Details to follow. [stealth edit]
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Category: Vignettes
Today’s the day
Susan had her weekly midwifes’ appointment Monday and they told her if the baby didn’t arrive by Monday night we should head to the hospital. That’s where we are now. Susan’s water has just been manually broken and we’re onto the home stretch. I’ll post again once the baby is born.
My parents are buttheads!
You just know that’s what the kid is thinking. I thought this ‘I hate my parents’ stuff didn’t start until the teen years? Check out the angry lion:
Truth be told he was enjoying himself, including letting off the occasional roar, I just happened to catch this mug as I was snapping photos, it cracked me up, and I had to share. I’ll post a happier photo if I can find one amongst the ones we took today. This as Brady on his way to the campus Halloween parade today, in an impressive and elaborate costume his Nana put together for him.
Quick Sandy update
We made it through relatively unscathed. Brady and I rode out the storm at home, playing with his toys and occasionally looking out the window to see the wind blow. Mid-afternoon I noticed some large piece had come off of the barn, so he and I suited up and went out to investigate. It turned out to be a panel of the tin roofing over the animal stalls – it got ripped off along with some pieces of the chipboard roofing that’s underneath it. I plopped Brady in the trailer of our tractor while I pulled the detritus into the barn as I didn’t want the sheet metal flying about. He was quite taken with the whole episode, and couldn’t stop chatting about the wind and the broken barn roof all morning this morning.
We also lost a tree, one which I had been considering taking down anyway, which fell over harmlessly in the middle of our yard. My neighbor lost a pretty large tree which fortunately fell parallel to his property instead of over into my yard, where it could have landed on one of our sheds.
Beyond that it was smooth sailing. We never lost power or internet, our new roof held without leaking (though once again water was coming in via the patio doors), and I even managed to watch the Monday Night Football game, though the Directv was stuttering now and then during the heaviest periods of rain.
I’ll try to post some pictures this weekend, but overall, boy am I glad that this wasn’t a repeat of last year’s week long October/November power outage.
The two minute mile
So this happened 😦
Before I go further, everyone should know we think he will be ok, but yes, that’s my son in a hospital bed yesterday. This started with a phone call at work around noon:
‘This is David Hamilton”
“David, it’s Caroline. I’m sorry to just blurt this out, but Brady’s had a seizure and lost consciousness, and we’ve called an ambulance”
!!!!!! what…the…fuck!!!!!!
Before you could say boo I was out the door and running to the college’s football field, about a half mile from my office, which is where Brady was and where the ambulance was headed. They beat me to it, and I arrived winded to the sound of the siren receding and Caroline, the director of his daycare, waiting for me in the middle of the road.
A summary of the next 40 minutes is Susan and I connecting in a panicked frenzy, me running right back up the hill to campus to get her, and us scooting off to the hospital with almost no facts in hand. Fortunately when we got there he was conscious if spacey and dazed, laying calmly in bed with one of his daycare caregivers, who fortunately had been able to go with him in the ambulance.
The preliminary diagnosis is that he had a seizure in reaction to the rapid onset of a fever. It’s called a febrile seizure and is not uncommon in kids under 6 and not threatening so long as they’re caught quickly, don’t cause choking, and you bring their temperature down quickly [edit so I don’t promulgate bad info to search visitors: according to our doctor, temperature stabilization is what is key, and quick is bad – you basically want to reduce quick changes in the child’s temperature in either direction. Older pediatric care books (which included ours) which advise cold showers are wrong. Consult with your own physician before taking any action]. We spent several hours in the emergency room with him yesterday while he stayed hooked up to a variety of apparatus. His temperature came down from 103, he took a long nap, Susan and I fretted and worried, and ultimately we had him home by around 4 or 5 last night. We have to give him medication every three hours to make sure the fever stays down, so last night was a bit rough. Today he’s still running a fever and not feeling so great, but he’s no longer as spacey and more or less happy and close to his normal self.
We have an appointment with his general practitioner late this afternoon where we’ll find out more, but hopefully above is everything there is to know about this and we won’t see anything like this again. On balance I’d say Susan and I took the brunt of this – the kid got to ride in an ambulance, something he’s fascinated with to begin with, and had something of an adventure he’s still chattering about. Meanwhile Susan and I went through a mini-hell, which later spiraled into a family argument over whether it made sense to keep our plans to head up to Maine this weekend. None of this was fun, but I’m tentatively happy that the worst of this seems to be in the past now (fingers crossed!).
You could spend $50 on a toy…
… or you could hand the kid a broom, which he’s never seen before, and set him to sweeping the porch. Brady spent half the afternoon messing about with this pushbroom:
and I couldn’t be happier. I relaxed with my book and leapt up for the occasional ‘don’t fall down the stairs after it!’ moment. Thus is a relaxing holiday spent.
Finally using our firepit
In the spring we bought a long coveted fire pit for our patio. Tonight weather, temperature, our schedule, and the approach of fall all combined into the first opportunity to use it. I guess I can look at it as the bright side of summer daylight receding 🙂
Let’s go out to the ballpark
Hard to find a better way to spend a late summer day:
The proof’s in the smile you see on Brady’s face as he shares a moment with his cousin Parker. This despite him coming down with a fever and ear infection the night before:
It’s the new taste sensation
I had a wonderful exchange with my ~20 month old son Brady yesterday. I talk to him about everything I do when I’m watching him, to help him with language acquisition and to help provide context for the world. Yesterday I was making iced tea from a powdered mix. He’s aware that I drink iced tea a lot, and knows it’s called ‘tea’ He asks for some occasionally and knows he can’t have any. So anyway, yesterday I’m making it, and talking him through the steps – water into the bottle, tea mix into the water, shake shake shake, and viola, tea!. He asks ‘tea….water?’ Yes, I put the tea mix in the water, and it makes tea!’ He considers this, then plucks a curd of cottage cheese* from his dish, holds it out to me, and demands ‘Cheese Water! Cheese Water!’
😉
* (Cottage cheese is one of his favorite foods).
So a guy walks into the Doctor’s office….
…and the Doctor says ‘holy crap these bloodwork numbers are bad, and what’s this new thing your liver is doing. What’s going on with your body?’ The guy says ‘way to make me freak out, doc, off the cuff, I dunno?’ They chat, and conclude that the fact the guy had a kid and hadn’t been able to exercise as regularly as he had been for the past 10 years, coupled with maybe a little complacency about his health, are the likeliest contributing factors. The doc tells him he has to go on 101 different pills, and the guy says let me try to fix this before we go there. The doc gives him 3 months.
The guy is me. That happened 4 months ago. As of a couple of weeks ago I’m officially back on track, with bloodwork that’s almost back to the levels I had been seeing for the past 10 years. As of last night, I’ve also officially lost 20 pounds. I had let myself get up to 190 this winter, which is 15 pounds over what I had settled on as my acceptable body weight, and 25 pounds over my ideal of 165. I’ve only been at my ideal twice in my adult life – I was there for most of college, and I got there a few months after I was diagnosed with diabetes 10 years ago. I’m going to get there again within the next month or so. We’ll see if I can keep it there this time. I’ve changed my approach. Broadly assessed, this is still low carb to take care of the blood sugar issues, but I’ve been counting calories this time. It takes a bit more work in terms of data entry, and it’s a less satisfying eating experience (I used to eat until I was full so long as there were not too many carbs – now I’m eating controlled portions), but in other ways it’s kind of easier – some months into this, I have a fair handle on what portions work. I also have some new tools which I’ll touch on in another post, but a teaser: the Fitbit is a pretty awesome little device and associated web service.
A related aside – 10 years ago when initially diagnosed, I went on a collection of medications that made me feel unwell. This helped motivate me to find other solutions. One of those solutions was Niacin instead of other cholesterol control agents. I pushed for that approach in part because of concern for my liver – I was 35 when diagnosed and couldn’t imagine a healthy liver still in me 10 or 20 years down the line with the regimen of medications they were proposing to put me on for the rest of my life. Now it looks like maybe it was the Niacin fucking with my liver, and more recent research suggest a connection between Niacin, alcohol, and permanent liver damage.
!!!
3 months ago I was completely freaked out by this, and metaphorically shaking my fist at a universe that would put me in this position (ok, so it was me, not the universe, but me acting on the best information I could find, so let me blame it on the universe). Now I’m somewhat less worried since the liver numbers came back down, but I’m also taking half as much Niacin and 1/3 less alcohol (2 drink maximum for me. Before this, weekends I was commonly hitting 3 and it wasn’t unusual for me to have a 4th). Oh, and the Doctor is still pushing for me to go on a Statin, so in another way, I’ve come completely full circle. Where I go next I haven’t sorted out yet.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 