This isn't what I signed up for!

Lucky I waited to write this post until today. Had I written it yesterday, it would have been much more depressing... H and E are sick...again. It's getting ridiculous. I seriously feel like a total fool even telling people. Soon people are going to start thinking I have some serious psychiatric illness like Munchausen Syndrome. How is it possible for two kids to be sick ALL THE TIME???

Poor Eden. Seriously. She hasn't really felt well, or eaten any solid food, for a month now. Occasionally she'll have a slightly better day where we can get her to eat a couple bites of cheese, a few Teddy Grahams, and some mandarin oranges. Other than that, nothing. She is basically on a liquid diet. John and I both feel like banging our heads against a wall. It's SO frustrating!

I took Eden to the pedi last Wednesday for the same sore throat that wasn't getting better. We talked about the possibility that it might still be mono, and maybe we had taken the blood too soon. Apparently mono doesn't show up in the blood until you've been sick for 5 days. There was a remote possibility that Eden was sick with something else first, then caught mono, and maybe it hadn't been long enough when we took the blood. We considered drawing more blood. If you read the blood draw post from the week before, you totally understand why I wasn't entirely happy with that option. The other option was to do nothing, and that didn't sound good either. I decided to give it 2 more days. If she wasn't better by last Fri we were going to take more blood. Thursday and Friday seemed better and I looked at her throat and it seemed to be improving. So we didn't take blood.

On Saturday (the day of my bday party when my mom was keeping the girls overnight) Eden started with a serious runny nose and cough. Completely different symptoms than before, and seemingly a NEW virus! On Sunday Holland caught it. John and I spent Sunday and Monday giving breathing treatments to BOTH girls around the clock. Monday was AWFUL. Like, "what the hell was I thinking when I decided I wanted kids" awful. Adding to the stress was the fact that Tuesday (today) was supposed to be my first day back to work! I had to call into work on my FIRST day back! I felt sick about it. How are we going to last through the winter after having a summer like this???

So I took the girls in to see the doc AGAIN today. Eden does have an ear infection that is actually pretty bad, so it's a good thing we went. We started the antibiotics today. Tonight she was in MUCH better spirits. I actually got her to eat some noodles and mandarin oranges for lunch, and a bit of a burrito, a couple bites of hot dog, and some teddy grahams for dinner. It was by far the best she has eaten in a month. No joke.

Other than the ear infection, the girls checked out okay. Oxygen sats were good, lungs were clear, and we are doing all the right things with the breathing treatments. The pedi was actually very relieved that we were in for something different, and not for the same sore throat. If her throat had still been bad, we would have been talking about lots of testing and blood work. In fact, the word "leukemia" actually came up in a conversation. Talk about totally freaking me out. Even with the disclaimer that the bloodwork we had already done was all normal, and it was a VERY remote possibility, it's just not a word that you ever want to hear in reference to your child. I really can't begin to even imagine it. Of course our pediatrician is very sensitive to this, and only brought it up because I kept asking a gazillion questions about what else it could be.

Thanks to my mom, who agreed to keep my kids on Saturday night, even with Eden sick and needing breathing treatments, I got to go out with my girlfriends to celebrate my birthday. I had a "little black dress" party, complete with a limo and an incredibly fun night of dancing. Thank you so much to all of my girlfriends who were there to celebrate with me, and to those of you who were there in spirit. You gals are the BEST!