Always On My Mind

A phone call at 6am woke me up on Saturday during my weekend on-call. I was asked to go out for another visit, about 6 hours after I got home the night before. I woke Michael up enough to tell him that Oliver was all his for the day, as I could tell that this was going to be another nutto weekend.

And then I heard it. Cough, cough. Cough, cough. Just those four little hacks sent me into a tiny bit of despair. Not. Again. It was my previous weekend on-call when Ollie got so sick and was admitted to Chidren's for the second time. I had just heard the warning signs of something approaching again. I left the house, prayerful and worried. Oliver spent the day with Auntie Val while while Michael tended to some serious video-gaming business. The update I got in the afternoon was that Oliver was doing fine, just a little warm.

Sunday was blessedly quiet, but Oliver's fever persisted. His skin was hot, he was absolutely exhausted, and wanted nothing but to lay on me the whole day. And that's what he did, except for when he took a bottle, and poltergeist-threw-up 6 ounces in three efficient and projectile heaves. Oliver's onesie, my pants, our ginormous polar fleece blanket, another blanket, and an elephant lovie took a trip upstairs to strip. I put every wet thing in the washing machine, pushed "power" and "start." It stopped. Then powered off. Really? A vomiting child and broken washing machine? Exasperated and in our skivvies, Ollie and I put on clean but grungy duds and headed back downstairs to snuggle.

I recently attended a conference where the presenter insisted that to every situation there is a cost and a benefit. If you're in the midst of something bad, you're already paying the cost; you might as well take the benefit. The benefit I'm taking is snuggling. As Michael pointed out, a quiet snuggle-session with our newly-crawing 10 1/2-month-old just doesn't come by very often any more. And so we draped on each other all day long, as I watched his fever rise. He puked again.

Monday was better, and today he is a million times better. He woke up, smiled and played, three things he wasn't doing yesterday. I had my own doctor's appointment today, so I dropped him off beforehand at daycare. After telling Pam that Oliver's fevers have left, I lifted Ollie from his carseat to find that his little hands were heating up. Sigh.

Tomorrow I have yet another appointment for myself. I am going to have a CT scan of my heart. As many of you know, most of my congential heart defects have been repaired, but I do still have a leaking heart valve. Every year there is a new guess as to how long it will be until I need to have open heart surgery to fix it. Once I have the surgery, I'll need follow-up open-heart surgeries about every 10 years or so, and will be on blood-thinners for the rest of my life. I'm not really excited for the process.

I don't know if my cardiologist heard something different when I went in for my annual exam, if I'm simply getting older, or if he wants more information before he retires, but something led him to think we should get a CT scan to see how much my heart valve is in fact leaking. This info will help us better determine how much time we have until the surgery will be needed. I'm scared. It's not something I think about every day, but I'm recognizing that between the three of us, our health is something that's always on my mind.

Then again, so is this.

I'll be just fine.