Year Three, Week Forty-Five - Sick Eyes.....

Wednesday morning I called the transplant team and babbled like an uneducated idiot to the nurse practitioner about how Babygirl's simply not been well for a month.  She, Hubby and I all came down with the same energy-sucking body-aching whateverthehell virus after Christmas.  Hubby and I recovered - slowly! But Babygirl just dragged.  And dragged.  And dragged. She's not been eating well. She's been sleeping all the time.  She's been out of school entirely for nearly 3 weeks.  I think she may have attended twice since Christmas.  And the best thing I could say to the practitioner to describe all this?  "She has Sick Eyes."

Moms everywhere know what I mean.  I can't describe it, but every kid who is genuinely not feeling well gets a 'look' to them.  Teething kids do not get "Sick Eyes".  Kids with colds do not get "Sick Eyes".  But a kid with strep throat, the flu, chicken pox?  They get 'em.  And moms KNOW. 

The nurse practitioner faxed me some blood work orders.  The labs all came back fine, even better than fine - creatinine a commendable 0.9, hemoglobin a remarkable 11.9 (personal best for Babygirl, I think).  They did levels on medications that could be making her feel crappy - all okay. 

All mothers also know that one of the fastest cures for a sick child is to take them to the doctor.  Whether or not the doc actually DOES anything is irrelevant.  Moms inevitably panic about five minutes before the kid is going to get better anyway.  In Babygirl's case all I needed to do was bleed her, apparently. 

So on Saturday Babygirl awoke clear-eyed and with a good appetite.  She came to church to help the mission team with a fundraiser for a few hours and returned exhausted but in good spirits.  She woke up looking well this morning.  I'm hopeful that she'll be heading back to school tomorrow - she's terribly behind, and the school is behind on tutoring.  It didn't help at all that her favorite teacher died of a heart attack last week - it understandably threw his colleagues and students into an uproar that made it difficult to get the tutoring team here. 

Being sick myself was exhausting.  Working short-staffed is daunting.  Doing both with an extra layer of vague but acute sickness in your chronically ill child is terrifying.  My greatest fear is that someday I'll be so distracted by home or work that I'll miss something life-or-death in either location.

DeeDee