gosh, Joshua is only TEETHING and i'm shitting myself! i hope all goes well for the future!

As the Gods are my witness, when your child is older, you will look back fondly on the days that you only had to feed, burp, change, bathe, carry and teach them.

Amen, Patrick. Too, too true.

I've been offline for a week due to my computer going wonky, so I just now saw this thread. E, hope the entire household feels better very, very soon.

We've about made it to the end of the day, and so far, so good.

Guess that's all you can do, make it to the end of each day. I sincerely hope each one gets easier. :thumbsup:

I almost wish I were carrying him again...
I say ALMOST though...

And here we go yet again...
 

My eldest is back in the hospital. My wife took him in to the ER at 8:00 last night, again complaining of massive headache. CAT scan shows his ventricles to be enlarged, meaning shunt failure once again. He has been admitted, and is in considerable discomfort. He is largely incoherent as we wait for his surgeon to get things rolling. I'm not very happy about things at present, as his doctor has not yet seen him, and he's been there for 17 hours so far. Further complicating things is the fact that I *cannot* be away from work today or tomorrow, leaving my wife having to tend to him (we don't leave him without a parent when he's in the hospital...his cognition is too poor for him to adequately participate in his own care and decision-making) on about an hour's sleep.

Meanwhile, the suspended kid and the anxiety-plagued kid are at home alone.

Shunt once again replaced, eldest son once again recovering. His mom is on hospital duty until Friday when I get off work, then I'm there for a day or so.

Mrs. Elspode is about to fold. Seriously. She's done nothing but deal with the kids' various illnesses, emotional problems, school problems and everything else unpleasant and offspring-related for the past six weeks. She just went to bed after 24 hours in the hospital with my son, and nearly 40 hours awake on one hour of sleep. I had to drive her home, then pick up the 18-year old and go back to the hospital to get her car. As soon as we got home, the 14 year old made disturbing statements and then puked like a fountain for ten minutes.

Everyone is now asleep except for me.

Just keep swimming...just keep swimming....!

Jesus Effing Christ on a popsicle stick!!! If I could bundle energy up and ship it to you FedEx, man I surely would. Isn't there any way to get a permanent nurse on duty with a cell phone to ask you the important questions??

My kid is a Medicaid case, and besides, no one knows him like we do. I'm sort of anal about all this, but truly, there have been *so* many mistakes made in his care over the years that I am 100% certain that he wouldn't be at all well off without our direct observation and intervention.

Case in point...my wife called me a little while ago to inform me that Steve's neurologist had called this morning to report that the MRI taken on Tuesday, when compared to the one done last year showed distinct enlargement of his ventricles. Well, hell...if we'd actually known that on Tuesday, when the MRI was done, we would have had the procedure done almost a day sooner, and he wouldn't have had to endure the terrible headache and descent into incoherence. I mean, the dye test on Friday was inconclusive, so I think some urgency should have been associated with the MRI result, but by the time we got that info, he'd already gone into complete shunt failure and had the revision done. So bad stuff happens all the time. This is actually minor. I could make you a list, but frankly, it would piss me off when I started thinking about all the medical stuff that gets overlooked or brushed aside.

On the bright side, when you get through this episode, that's it. This is the fix, the final fix, no more trouble. Life will be good again. You'll be making music again. It's in your Cellar contract that you only have to put up with limited bullshit. Smooth sailing now. I'm convincing me and I hope you. :)

Obviously, Bruce is Right!
 

Doc sez Steve can go home tomorrow (well, to my home for a week or so, anyway). Last night in the hospital. Yay!

Finally! Get some proper sleep man.