Lamentations of Ill Health

I decided to add up the number of doctor, dentist, and eye doc appointments we've had in the last six months. Can you guess? 20 doctor, 9 dentist, 8 eye, 2 urgent care visits, and 2 hospital trips. Crazy, huh? It isn't like we don't have anything else to be doing either.

So the eye appointments are pretty easy to explain. Jonathan and I had our normal contact prescriptions renewed. We knew from last year that Isabelle and Miriam needed new eyeglass prescriptions. This was David's first appointment. It turns out he has the worst eyes out of any of us. He is majorly far-sighted. We were then worried about Emily since David's were bad so the eye doc said to bring her in. We lucked out, she has perfect vision. But of course then we had to deal with going back to order and fit the glasses, etc.

Dentist - We each (down to David) had a cleaning of course. Isabelle ended up with 2 cavities so she was back in later for fillings. It turns out Miriam has 7 cavities. What? She must have her Dad's teeth since I've only had 2 fillings in my life. Jonathan of course had cavities. He always does. So he ended up with 1 filling and 1 crown. So far David and I are in the clear. :)

Doctor - Of course I had a bunch of OB appointments, and then the 6-week check after Zachary was born and the IUD. Unfortunately I also went in twice with my sickness just before Zachary's birth. We've had a bunch of well-checks and immunizations. Zachary and Emily both had yeast infections on their bottoms. And then this week Emily was having a bunch of stomach pain. We were worried about her having the same thing as Isabelle (I'll explain later) so we had her blood tested. Luckily she doesn't have what Isabelle has, but she does have a virus. Oh joy. We've also had our share of flus, colds, poison ivy, sunburns and allergies. Even Jonathan, who never gets sick, was completely wiped out by a flu.

Urgent Care - Two weeks after Zachary was born, Emily fell while in the food storage room and hit her chin against a metal shelf corner. Luckily urgent care was still open so she ended up with ~8 stitches. Unfortunately, she refused to let us remove the stitches later (even with Aunt Miranda's help) so Jonathan took her back to the clinic to get them removed. Apparently she'll hold still for a doctor, but not for us.

Two weeks ago I scraped my knuckle while working in the chicken coop. No big deal. I disinfected it, put neospirin on it and a bandaid. It still got infected. A few days later the infection starting streaking up my hand and into my arm. It was my turn in the Urgent Care with blood poisoning. I was put on a couple of antibiotics and an epsom salt soak. I was amazed at how quickly the salt soak pulled the poison out. It was pretty cool. It also made me appreciate how before modern medicine a small cut like I had could have killed a person.

The first hospital visit was of course the birth of my son. I am very grateful that there were no complications or problems.

The second was Isabelle. She has had diarrhea for 7 months. Not a single normal stool. After multiple doctor visits, xrays of her stomach, stool samples and a couple of blood works, they recommended she go to a pediatric gastroenterologist. He recommended an EGD and a colonoscopy. So she was in the hospital for both of those last week. Most of the time I was trying to keep her distracted so she wouldn't be scared so I didn't have time to think about it, but when they wheeled her away, it hit me. The life of my little girl was now in the hands of a doctor and an anesthesiologist. And while she wasn't having surgery or anything dangerous done, I was still scared. 3 things kept me together... prayer, my husband sitting next to me, and my little baby boy who needed to nurse and who pooped through his outfit (the normality of this was comforting). The results came back later in the week. She has ulcerative colitis. Luckily, she has a mild case and they believe that the lighter meds will put it into remission. I just found out my Dad has it and I never knew, so if her case is like his then I hope it won't affect her very much during the course of her life. Unfortunately, it is genetic so the chances of our other children getting it are high. At this point I'm just feeling grateful that it isn't Crohn's disease, grateful to finally know what is wrong so we can start fixing it, and grateful that I never had it since it must have come through my genetic line.

Jonathan says "getting sick stinks. We should stop doing it." I agree.