Langer Loksh

Double Time

Often kids will do stuff for babysitters or teachers that they won't do for their parents. All year Charlie's teachers have been telling me to bring in his eye patches. Last week I finally remembered to do it, and naturally, Charlie wore the patch for teacher S. without a fight.

This week S. is on vacation. Today I got a call at work from teacher B. "I just wanted to double check: which eye?" I laughed and told her, "His left eye. We want to force him to use his right eye." B. said, "That's what I thought, but I figured I'd better make sure!"

When I picked up Charlie this afternoon, B. told me he had a great day. "He wore the patch for two hours!" she said happily. Poor kid. He's only supposed to wear it for an hour. Which I explained to B. So I think we're all set now. And I'm going to use that extra hour as a credit for tomorrow's patch time.

Oh For Heaven's Sake

Is that oatmeal on Charlie's face in his school picture?

Charlie's Just Like Michael Bloomberg

He's not a candidate.

Today I heard from Dr. Kesser, the guy in Virginia who does the surgery to open up the ear canal to restore hearing. Dr. Kesser reviewed Charlie's CT scan and told me that because of the twisted path of Charlie's facial nerve, he won't operate on Charlie's ear canal. Only half of kids with Charlie's birth defect, hemifacial microsomia, are approved for this atresia repair surgery; knowing already that something is clearly not right with Charlie's facial nerve, I prepared myself long ago that he would not be a candidate. So while it's sad that we can't improve Charlie's hearing for him, I'm looking at it as one thing I can cross of my list. We won't have to go to Virginia, and Charlie faces one less surgery in his life.

Dr. Kesser also talked about the whole bulge fiasco. He said that it looks as though the infection did not cause any damage to the insides of Charlie's ear, but that it could recur--that parallel ear canal or whatever it is could get gunked up again, and perhaps harm his ear or his face, so I should go ahead and meet with the surgeons at Children's Hospital who have been stalking me. We need to have a plan in place.

What? Did you think I meant that Charlie was a self-made billionaire and the chief executive of a Byzantine beaurocracy? Or that he's from Medfid? 

I shouldn' t be joking. This is a big deal. But like I said, I pretty much knew.

 

Elder Abuse

We've started to do a little volunteer work. We're grocery shopping for a little old lady who can't get out on her own. Friday was our first day. We went to the lady's house and collected her list, coupons, and check. Then we went to the grocery store and filled a cart for her and a cart for ourselves. Then we took the groceries back to the lady's house and I unloaded everything and helped her put stuff away.

We signed up to volunteer several months ago; it took the agency this long to set us up with a match. Since then it has become nearly impossible to take Charlie into the grocery store. He hops in and out of those plastic car carts, or he insists on pushing a kid's size cart and then abandons it to run around grabbing Spiderman yogurt that he won't let go of even when I explain to him that we have twelve cups of Spiderman yogurt in the fridge at home. 

Our little old lady--we'll call her Geraldine--likes children a lot and is happy for the interaction. But she didn't bargain for Charlie. At first he was content to climb up and down Geraldine's step ladder and rearrange Geraldine's dollies on their dolly wicker chairs. Geraldine gave Charlie a motorized carpet sweeper that she'd bought off the TV, and we know how Charlie feels about sweeping, Swiffering, and vacuuming. Still, I apparently spent too much time stacking the little cans of pineapple chunks in Geraldine's pantry closet because Charlie managed to knock over a glass vase, spilling water all over a wooden sideboard. He then plucked a loose thread in the rug and unraveled a strip of carpet a couple feet long in the middle of the living room.

I'm waiting for the call from the agency letting us know that our services are no longer required. 

Bottom Teeth

At our annual visit with the craniofacial team a couple months ago, they told me to get a dental X-ray to see where the heck Charlie's lower front lateral incisors are. Those are the two teeth next to the two front teeth, on the bottom. "Where do you go?" they asked me. I told them the name of the pediatric dental practice where I took Summer. "Oh, great, they will have the Panorex machine where he can just stick his face in the chin holder and they'll take a picture. Go have that done and get back to us."

The appointment was this week. We discovered, to my vast irritation, that Fancy Town Pediatric Dentistry does not have a Panorex machine. The dentist, a tan 80-year-old man with a gold chain who looks like he just walked off a tennis court in Boca Raton, gently examined Charlie's mouth and proclaimed that we did not need an X-ray. "You won't see anything," he said. Charlie does not have those teeth. He doesn't have the baby teeth and he won't get the adult teeth.

"How weird is that?" I asked. "Five to eight percent of the population has either an extra tooth or never got a tooth," he answered, "so, not that weird. And it's on the bottom. No one's even going to notice."

Since the high priests and priestesses of the craniofacial team had ordered the X-ray, I asked the dentist if we could please try to do a regular X-ray, even though Charlie is only two and will not hold still for long. I told them about how brave Charlie was when had X-rays at Children's before he was sedated for his CT scan, in case they had to intubate him. "Yeah, but he was sedated," the dentist said. "No," I said, exasperated. "They needed X-rays of his jaw so they could see if it was safe to sedate him." 

The dental assistant made a somewhat lame attempt--Charlie was calm, he said "Ah," he bit on that thick paper--but she couldn't get his chin right or something and finally I told her to give up because I didn't want Charlie to be afraid of going to the dentist, like his big sister, who now has to be bribed with Barbie movies to sit through a cleaning. On my way out the door, the technician told me that her son is missing the same two teeth. "They shaped his eye teeth so they'd look flat, like the missing teeth would be. No one can tell but me," she said. 

I called the craniofacial team the next day and asked if they still wanted the X-ray or if the Boca dentist's opinion was good enough. "If the maxillofacial surgeon asked for it, you'd better get it," the team coordinator told me. I mentioned all this in my Early Intervention group. Another mom told me that Neighboring Fancy Town Dental has the Panorex. Guess I'll ghead and book that.

Later in the week I picked up my new night guard from my dentist. Apparently I'm grinding my teeth, so I'm paying hundreds of dollars out of pocket for this uncomfortable little piece of clear plastic that I hook onto my two front bottom teeth. As I was falling asleep last night all I could see was Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction: "I hid this uncomfortable piece of metal up my ass for two years..."

Can't Talk Right Now

Studio 60.

3,491

For Father's Day we climbed Mt. Greylock, the tallest mountain in Massachusetts. (At 3,491 feet, it's just a little bigger than Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire.) On the way we stopped to see the dinosaur tracks (1) just west of the French King Bridge that we remembered from a college field trip. Then we stopped in Shelburne Falls and walked across the Bridge of Flowers (2) in full bloom, and viewed the "geologic wonder" of the potholes (3) at Salmon Falls, sealing our children's fate in nerdhood.

Because we cannot get out of the house before 10:00 a.m. under any circumstances, we arrived in Western Mass. later than we'd hoped so we took the Thunderbolt trail up the mountain. Which is like visiting the Empire State Building and opting for the stairs. We hiked for two and a half hours straight up. If we stopped to rest we were assaulted by flies. Summer did it entirely under her own power. She is a very impressive five year old.   

The view at the summit was a little soupy but we didn't care. Charlie, who caught a ride up on Dad's back, was happy to run around the grassy top and share our snack of cheese, crackers, sausage, and Skittles. We took a less steep trail on the way down so it took a little longer, but my aged knees are still operational. Before heading home we stopped at the Freight Yard Pub for dinner, where we got to watch a long freight train rumble by the restaurant patio.

Happy Father's Day to my dad readers. 

I Never Let Myself Hope They Would Be Friends

Cherry Blast

On Thursday night at 9:00, Charlie said "hurt, teeth" and pointed to his mouth. I gave him a teaspoon of Children's Tylenol and then went into the bathroom. Jeff and Summer were hanging out in the living room. A couple of minutes later Charlie pushed open the bathroom door and waddled in waving the empty Tylenol bottle. He must have swallowed two thirds of the bottle. "Shit," I hissed. "Where's the phone. Where's the phone?"

Charlie had climbed up on the high snack-bar stool and guzzled the bottle, spilling just a little bit on his construction-truck pajamas. I finally found the phone near the computer and called the Poison Control number on the babysitter info sheet magneted to the fridge. (800.682.9211.)

The nice young man I spoke to asked me how much Charlie weighed. "Just under 30 pounds, I think," I said. "Do you have a scale you can weigh him on?" the guy asked me. Charlie stood on the scale; 31.5 pounds. "It sounds like he's right on the line. It may be an overdose. Take him to your nearest emergency room," the man told me.

I drove fast. There wasn't anyone else on the road. At the ER, a nurse weighed Charlie again and took his temperature and blood pressure. She gave me a bag full of toys for him--a plastic car, some bubbles, a ball, and a book. The woman who took all our insurance information put bracelets on both of Charlie's wrists. We waited just a minute and then we were escorted to a private room. A doctor came in, an older guy with his top shirt buttons open, and I told him what had happened. "My kids did that like four times," he told me. He explained that we needed to get a blood level in four hours. If Charlie took an overdose, the doctor would give him some foul tasting medicine that's an antidote to Tylenol, to prevent liver damage.

Another nice young guy wheeled a television cart loaded with VCR tapes into our room. Charlie and I watched one episode of Blue's Clues and then fell asleep together on the exam room cot. At 1:30 a.m., the phlebotomist woke us up. We needed two nurses to help hold Charlie down, and the phlebotomist had to stick both arms, but Charlie fell right back to sleep. Finally at about 2:00 or 2:15 in the morning one of the nurses poked her head in and said quietly, "You can go." Charlie's blood level was not in the toxic range.

I told Shaina the story today. "Wait a minute," she said. "One of my friends was in the ER that night." I remembered a teenage girl with a two other girls and a boyfriend; she looked like she was having some stomach pain or something. I'd assumed she had eaten bad mushrooms and then felt sort of guilty for stereotyping her; maybe it was her appendix. "She wrote about it on her blog," Shaina said. "She said there was some kid whose mother let him drink a bottle of Tylenol."

Nice. It was the shrooms, wasn't it, you carefree pre-child bitch?

Anyway, he's fine, and for a first time visit to the ER, it went rather well. Free bubbles. Who knew?

Circle of Smiles: Eye-Oh!

When I take a picture of Charlie, I say, "Smile!" and he does not smile. Instead he says "Smile!" back, only because it's Charlie, it's "Eye-oh!" (just like how he says fire). I complained about this to Shaina, who reminded me that Summer did the exact same thing at the same age and Shaina had to stand behind me waving puppets to elicit a smile from Summer for a holiday card photo.