New casts!

So last night after stretches, Laelia was so fussy that I put her down for a late nap. She slept for about 40 minutes, then woke up screaming unnaturally loud. I picked her up and as I did, her eyes became large and she screamed even louder! Charley got home from work about ten minutes later and she had been screaming non-stop since waking. We noticed that we could only count four of her five toes on the left side. Then we noticed that both casts had slipped down and the toes were receding back into the casts. Also I could see the pin in her right foot sticking out more than normal.

This began a rush to the emergency room followed by hours of waiting on people to cut the casts off. It took forever which was very frustrating.

When Charley first arrived he ran into the surgeon’s fellow, George, who had assisted with both of Laelia’s surgeries. A miracle run-in! George was off for the day and walking to his car. He took a look at Laelia and agreed this was going to be an emergency cast removal and escorted Charley and screaming Laelia into the appropriate place (between the Emergency room and the casting area) to register and wait. And wait and wait and wait!

Laelia freaked while getting the casts removed and redone. It was a little traumatic since she doesn’t know if she’s getting surgery or not. She tends to mistrust everyone in hospital situations. Her little legs and feet also hurt like crazy and that only got worse when the casts were removed and the blood flowed back into her toes. Charley also made the decision not to feed her anything in case they needed to put her under a local to take the pin out. (Which they didn’t, but we didn’t know that at the time because they didn’t communicate with us.)

Earlier in the day our sitter, Megan, had called to say that her baby boy had the stomach flu and she couldn’t watch Lali. Thankfully Melissa got back to me pretty fast and said she could help. I was wondering if I should take the day off tomorrow instead.

I’m doing everything from a cell phone on the couch since I had a bad reaction to the flu shot I took earlier in the day. I felt worthless and stressed until they came back. (Listening the the baby scream while getting casts removed from a stupid cell phone is no fun.)

When they got home I grabbed them both and hugged them tight. I fed Laelia and gave her some pain meds before bed. Charley was shoving food down his own throat at the time; he had barely eaten anything all day. I put Lali  to bed a little before midnight, but she was having a hard time of it. She woke us up every 20 minutes (which I did not react to very well) and Charley gave her more pain meds a little early. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and I kicked Charley out of bed (poor honey) and put Laelia in the bed around 3:00 AM. We listened to the rain together and she calmed down a bit as round two of pain meds kicked in. She asked, “What’s that?” and I answered, “Rain,” in a half-asleep voice about 50 times straight. She liked when I talked non-stop, so I prayed out loud for a while.

Then when I felt she was doing better, I suggested she go back to her crib. This was met with her shaking her head “no” and snuggling up to me. But I knew better, and carried her back to her own crib. I prayed that she would sleep and almost as if God was just waiting for the magic words, she fell fast asleep right then and there, a little after 4:00 AM.

I’ve been seeing the caring side of God lately. It’s been too easy to be agnostic during the hard times, but I read, “Cast all your cares on God because he cares for you.” (Found in the last chapter of 1 Peter, somewhere.) And I’ve been trying it. It’s a calming effect.

Although when my alarm went off at 6:00 AM, I laughed like a crazy woman.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 11:22 am and is filed under coping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.