in the world falls into one category or the other), Jacob started having a series of health issues around Dec. 22. Laureen got him into the doctor, and it turned out he had thrush. For those of you unfamiliar with childhood diseases (or have conveniently blanked them out of your mind since your kids are beyond them), thrush is a yeast infection. Pretty nasty. We got medicine for that.
December 23: Jacob gets a 102 degree fever, but doesn’t seem like he’s hurting or anything.
December 24 morning: Jacob becomes a bit listless. Fever’s still there. We call the emergency line, they advise acetominophen and ibuprofen alternatingly taken.
December 24 afternoon: We go to see the doctor. We pay $100 to be told, “There’s nothing visibly wrong.”
December 25 early morning: Jacob’s temperature spikes to 104 degrees before coming down.
December 25 day: we give him medicine and worry.
December 26 early morning: Jacob’s temperature spikes to 105 from 102 in the course of 20 minutes.
December 26 afternoon: we go to the referred care center at Children’s Hospital and spend 5 hours in an examination room. The doctor tells us “There’s nothing physically obvious.” So they do tests: blood tests (for which they stuck both of his arms (sniff), urine tests (for which he was catheterized (all men must now lower their hands to their waist and cringe for a moment)), and mouth and nose swabs. We’re told that the blood and urine aren’t showing anything, but we should consider giving him a shot of antibiotics just in case. We agree, then we wait another hour for the shot to be ordered and done. We then have to wait 20 more minutes in case there are any reactions….
There is nothing that hurts more than to see your child sick. There is nothing as painful as knowing that you have to poke and prod your child with needles, wake them up from naps, etc., to get them to feel better.
December 27 afternoon: return to the regular doctor (actually, the on-call regular doctor). The swabs came back: he has a cold.
That’s it. A common cold.
Did we do the right thing? Yes. We couldn’t have lived with another night of high fever, and we’re entitled to moments of panic as first-time parents.
3. My having to work through the holidays: this is the first year that I’ve had to work the week between Christmas and New Years’. Either it was a holiday, or I took vacation time, or I was out of work. None of those are really viable options this year.
Anyway, that’s the catch-up.