Recovery

It’s been a rough week.  A really, really hard week.

Sam’s stomach has been getting worse and worse.  He came home from school last Wednesday and last Friday, and then on Monday, I got a call from the nurse.  Again.  He was in the office, crying.  His stomach hurt so badly.  I got him to go back to class for a while, but it didn’t last.  It just hurt, and he couldn’t stop crying.  So we picked him up and brought him home.  We brought him into the pedi GI doctor and he pushed up the scheduled endoscopy/colonoscopy to Wednesday.

If you’ve ever tried to not feed a kid for a day, then you might understand what Tuesday was like.  Of all three of my kids, the one who eats, consistently, all the time, is my Sammy.  Jessie skips meals more often than not, and Julie fasted on Yom Kippur simply by never asking for food.  But Sam – Sam always eats.  He eats breakfast, lunch, dinner, is a big fan of snacks.  The food helps with the pain.  Combining no food (which added hunger pains on top of the existing pain) with not being able to eat to help with the already onmipresent pain, and then tacking on getting him to drink 32 oz of miralax (every sip made him cry harder) – it was hellish.  We’d cycle thru from complaining to crying to begging me to help him to finally accepting comfort and then I’d distract him with something – we did that five or six times.  I called my mom and had her come out and take the girls out for dinner – because I couldn’t feed them.  I couldn’t feed myself – I couldn’t even pee.  Sam was a hot mess, all day long.

The procedure was actually the easiest part of it.  Sam was so brave, and even though he was scared, he was polite and respectful to all the doctors and nurses (and there were thousands crammed into the little room with us).  He did great, woke up easily enough after the anesthesia.  There were three different options we could have ended up with – they could have found terrible, terrible things in there, but they didn’t.  They could have found absolutely nothing wrong, and told us that he was making the whole thing up, but they didn’t do that either.  Instead, what they found was mostly an incredibly healthy boy – but evidence of inflammation in one specific section of his stomach.  We can treat it with medicine, and we’re optimistic that this will fix the problem.

As optimistic as we are – I think we’re all feeling a little shell-shocked.  He’s missed the better part of a week at school, and we’re drowning in make up work.  He was groggy and tired this morning, and I couldn’t force myself to make him wake up and go.   We took the whole day and just stayed home.  He listened to books on tape, worked on math homework and played too many video games.  I did laundry and dishes, and cleaned.  I gave the kids a bath, made a lovely dinner.

It’s been a long week, and I’m happy it’s over.  Hanukkah has gotten entirely lost in the shuffle of this week, and I can’t muster up the energy to really do much about that.