Spinning plates
Health is a relative thing. Most of my relatives are healthy. A few of my relatives are not healthy anymore--they're dead. Somewhere between health and death there's a thing called chronic illness. You deal with varying degrees of being not healthy, or sick, by managing it, because there's no "fixing" it, unless God intervenes, which He can anytime--like today. Chronic illness is something that most of us experience to one degree or another as we age, but some people get to live with chronic illness at an earlier age.
Annie's chronic illness is like spinning plates. Remember on the Ed Sullivan Show, there was guy who set up poles and one by one put dinner plates on the tops of the poles until they were all spinning? Huh? Okay, Ed Sullivan was a guy, who had a show, and it was on every Sunday night at 8--duh. So anyway, the plates. The last couple of weeks we had the vomiting plate spinning, then came the constipation plate, then the seizure plate. These plates spin and then fall down for awhile, and then get picked up and start spinning again--usually by reasons and forces that I cannot predict or understand. Oh, and there's always the Addison's plate, that spins and never falls down.
Now, AS IF that weren't enough. (And, just so we're clear--I do not have Munchausen's by proxy.) So, getting back to the plates, specifically, the vomiting plate--yesterday, the first day Annie's home, she threw up 3 times. We had begun tapering her back to regular hydrocortisone doses--not all the way down, but a little less. And, every time she threw up, we gave her more hydro--in a reactive way, rather than proactive, because we didn't think she needed it. She was cleaned out, right? And she hadn't thrown up at the hospital the last day we were there, right? And she had no other symptoms, right? But she started throwing up, so we broke out the hydro in shovel-fulls.
Sometime last night I made up my mind that I was going to take her to see her pediatrician today. A-gain. I made the appointment for 4:30 PM.
This morning, I gave her triple dose hydro, noticed she wasn't throwing up, and then took her to school. But, while Annie was in OT working the arm that she doesn't use so much, she complained--loudly. Her nurse called me, and we brainstormed: Maybe a sprain? Maybe a break in her arm or elbow? I had noticed in the last few days that her arm didn't seem quite right, but because she doesn't use it much, it hadn't gotten to the front of my mind. Well, after school, I took her down to Evergreen to get an xray before my 4:30 doctor's appointment, and there does appear to be a possible tiny "buckle" fracture at her right wrist. So, her pediatrician put a splint on it, and it should heal in about 2 weeks. And, this would explain the need for more hydrocortisone.
So, the fractured wrist plate went up today. Not a big plate, but one that needs to spin for a while. What makes it problematic is the 2 week healing time, and the fact that we had scheduled Constraint Induced Therapy to begin next week. In CIT, her good left arm is casted for 3 weeks while her not-so-good right arm (the one that is now splinted) is worked so it wakes up and starts pulling its own weight. Hopefully tomorrow, the doctors and therapists will discuss the possibility of doing CIT in some modified manner. I would like to get the CIT plate up in the air.
Now I was talking to Peter about all this on the phone this evening. He had heard the whole story from his wife, Cris, who I "happened" to run into on my way into the hospital to get the xray. Cris was just walking out of the hospital after her OB appointment, so she turned around and came back in with us while Annie got her picture taken. Anyway--after updating Peter on all this he just asked, "Why doesn't God just heal her??" I wish I had the answer to that question. But I don't, and I don't have too much time to think about it, because these plates need to keep spinning.