A whirlwind

My oldest daughter has some health issues, so we are frequently taking her to the doctor. I am pretty good at rattling off her information to the receptionist and generally knowing what to expect at an appointment (except that our local doctor’s office has become part of a big conglomerate and procedures change almost weekly.) However, she is much improved since the spring and the number of appointments has been greatly reduced. (The reduction in appointments may be attributed to some lost paperwork (for a treatment that doesn’t work anyway) so I’m in no hurry to follow up on that. I was told they would call me. I’m not turning blue holding my breath.)

The reprieve from appointments has been delicious. No hurrying around after school, no scrambling to find babysitters, no mountain of co-pays.

My other two children are generally healthy. One has only been to the doctor for an ear infection and well child visits.

They decided to make up for that this week. My son has had pet allergies from birth, but we were managing them quite well until this year. He was constantly congested and could make a fantastic slurping noise when he sniffed. We took him to an allergist and he is allergic to everything they tested. His poor back was solid red and looked like mosquitoes had chomped on him in a perfect eight by eight pattern. The results of this meant that our dog could no longer sleep in his room. That’s fine, but it meant that we needed to move her crate as well. Now, she’s a Great Dane. Her crate is larger than many tiny houses, so finding a place for it that wasn’t in the center of the living room is tricky. Eventually it moved to my daughter’s room, but that meant that we had to move the ginormous desk and queen bed out. (Probably a good idea anyway, even with the crate, she has much more open space in her room.)

After a weekend of fanatical cleaning, we were ready to settle down and that seemed to be working until I picked my youngest daughter up from school yesterday. As I was coming to the door, her teacher was coming to meet me. My daughter fell on the playground and landed on her arm. While she cried at first, after a while, she was playing and laughing with one of her friends. By the end of the afternoon though, it had started to swell. Back to the doctor’s office. I called expecting to be sent to a new urgent care office that does not seem to have regular hours or to the emergency room. Amazingly we were able to get in to see a doctor right away and get X-rays there before the X-ray tech left. (I say amazingly because any regular / non-life threatening appointment needs to be scheduled months in advance and you take the spot you get because there won’t be anything else.) So she was off to school today with a brace on her arm and we see the orthopedic doctor next week for a regular cast.

And at the beginning of September I thought that we might not even reach our deductible this year.

Advertisement