Doctors and Hospitals

After 8 ear infections last year, delayed speech and problems swallowing Lilly finally got tubes put in her ears in February .  She had the surgery early in the morning, and by the afternoon you couldn't tell she'd had anything done such a short time before.  Her eating has improved greatly, she no longer chews things up and spits them out.  She has greatly varied her diet and survives on more than goldfish crackers.  She used to run funny, we called it the "Elaine Run", like the Elaine Dance, from Seinfeld.  It turns out she must have had trouble with her equilibrium because she runs normal now.  Her speech has just exploded, it's so nice to understand each other now.  I feel bad the poor baby had to live with blocked up ears for so long, but when they can't communicate what's wrong sometimes it takes awhile to realize what the problem is.  We're just glad she's improving so much.

Eli had MRSA on his toe.  The cell phone picture isn't great, but his poor toe looked like it was rotting off.  After a ton of antibiotics, soaks and band aids his poor toe is finally back to normal.

Eli's toe was so painful he couldn't walk for a few days.  His favorite part of not being able to walk was using the wheel chair when we visited the doctor's office.  Lilly thought this was pretty great too!

Eli also had a few months of hallucinations last fall.  We spent countless hours at the hospital trying to figure out why he was seeing "big and little".  He said things would get really big, then they would get far away and really little.  This happened several times a day, and sometimes in the middle of the night.  He would wake up terrified and cry for a couple of hours until it went away.  After this went on a couple of week they scheduled us for an EEG to rule out seizures.  We had to keep Eli up until midnight, and then wake him up at 4am and keep him awake until the appointment at 7:30am.  After arriving at the appointment Eli had to have over 50 electrodes pasted to his head, and then go to sleep.  I thought this was going to be terrible, the lady scheduling the appointment asked if he was "an agreeable child".  When I told her no, she sounded surprised, and asked what I meant.  I told her Eli only generally liked to do things if they were his idea, not if someone tried to make him do something he didn't want to do.  She assured me that their staff was really capable, and everything would turn out okay, but I had my doubts.  Eli was super tired and compliant, with a little singing and a foot rub, he passed out.  The test ended up ruling out seizures, so we moved on to migraines.  The pediatric neurologist prescribed Eli a medication that made him insane.  He became aggressive and violent, when I brought him in to see the doctor he was so bad the doctor offered to sedate him.  We declined, thinking more medication wasn't what he needed and the effects wore off after about 8 hours, and one bad punch in the face for me.  

They finally decided he had Mono, and that it can cause hallucinations in young kids if they have a bad case. The hallucinations eventually faded, and we're back to normal life.

I hope this year goes more smoothly, no more 17 day long rota virus, beads up the nose or weird rashes (Eli has mollescum we can't seem to get rid of ).  Maybe the sun will bake all germs and we'll at least have a good summer!