Looky, Daddy!

Seven Was So Yesterday

Dear Kathryn,

On your first trip to the pediatrician, you crapped on me. I had just set you down, naked, on the examination table, and you lifted your legs and squirted a fine line of brown up my shirt, from my navel to just below my chin. I didn't have another shirt to change into, and so, for lack of anything else to do, I greeted everyone I met for the rest of that office visit with a thumbs up and the biggest smile they'd ever seen. I looked like the smiley-faced dot a young, dreamy girl might place over the "i" you'd just drawn on me with your butt.

And then we switched pediatricians by cell phone on the car ride home.

Today you turn eight, and right now I feel like you are the biggest smile I've ever seen dotting the line of crap that seven pooped on you. May this year treat you better.

I love you,

Dad

Because I'm Too Tired to Think of Five

Four Reflections on Flying with Children:

Thirty years ago, airline ticket prices were such that flying was the domain of the business traveler or the super-rich. Those days cannot return fast enough.

If a child kicks your chair from behind, don't be an asshole about it. It is very hard for parents to care if their children kick the chair of an asshole.

Someone should draw piggy nostrils on the oxygen masks.

In a movie theater, drinks come with lids and fit into cup holders molded into the armrest of the seat in which you are sitting. In an airplane, drinks come with no lids and rest on little slippery hinged tables attached to a seat in which someone else is sitting. And movie theaters do not, as a general rule, move.

Sparky Sparky Boom Man

The neurologist came into Kathryn's hospital room and greeted us all: me, Sharon, Kathryn, Kathryn's webkinz, Kathryn's webkinz, and Kathryn's webkinz. Then she asked Sharon and me if we wanted to talk in the hallway. She had never asked this before, and I wondered why she was doing so now. For one thing, up to this point all of our conversations about her epilepsy had included Kathryn, and for another, Kathryn was busy watching back episodes of Avatar on the hospital TV, so our doctor could have easily stood in the middle of the room and announced she was the High Priestess of Synthar, Lord of the Demon Horde and Kathryn's seizures were actually a natural result of her on-going transition from seven-year-old girl to Demon Hordette and the most she would have gotten from Kathryn would have been a "Shh!" because Sozin's Comet was coming in just two days and Kathryn had some major catching up to do before it arrived. AIRBENDING SLICE!

In the hallway, the neurologist informed us of what Sharon posted here a few days ago: It's still Rolandic Epilepsy. (Somewhere along the way, the doctor stopped calling it "Benign" Rolandic Epilepsy, and I really wish she'd bring that first word back.) But the news our neurologist was most concerned about was the frequency of Kathryn's spikes as shown by the EEG. As Sharon wrote, in the same amount of time that most kids would have between three and four spikes, Kathryn was topping out between thirty and fifty. And that's on medicine. "Frankly," the doctor said, "I'm having a hard time reconciling the EEG results with what I see in your daughter." I pressed her to explain that and she replied, "Well, with so much activity in her brain, I wouldn't expect her to be so alert, so high-functioning."

"Ma'am," I replied, "If you visited our house for just a few hours, you'd be amazed that any of us are so high-functioning."

But it's true. Despite the virtual shower of sparks squirreling around Kathryn's brain at any (and every) given moment, she is still every bit the girl she's always been. I have no doubt if any of you frequent commenters to this site actually came here and met my oldest daughter, you'd turn and clock me across the jaw, cursing me for ever worrying you about her in the first place. But that's how she is. She's wonderful, she's wonderful, she's wonderful, and then she's not. Living with her is like touring the world's museums, with every 14th painting  replaced by a fist in the gut.

So now the great medicine quest continues. We're a team of chefs surrounding the pot of Kathryn's brain, trying to find the right combination of herbs to eliminate the acrid aftertaste of an otherwise perfect soup. (Look at me tonight, being all metaphory. Must be the wisdom of my newfound age.) The latest drug cocktail is a hopeful one, but it will take months to affect any change, so we are bracing ourselves here for a wild seizure-ridden ride. And I'm taking you all along with us. Oh, lucky you.

But for now, we are going someplace you can't, or at least shouldn't: Texas. Tomorrow the girls and I fly to Texas to spend a few weeks at my parent's house. We will be joined on the flight by my mother, who was a last minute addition to the plane's passenger list. She's not seated anywhere near my daughters or me, but something tells me there will be no shortage of volunteers eager to switch seats with her. Especially once Victoria starts singing.

I'm the Less Melodramatic One

Hi All. The Mom here.

Today I convinced my husband spend a day with his family rather than blog about it. He was not happy, saying something about you guys liking him more than we do, which is probably true, but didn’t carry a lot of weight with me. In exchange, I promised I’d write an update about Kathryn.

Kathryn is same as she ever was, just extra sparky. Actually, the neurologist calls them spikes, not sparks. The takeaway of the testing is this: It’s still Rolandic Epilepsy which is good news. The bad news is, according to the doctor, in the same time frame that most kids with Rolandic Epilepsy have between 3 and 4 spikes showing on their EEG, Kathryn has between 30 and 50. She’s starting new medicines and we hope to get the spikes under control, but the immediate prognosis is that it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

But as we all know from the 80s, spiky is cool but won’t always be around.

BTW: Monday is Brian's birthday. So keep him in your thoughts as he heads into his twilight years.

This Post Would Work Better as a Tweet

Kathryn's back home. I'll write an update after I sleep the next twelve hours.

Testing, Testing

I've begun this post seventeen different ways and all of them sucked. Actually one of them didn't, but I abandoned it anyway because it didn't meet even the low standards of good taste that this blog maintains, plus it featured a grotesque illustration I found of how doctors treated epilepsy in the Middle Ages (Answer: Poorly). Beginning it this way sucks, too, but at least the post has begun, so let's move on. I bet the ending will suck, too.

Kathryn is back in the hospital, for a three-day stay of tests and observation. The seizures are proving to be more wily than the medicines she is taking, and so they have brought her in to glue twenty-four electrodes all over her tiny blonde head and see if they can figure out why. A twenty-fifth electrode goes over her heart.

The seizures are getting longer and stronger. Last Sunday, in heavy traffic on the Garden State Parkway, I looked in my rearview mirror to see Kathryn twitching and jerking, seatbelted into her seat. My wife spun around, but the only assistance she could lend was to swipe at the spittle coming from Kathryn's mouth as she threw her head around, a horse fighting its rider. The seizure lasted longer than any we'd seen before, and it left Kathryn wasted, spent, and sick for the rest of the day and long into the next.

It's been only nine months since these seizures have entered our lives. They have stopped being funny. Right now, everything has stopped being funny.

Well, everything except this.

Sleep eludes Kathryn. Or maybe it's Kathryn who eludes sleep. She fights it as she always has, but now when she wakes, she immediately stakes her claim to the day, even when "day" is still several hours away.  Not that I can blame her. How can someone sleep when they know it brings the seizures? But yet it's tiredness, more than anything, which triggers them during the day. Catch-22. Like if eating chocolate made you fat, but eschewing it made you fatter.

Sleep doesn't come any easier to the rest of us. It's 2:17 AM. I've opened and shut this laptop so often in the past three hours, I fear its hinge will soon fail. The same goes for the switch on the bedside lamp. The house is still and quiet, and still sleep won't come.

But the end of this post will. And it will suck just as much as the beginning did.

See?

Add Orange Juice and It's a Perfectly Serviceable Breakfast

This week's drink: Champagne. Somebody up and got herself legally hitched. It couldn't have happened to a nicer groom.

So pop the cork, raise a glass, then sit back down and read a spell. LesbianDad's ruminations on marriage, found here, here, and here, should be required reading for all people who wish to live and love in this modern world.

Dark and Stormy

It was the lime that made me cry.

This drink was made for me for the first time by Lila's godmother. It was made for me the second, third, and fourth time by her as well. The drink is called a Dark and Stormy and its recipe is simplicity itself: Ice, a few fingers of dark rum, a bottle of Jamaican-style ginger beer, and a wedge of lime. And, like I said, it was the lime that made me cry.

The twins were seven months old when the lime made me cry, so it wasn't really that big of a deal. Everything made me cry back then. I blame it on my wife's hormones. We were spending a week down the shore and the week was not going well. Lila's godmother had taken it upon herself to mitigate some of the psychic damage the twins were wreaking on us all by mixing Dark and Stormies each afternoon and distributing them willy-nilly until all hands were holding at least one, sometimes two or more. I was usually a "more."

It was something in the way she handled the lime that did it. She'd cut out a wedge, and then just leave the lime right there on the counter, like she was saying, "Don't worry, little lime. I'll be right back with you in a moment." It was just so... so casual. It brought home to me how there was nothing whatsoever casual about my life right then. I could no more be expected to get "right back" to that lime than I could be expected to solve world peace. Those were the days in which I used to eat my breakfast cereal dry, because adding milk meant I had to finish it before it got soggy. Milk gave the cereal a deadline that simply was not realistic. And even dry, some days that cereal bowl would still be sitting there, full, when my wife came home from work that evening. Those were hard, hard days.

So it was one night that week, one of many, that I was up with the twins,  strapping them into their carseats so at least the rest of our shore rental house would be spared their 3 AM infernal wailing, that I passed the lime on the counter. It had three or four wedges missing, but it was still there, waiting for the next round of drinks. And I lost it. I drove around Ocean City that night, back and forth on the deserted roads, with the twins in the back of the minivan slowly trading in their cries for sighs and sleep, and I bawled. I wished that someone would come and put me in the back of a minivan and drive me around. I wished that my only responsibility were going to sleep.

I wished I could cut a wedge out of a lime and promise it I'd be right back.

Victoria's Festive Toilet

The twins are potty trained. Have been for a while, but I didn't want to tell you that. It was my plan to milk it for a long time, making the occasional cryptic comment like, "The girls graduated college today, their robes barely showing the bulge of their pull-ups," but then I wouldn't be able to post about Victoria's Festive Toilet. And that would be sad. I don't want anyone to be sad.

Victoria's Festive Toilet isn't the beginning of our story. It's the middle, wedged between a seizure and a trip to the emergency room. Be patient.

The day started at 6 AM.

"Sheeshur."

Kathryn's seizures have gotten longer. It takes her longer to recover. She often slurs her words.

Kathryn came in and sat in my bed, taking the spot where Sharon usually sleeps. Sharon wasn't there. She was in Florida for business, although it's still unclear to me exactly what business. The woman edits dictionaries, for crying out loud. Had there been some discovery, some outbreak of new English words she needed to investigate? My wife's world is a mystery to me. I looked at Kathryn. The left side of her face was slack, drooping lower than the right. This happens sometimes. The effect is not unlike those before and after shots advertising tacky plastic surgeons. It is not easy to look at.

Kathryn slurred more words. Only half of her mouth seemed to be speaking. I told her I didn't understand. She repeated the words with effort and it still sounded like nothing. I shook my head and apologized. I felt like the world's worst dad.

"Yong," she said, emphasizing the word with frustration.

"Long?" I tried. She nodded. "It was a long one?"

"Yesh."

She folded into my arms the way sleepy children do and I laid her down on the empty pillow. I lay next to her and listened to her breathe. We stayed there until the twins awoke. I know Kathryn never slept because she never moved.

And that was how the day began.

One thing Sharon did before she left for her "conference," besides pack a bathing suit and some sunscreen, was enroll the girls in a week of day camp. It was an extravagant gesture on her part--three kids mean three tuitions--but she said if I didn't let her do it, she wouldn't come back from her trip. "I don't want to be the one to discover your body," she explained. The camp was only in the mornings, just enough time for me to unload the dishwasher and load it back again, but on this day, it was even shorter than that. Mid-morning, the director of the camp called me. Victoria, caught up in the excitement of the day, the director informed me, had crapped her pants. Would I be so kind as to come there and change her, she wondered. I was tempted to say I was busy and suggest the director call my wife instead, but I was afraid Sharon wouldn't hear her cell phone ringing over the crashing waves and seagulls. So to day camp I went.

However, it wasn't Victoria that greeted me when I arrived at the building. It was Lila. A screaming Lila. Keep that in mind, because that will come up again later in the story.

Victoria had locked herself in a stall in the girl's bathroom. She had been in there since the director called me. "I think she's embarrassed," the director said. This woman should never be allowed to supervise children. Victoria could march through town leading the Fourth of July parade with a dump in her pants the size of Central America and be completely unconcerned. It wasn't that. It was the Festive Toilet.

When she heard my voice, Victoria unlocked the stall. "Look, Daddy! I took care of it," she exclaimed proudly, holding up hands that showed more brown than white. Her pants were around her ankles. Her panties were, too. She had been taking fistfuls of toilet paper, swiping them through her pants, throwing them into the toilet, then going back for more paper. At no point did she tear any of the paper off the roll, which left great loops of brown and white streamers dangling over the sides of the bowl. It looked decorated, like somebody was planning a potty-themed birthday party. Or welcoming home a beloved turd after a long absence.

To preserve her dignity, I won't tell you how much of her own poop she smeared upon herself during this process, except to say all of it.

Lila spent the majority of the time needed to clean her sister, the stall, the floor, and then myself, sitting outside the bathroom wailing in pain. Just before I had arrived, I was told, she had gotten her finger slammed in a door. A staff member had been holding ice on it for a while as I cleaned Victoria, but at some point that person had simply drifted away. And as I was using a wet paper towel to try to get the feces out of the treads of Victoria's sneakers, I realized Lila had drifted away as well.

I found her in a classroom, unattended and whimpering. Her finger, which had looked red and swollen when I came in, was now looking like a bratwurst. Cue the emergency room.

We didn't drive straight to the ER; we went past our pediatrician's office first. I had decided I was probably not in the best mental state to decide if this finger required the hell-on-earth that is an ER visit. The doctor looked at the finger for less than a minute. "Keep on driving," she said. "I'm pretty sure that's broken." So on we drove, Lila's middle finger swelling up in the exact same gesture I was mentally making at the world.

Lila was a champ at the ER. Why wouldn't she be? She was the star of the show. Victoria, however, became less and less enthusiastic about the hospital as she watched her twin talk to doctors, get a bracelet, and suck down painkillers. By the time Lila went for x-rays, Victoria was looking for a door to slam her own middle finger into. Finding none, she had to content herself with throwing herself to the floor, hoping for a head injury.

The finger turned out not to be broken, just badly sprained. Lila wore a splint on the finger for four days afterward. By the second day, the swelling had gone down, and the day the splint came off, she made a very tentative fist, slowly morphing her four-day bird-flip into a fight-the-power salute. And then she had to give back her gold medal.

Looking back on that day, now a week ago, it plays like one of those themed movies in which different directors shoot different, unconnected scenes all with the same cast. There was the sentimental childhood-illness tearjerker, the madcap scatological comedy, and then the fast-paced emergency-room TV drama. And, if you can believe it, it all took place before nap time.

But not long before nap time.