In which case google is a bad thing...

Today has been and interesting dichotomy of feelings and emotions. Let me see if I can record some of them.

Let me just tell you about my night last night. I went some thing like this "Pat Hammond, come on down, you're the next contestant on "Sleep Torture Chamber".

Round One: We are going to see how you handle a new room mate at 9:30 at night. Yes we know this is room mate number 5. Welcome to as the "room mates turn". This room mate has a broken femur from his motor bike landing on top of his leg when he tried to go over a rock. He was helicoptered in here and at 6'2", his head and feet stuck out either end of the helicopter. And they were just like open in the air. Of course a fifteen year old kid that enjoys the thrills of motor biking probably thought this was way cool. His mom not so much. Think hysteria. So new room mate comes in, and his bed will not stop making a beeping sound, that probably had all the dogs in the neighborhood running for the hills. Nothing they did could make it stop for about twenty minutes. As a side note, this room mate seemed very nice, with equally nice parents. One out of five not bad.

Round Two: Hospital Beds for dummies. Jared's bed decided to stop working, when he tried to put it down so he could go to sleep. Several nurses worked on it and nothing. Finally they pulled the CPR release to get the bed to go flat. They said they would put in an order to maintenance. But who knows how long that would take. In the mean time because Jared does not like to lay flat, they brought some pillows to prop him up. Yipee! Have I mentioned my goal to collect as many pillows as I can. So far we are up to ten, which I let Jared have one or two, and I use the rest to try and line my cot to make it comfortable.

Round Three: Throwing up is fun to do, fun to do, fun to do. Broken leg kid is recovering from surgery to put a rod in his leg from his hip to his knee. Some bright nurse forced him to drink grape juice to soon after surgery. So my mommy radar woke up when I heard vomitous noises on the other side of the curtain. (Apparently, the spell checker does not think that vomitous is a word, well I beg to differ.) Think the noise it makes when you dump out a dish pan of water. Not good. I hurried and pushed the button for the nurse, asked if he was ok, and then went out to find some one to help. Then I blissfully went back to bed while two nurses got him cleaned up. And blessedly, my allergies are so bad here, I couldn't smell at thing. This was probably about 12:30.

Round Four: A visit from the "Maintenance Man" He insisted on turning on the lights. Didn't they teach him to do repairs in the dark, like reading Braille or something? It is slightly unsettling, to wake up and see a strange bearded gentleman, standing at the foot of Jared's bed. Luckily he had one of the those work shirts with the name on it. You know Bob, or Ed, or Fred or something like that. This was 2 am.

Round Five: Let's have a heart attack when awakened by a loud crashing noise, in the middle of the night. The nurse moved the TV cart slightly, in order to get in and check on Jared. When he moved the cart, the game cube fell onto the floor and sounded like a bomb going off. I pretty much jumped to the ceiling and lost a year off my life expectancy. This was at 4 am when they came to check his vitals and do his IV.

So yea that is one night of sleep I will never get back. We all did then manage to sleep in until nine thirty. This is against the rules for me, because supposedly the fold out beds are suppose to be put away by 8 am. Luckily it seems to be more of a guideline than a code.

So to protest the bad night of sleep I got, I decided to stay in my pajamas for the day. This may have been a mistake, as people gave me strange looks. But fortunately I am more of a slave to comfort than fashion, so all is good.

Next I ate my yummy breakfast of left over chips from Qdoba. I had brought it last night. Man I love those things. And since I really did not have much else I made due. Hey they have corn in them, can they really be that different from corn chex?

After that delicious meal, I received a call from my sister, inquiring in a rather casual way if Diana had been immunized against chicken pox. I replied that she has, but why would you ask such a question. Oh there maybe a chance that she has them now. What. How. What. Is it possible to still get them, even if you were immunized? So she and her cousin, who was also covered in spots, stayed home from church. At this point they weren't sure about it. But something fun to contemplate, another sick kid miles away from home. By tonight we have determined that it can't be chicken pox, because several of the kids have these spots, but they were not together two weeks ago to be exposed together. It is probably something they got from the hot tub at my sisters house. So they will be fine in a few days.

We then had a pleasant afternoon. I spent a lot of time on the computer as you can tell from all my posts. At one point Marion and Jared's scout master came down. They gave Jared his board of review so he can get his star. Then they gave both of us the sacrament. I hadn't realized how much I missed that since neither of us have been to church for three weeks. After dinner, we had a visit from Jared's teacher quorum advisor and his family. He shared a scripture with Jared about seek and ye shall find and how Heavenly Father answers our prayers. We had a nice prayer with them before they left.

This is where things went downhill. Yesterday and today Jared has had a very low grade fever. In fact the doctors here do not think that it is a fever, because it is only 99.8. So I then had a freak out moment. I started obsessing about and started imagining that the infection was coming back. Because that has been his history: he has a fever, then they find a pocket of infection, they drain the pocket, he does better for a few days, the fever goes away, the fever comes back, they find a new pocket of infection, they drain again, he does better for a few days, the fever goes away, the fever comes back. Yea, we have done this cycle four times so far, so call me neurotic for thinking here we go again.

So pretty much even though a doctor told me earlier, that for someone his age it is not considered a fever until it reaches 101, me not so much convinced. Then I talked about my concern with my mom, in front of Jared, and got him to board my train to paranoia. Bad, bad mom. At this point he broke out in shivers, and was complaining of being too cold. I am also extremely worried about his weight loss. He has lost 11% of his total body weight. That seems alarming to me. So this is where I googled weight loss. And read something about how when you loose too much weight, your body looses its ability to regulate its temperature. Well that just pretty much put me over the edge to loony toon freak out phase of mothering. Which of course scared Jared to death. He envisioned that he was going into shock again, and that he was going to die. Good gracious, I have got to do better at containing my freak out, until I go into the hall. Finally a doctor was paged to come and talk me down from the ledge. I asked him about what I had read on Google. He said that is very, very rare, and not something they are not worried about right now. I am trying to convince myself that he is right, and things are OK. But deep down, I don't think they are taking care of him well enough. It is minimally adequate at best. And I feel so helpless to do anything about it. I am just to nice and just go with the flow, but I am going to have to step it up and start being the squeaky wheel to get some grease. And so here I am for the second night staying at the hospital, because there was no way that either Jared or I could stand for me to leave him after all that went on this evening.
But hey good news, at least I am already in my pajamas.

Really more than anything, I want to get him away from the people. Just take him home and nurse him back to health. Maybe that is part of their maniacal, devious plan. I wasn't quite sure I was ready to take care of him, when we were in the PICU, but now they have driven my down the lane of please, please, just let my people go.