A Tale of Three Seizures

This is a gruesome, gory, medical story. It's two years old, almost exactly. And I need to share it. There's something in telling these stories that heals.

Phase I
It began with puking, 36 hours, every half hour on the dot. The docs congratulated me on keeping him well hydrated. He stopped his clockwork regurgitation for Blue's birthday. My parents visited. He laid listless and tired on the couch.

Phase II
The next morning he was sparky and alive. When he requested yogurt, I delightedly skipped off to the kitchen to fetch it.
A sharp garbled cry. And then Huck calling to me to dial 911.
"Are you kidding?" I asked.
"My God. NO!!" He screamed.
I dialed, then looked, a method I recommend for all moms.
Huck had him in his arms. He was curled up. Stiff yet vibrating. His mouth was foamy. He wasn't breathing. His lips were rapidly turning blue.
The operator came on the line and I could not speak. I could not breath. I could not stand. I could not sit. I could not exist in any way that I knew of. I handed the phone to Huck. He juggled all of it in his hands, while I circled the living room, moaning, half standing. A cry finally came from me and I could hear the operator say, "It sounds like he's breathing now."
"No," Huck said.
"But I heard a cry," She noted.
"That's my wife."
I heard those blessed sirens and flung open the door.
Coyote breathed a little. His body unclenched.
The medics ran full tilt in to the house. This look passed between them. One scooped up Coyote and ran back out. I jumped into the ambulance in my socks.
Huck, he of clear heads, dressed Blue, shut doors, hung up phones, put on shoes, and followed in the car.

Phase III
The ER was empty, except for us (and people wonder why I love small towns). The Docs asked questions while Coyote groaned and batted his eyes on the table between us. They assumed a febrile seizure. But the medics were sure it wasn't just that. And also, we kept explaining, he HAS NO FEVER!

Suddenly, it began again. The stiffness, the curled body, the shaking, the bluing, the horrific bluing of his lips. Only this time, I knew he would likely survive.
To stop it, they sunk him into a chemical coma. I sat in the waiting room with Blue, while Huck stayed for the spinal taps, the MRI, the CT, the yadadada. Everything came back negative. Which was positive as far as I could tell. No meningitis: YEAH! No brain tumor: YIPEEE!
He stayed unconscious, however, and we spent the night. I watched Oprah's Earth Day episode in his bed. Did you know that if we all stopped taking receipts at gas stations we'd save 14 billion trees every second?

Phase IV
When they pulled him up out of the chemicals, all he wanted to do was nunu. I'd weened him in February, but he still wanted that ultimate comfort. And who was I to deny him? I hopped right up on that bed and let him on.

And that is how I learned that people bite down really really hard when they are having a seizure. I shrieked and EVERY doctor and nurse in the building ran to us. It took several hands to extricate me! They calmed down once they knew where all that blood was coming from. I did not, however. They offered stitches once the seizure subsided and we all knew the child was okay. But I opted for the surreal "comfort" of a latex glove filled with ice, and then a bandaid. Coyote has never nunu-ed again.

Phase V
I decide to host Blue's birthday party anyway. The hall was rented. I'd made the world's awesome-est, glittering alligator-in-a-pink-boa pinata. And the list of phone calls to cancel was too daunting. What I remember: sitting, empty and exhausted during musical chairs and not standing when the music began. Kate made a cake. My friends invented games for the kids. They set up. They cleaned up. And my poor little Blue and I schlepped back to the hospital when it was all over. What a shitty little birthday! Luckily Grandpa Richard was there to perk it up for her.

Phase VI
They put him on phenobarbital, saying it would make him uncoordinated and grumpy but halt the seizures. He was two and a half! So he was REALLY REALLY two and a half. We popped a helmet on his noggin and tried to not get bitten by the world's tiniest monster. He hated that phenobarbital! He would not take it! Twice a day we had hour long sessions trying to get him to swallow that stuff. I would weep, begging him, the threat of his blue lips driving me insane. I bought every sugary drink in the store to help him get that stuff down. Blue remembers those days with such sweet fondness: "Remember how sometimes sugary drinks can be really healthy? Mmmmm." Sheepish about the volume of sugar-crap I was buying, I insecurely told the 18 year old cashier what noble cause it was for.
"Does he take more than one kind of medicine?" The stupid kid asked.
"Yes."
"Does he refuse to take all of them?"
"No, just this one."
"Well, I'd listen to him if I were you. I did that when I was three and my mom had fits over it. But it turned out I had a life threatening allergy to the stuff. Kids know, you know."
Yeah yeah yeah, that's how I parent, you pimply nincompoop! But this is life and death! I smiled politely and left with my burgeoning cart of red flavored high fructose corn syrup.

Phase VII
The rash that followed did not concern the doctors. After two weeks of me not working and yet paying for daycare, we got the go ahead to put him back in with his less wobbly peers.

I stepped back in to the office, to lots of support, and to the phone ringing. It was the day care. Coyote suddenly had a very high fever and wasn't breathing properly. I ran right back out the door I'd entered just 3 minutes before. Luckily, there was lots of construction so the 20 minute drive was elongated to 40 minutes. It was not a calm, soothing trip and what the workers heard were not my most supportive comments.

Phase IIX
The week that followed involved daily visits to the doctors' office in which all the pediatricians gathered in our room to dance and sing "What do you do with a problem like Coyote? How do you pin a diagnosis to the ground?" They phoned their colleagues from various pediatric specialties. They pulled out their text books. They were in doctor heaven! This was no common cold. This was not a butterfly stitch. This was M*E*D*C*I*N*E! I don't think we could have gotten better care, even at the bigger hospitals.

Coyote indeed has a life threatening Phenobarbital allergy. His skin separated from his tissue. Each item on the list of "things to look for" came upon us. Goopy eyes: run to the doctor! Coughing: run! Coma: how can you tell?
At the end of that awful week, I looked to the backseat of our jalopy to see how Coyote was. He was slumped and listless, non-responsive. We flew to the doctors' office. They saw me running, Coyote flopping in my arms. They threw open the doors. We ran into an exam room, the doctors close on our heels.
They checked him. And then they left. One stayed, sat down, sighed.

What! What! What!

"This has been so stressful, hasn't it?" She began, calmly.
"I felt like I handled it well the first two weeks and now I'm a mess."
"Honey. Coyote is a very tired little boy. He is napping. I suggest you go home and do the same."

End of Story.

Epilogue:
Coyote has been seizure free since. He had more tests, all wonderfully negative results. They don't know what causes these things. Perhaps the brain is just trying to "reboot"? He was never tried on another medication. Our current doctor says that if he makes it to five (3 months away!) without another seizure, we should be in the clear. I think we will be.

During this all, another cashier asked about Coyote's rash. And I told a bit of the story. She said the same thing happened to her when she was kid. Three seizures after a bad illness. She'd never had another one. By then, I was ready to listen to the cashiers, no matter their age or station. And I decided then that was the case with my boy. May it be so.

This is not a tremendously funny story. It's a story that haunts me when I'm reminded of it. And there have been several reminders this week, including the anniversary.

Neanderthal Fog

All this moving is causing me to develop a severe case of idiocy. Or it could be staying home with the kids all day. Some thing is causing the fruity filling in my cranium to go mushy, and maybe even sour.

My cell phone lays open, on the couch. Did I put it there? Am I talking to someone? I pick it up, "Hello?" In five minutes: where did I put my phone?

Coyote was invited to his first Wenatchee birthday party. I read the invite and lost it. We showed up on Saturday, obviously, at the Rotary Park. There was a birthday party. We joined it.

I didn't recognize anyone, which didn't surprise me. I wasn't expecting to recognize anyone. But I didn't see Dora, The Mom, who is a very black woman and rather obvious around here. "She must be in the bathroom or running off for supplies." I didn't see her kids. Also in the bathroom?

I was disturbed by the collection of overly-cared for children. Dora is a free spirit and I wasn't comprehending why she'd surrounded herself with control freaks.
What really ticked me off, however, was the tall pile of primly wrapped gifts. The invitation, if I remembered nothing else, clearly stated NO gifts, but a donation for mosquito nets. "Typical." I thought, "This ALWAYS happens. 'No gift' and I stupidly obey, AGAIN! Now we're going to look stingy and poor. And me having run out the door with my holey house shoes on again."

That is when I noticed that the names on the gifts were not ringing a bell. My sluggish, ape-like brain slowly formed the words, "Something is wrong."
We delicately backed away from the party. They were stand-offish anyway. Relief is realizing that you don't have to spend the next few hours in painfully polite chit chat with a bunch of prissy snobs who are ignoring you.

I sat on a bench and stared at the floaters in my eyes. And I apologized to a very disappointed Coyote over and over.

The next day Dora was there, hosting her son's party. As were the other two black people in Wenatchee. (I asked how they met and they said, "We stand out.") And a bunch of laid back white folks. And appropriately messy children. And NO presents!

That is but one example of my gaseous brain. The thing is DEAD! DEAD! It could be due to all the moving. I'm about to reserve the fourth moving van in less than a year. It could be the single parenting thing: alone, in a very small apartment/garage, in a town in which I have exactly 1.73 friends who aren't even in this town but are in the general geographic location an hour away.

This is the opposite of what I wanted. When I read "Of Woman Born" by Ms. Rich, I knew that what I didn't want was to raise kids in the isolation and rigidity our culture prescribes for parents. What I objected to was not off-spring, but the parenting culture. Obviously, it turns out, one woman could not do that alone. And certainly NOT while she has kids herself. One woman can only HOPE to survive, much less change her entire culture so that it allows the type of parenting experience she was dreaming of. And now. Here I am. In the exact opposite of what I wanted.

And it is killing my brain, as predicted.

Working was hectic. It was a wrestling match every morning. It was a race against the clock. There wasn't time for a single glitch in anything: the phone, the car, the routine, the health, and certainly no time for crying about hair deelies. And yet... and yet... There was this dark blue room for me, this contemplative den, in which I was paid to have one continuous and complex thought for hours on end. And what emerged from that thought was a strategy, a brief, an interrogatory, something tangible that left in the afternoon mail and some one else read it.

A stay at home mom has no complete thoughts. Does not complete a sentence. Does not complete a chore. Does not have a moment of clarity. And at the end of it all. After everyone is asleep. There is no one here with whom I speak. Just zygotes of thoughts, aimlessly swimming around my brain. Little specters of something that could be coalesced into a word or a phrase, if there were ears around. I feel like Helen Keller in her early darkness. I feel like a Neanderthal, awaiting language to make it all clear, to burn off the foggy banks and let the sun shine in.

Don't bother calling to save me. The reception in this electrified canyon in pitiful.
"Hello. Hello. Sarajoy, I can't hear you again."
"Well, I can hear you."
"Hello. Hello. I'm not getting anything."
"What do you mean? I'm crouching on the top bunk again. Can you hear me now?"
"Hello. Are you there?"
"Yes, I'M HERE AND YOU CAN'T HEAR ME, YOU DUMB MUCK! WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE CALLING ME WHEN YOU KNOW YOU CAN'T HEAR ME! JUST SHUT YOUR STUPID PHONE AND CALL SOMEONE YOU CAN HEAR!!!"
"Oh, okay, Now I did hear that."
"great."

I'm moving to another new town. Where I get to start all over again. yippee.

But I've got the right feeling this time. I'll find my place among friends again. I'll find good loamy things to dirty my hands. I just hope I can find my brain. Maybe it will turn up when we unpack.

Little Green Gables on the Prairie

So. Here it is. My big announcement. Perhaps premature. But I've waited almost a month already. That's a long time for a big mouth like me.

I'm in love.

With an object.

It's a house.

And I appear to be buying it.

I'm crushing so hard on this house. I think about it constantly. It actually makes my little heart go pitter patter and I get dizzy. It's like Stacy Brisky's 8th grade thing for Kirk Cameron. I'd slather this apartment with posters of it. I'd slide it's photo under the plastic of my trapper keeper.

Coyote loves this soft rock station and I consented to listen to it 1/2 time. But I love it now too. I sing along with the schmultiest love songs: to this house. I see myself in a video, soft on the edges. I'm running through the prairie, sparkling with wild flowers, passionate poppies, I think. I'm running in a flowing sun dress. I'm running. My arms open wide and I collide with the corner of the house. When I recover, I kiss it's white siding. And then we cut to the sunset. I'm snuggled on the front porch. It's railings wrap around me. The pink light bathes our faces in shades of new love. Celine Dion sings in the field beside us.

This is the house I wanted to raise my kids in. This is the house.

Grandiose it is not. Chandelier-y: no. Wide, curving, spindled stair case: No. Daddy Warbucks: absolutely not. Me: YES! YES! YES!

It's perched up on a high plateau called Paradise Prairie (and that's not just in my head!). It is white. It has green trim. It is a restored 1901 farm house. Farm house: solid, functional, the real stuff. Solid wood floors. Ornate moldings. 2 x 4's that measure 2" x 4". Tiled sun room. Claw foot bathtub. But it's got all the new stuff too: new electrical, new plumbing, new kitchen with ornate slate everywhere, new foundation with a rock facade, new basement (which is 1 1/2 times the size of this place! And that's just the basement!), new heating, new everything, but the stuff that should be old!

And it's on 5 acres of prairie, with a new horse barn and a new garage. The dirt is considered top of the line for the region with a Rosarium next door. It's on a dead end country road with very little traffic.

And it's a 15 minute commute for Huck: door to door!

The down sides: the school situation is kind of confusing. And the mortgage is out of our comfort zone. But if this last year has taught me anything it's that the quality of my home REALLY matters to my mental health. Not everyone is like that, I know. Maybe it's just the Libra in me. But I NEED a good home. And I'm willing to pay for it.

I can scarcely believe my good fortune. I feel the angels of Anne and Laura watching over me. I feel, in part, undeserving of this good fortune. And yet, I also feel that I've earned it, as much as anyone earns it. I worked hard while Huck was in school so that we wouldn't have to go into debilitating debt. I did without so that we could do without credit cards. I drove an embarrassing crap-mobile so we wouldn't have car debt either. And this past year has been vicious: sleepless nights, tears, weeping, gnashing of teeth, the worst fears, the ego decimation, the humiliation, the cramped quarters, the loss of 1/2 my belongings (which is interesting since we are *hopefully* moving into a space 4x as big as this one!).

Some one has to live in an old farm house on Paradise Prairie. And it might as well be me.

If some one could have told me that at the end of this shit-rainbow, there'd be this honey pot, I could have endured it better. But all in all, I think I did a rip-snortin' good job, anyway.

Some of you may think it's wrong to love an object. And maybe it is. But a 108 year old house is not a mere object. It's not some Wal-mart book bag. It's almost a living thing.

And now I'm worried I may be jinxing it by talking about it (that's why there are no pictures here). We've got 3 weeks left to go. And the financing is the big question. The banks are just a little skittish these days and the mortgage is just a little bit of a stretch for us. So: collective crossing of the fingers please! And lets not say another word about it until the deal is sealed.

Thanks for sharing my joy!

Lessons from a Slumber Party

1) Have one other adult present, not as a guest, but as some one to help!

2) Do not give 10 small children stone bocci balls and then run inside to get the pizza out of the oven. The only instruction given at that moment was "So, you through the balls... Oh! The pizza's ready!" Everyone apparently survived, I hope, but I haven't been back to check for bodies.

3) If hosting a party in the middle of a blooming orchard, ascertain if any guests are allergic to bees before planning the entire party around this one feature.

4) Keep the wind down. Or at least hold the pizza firmly with both hands as you cross the driveway. I don't care if it burns you!

5) Remember, the 5 second rule does not apply to hot pizza in a dirt driveway.

6) Again, arrange for help.

7) Be amazed by your daughter's foresight in inviting her extremely useful babysitter, who steps up to the challenge.

8) If hosting a party outside, keep it close to the "house" and live on the ground floor. I may (or may not) jog with weights these days, but running up and down the stairs 500x loaded down with party gear causes a burn I thought was only reserved for hell.

9) Have a larger house for when the wind won't stop and rain suddenly comes. The forecast said NOTHING about a hurricane!

10) Do enjoy the sweet mudpies!

11) Be sure to watch the play. The parental job offers nothing better than a kid written and directed play, especially when the little brother is cast as a hobbie horse ridin', gun totin' mass murderer.

12) When serving the wee little guests chamomile tea to quiet them for bed, DO NOT under any circumstances, drink the tea yourself.

13) Check out their Native American village in the orchard, complete with a teepee of pruning scraps and a real, authentic "Native American Fence!" Overhear a proclamation that your daughter really wanted a Native American themed birthday party, but that there are so many different types of Native Americans that she thought it would just confuse everyone.


14) I now recommend against taking all the tired little guests to a kids fishing derby the next morning. It was just as bad as I imagined. 2,843 children randomly flinging hooks and worms occasionally into the water (crossing lines) but usually into each other. In the hour we were there, only one person caught a fish. Given the net of tangled lines over the pond, it's a wonder anything got away. Those smart fish wisely hunkered down at the very bottom of the pond, where it was likely quiet and dark and they were likely napping and I likely wanted to join them. The gods were on my side again that day, however marginally; we caught NO FISH! I should make an offering or something.

15) Do not arrange for the grandparents to visit the day after a slumber party. They will not be impressed with your surly, sleepless little darling growling at them from the doorway.

16) Have you considered not hosting a slumber party? Maybe you will next time.