Last night, we were anticipating, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, Daniel going to his first middle school dance tonight. Tim had just finished grading all of his students' finals, and was looking forward to getting some other things done and to playing with Esther. I was pleased that Esther is over whatever bug she has had, and seems to have returned to spending the night in her own room after a string of nights coming in and waking me up at least once.
When I put Daniel to bed, he couldn't breathe well and asked me to put some normal saline drops in his nose to help clear it out. It worked, but he told me that some of the drops had gone into his ear and made it hurt.
At 12:30, Esther came in and woke me up. I'm not even sure what inspired her to get out of bed in the first place, but she wanted to be tucked back in. Less than an hour later (but at first I didn't even realize I had been asleep, and thought it was just a few minutes later), I heard the medicine cabinet in the bathroom creaking and got up to see who was doing what. It was Daniel, looking for something to scrape out his ear with because it was really hurting. Remembering how miserable earaches were for me when I was his age, I stayed up with him for an hour, giving him an antihistamine, pain medicine (650 mg of acetominophen designed for arthritis relief, which was all I could find at that hour of the morning), a heating pad, and a little entertainment. When it got to the point where I thought the pain meds might kick in soon, I put him back in bed with instructions to wake me up if I was still hurting in half an hour. My cold feet had not yet let me fall back to sleep when I heard Esther mumbling, so I went to check on her to find her sitting on the side of her bed saying something about having lost her blankie. I retrieved the blankie, put her back in bed, and checked on Daniel. He was asleep, thankfully. So after lying awake with cold feet a while longer, I finally got back to sleep. I only had to get up one more time, at 5:30 to put Esther in her sleeping bag after she wet her bed. (Which reminds me, I need to do laundry...)
At 7:00 I got up again, made Daniel's breakfast, and woke him up to ask how he was feeling. His ear was only hurting a little bit, so I had him get up and get ready for school and was all set to send him out the door with a note asking his teacher to let him call us if the pain came back. Then he started grumbling about how much he hates asking to use the school telephone, and I was reminded of the time in the fall when I sent him with a low-grade fever and instructions to call me if he got sicker, and he spent the afternoon with his head on his desk and a fever of 102, not bothering to call me despite feeling lousy. So we decided that he was going to the doctor. Oh my word, I am SO glad we did that! Even though it took most of the morning, we now have a diagnosis...of strep throat! And I am so glad we didn't send him to school and spread the germs around his classmates...so glad we are already started on the course of medication before he got to feeling really lousy...so glad we aren't stuck with a Saturday or Sunday decision of whether to take him to an urgent care center or tough it out over the weekend...so glad I don't have to figure out how to get him to his doctor in a neighboring town (a drive I'm not comfortable with) while Tim is out of town next week...so glad that Tim had already finished his urgent work for the week and has been able to have Esther with him all afternoon so I could nap and catch up from last night. Of course, I'm not glad that Daniel has strep in the first place, but it could have been a whole lot more unpleasant! I'm also glad Daniel's doctor thought to test for strep, since he doesn't have any of the classic symptoms except an irritated throat, and even that I don't think has the tell-tale white patches. But for whatever reason he decided to swab, and it came back positive.
So our expectations for today did not come to pass. But the sun is shining, Daniel is not too uncomfortable (I think; he's been zonked out in his bed for a while now!), and we all get to spend the evening together. And that just might be good too.
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