So the title of my Wednesday night post became eerily appropriate just a few hours later. I awoke Thursday morning to my phone ringing. On the other end was my dad’s wife saying that they were at the hospital and that my dad had a mild heart attack that morning. By that time he was stable and doing fine, but there were lots of tests yet to be run on him.
As the day went on and more reports came in, it was determined that he did not actually have a heart attack, but that he did have some inflammation and infection around his heart that was causing part of it not to work properly. I’m not really sure what all of that means, but it most definitely sounds better than a heart attack at his age.
My first reaction when I got the news was to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. Then I looked outside and realized that wasn’t going to be possible. The roads were covered in ice and according to the news and radio reports no one was getting anywhere very quickly in the city. On top of that, Zachary was still sick so I decided to stay home and wait by my phone instead of jumping in the car.
As it turns out, I made the right choice because by evening I wasn’t feeling so well myself. Apparently Zach’s illness was finally passed on to me after a week of him coughing and sneezing in my face.
On top of feeling quite crappy myself, Zach got extremely clingy and whiny last night. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him other than knowing that he didn’t get a nap so I was quite frustrated with all the whining. Nothing seemed to make him happy. He wanted a drink, then he didn’t want a drink. He wanted his blanket, then he didn’t want his blanket. He wanted to be held, then he didn’t want to be held. Rinse, repeat, all night long. By about 3:00 a.m. he was whining and moaning so much that I finally just got up with him.
I finally ended up propping myself up on a pile of pillows and sitting up in the bed for the rest of the night with him lying on my shoulder. Shortly after that I figured out what the problem was. He had finally calmed down enough to talk to me and told me that there was water in his ear. Suddenly it all made sense. The boy now has an ear infection. I think he finally relaxed and fell back asleep around 5:00 and I followed shortly after. When my alarm went off at 6:20 I wanted to kill it. I let myself hit the snooze button for about another hour before getting out of bed. When I finally made it up and to the bathroom the first thing I noticed was a bunch of icky ear drainage on the shoulder of my shirt where Zach had been sleeping.
I was dialing the doctor’s office as soon as they opened at 8:30 and was able to get Zach an appointment to see the nurse practitioner. The consensus was that he most likely has the flu, although it is too late in the cycle now to medicate it so they didn’t bother with the flu test. I guess I should have pushed a bit harder for them to test him on Monday when they told me it was most likely just a virus that would pass in a few days. All of the congestion apparently pushed the crud into his ears and caused the nasty ear infection. Fortunately, it is only one ear (for now) and the other one was still completely clear. At least I know that the tubes are working because there is all kinds of stuff draining from the infected ear.
After the doctor’s office, I took Zach home, gave him some Motrin for the pain and the first dose of his antibiotic ear drops, and had to leave him with Granny and Papa so I could get to work. I’ve hardly worked at all this week and I’m feeling terrible about that. At least I was fairly caught up at the end of last week so I’m not really behind at all. I just didn’t get ahead of things like I had planned on doing this week.
At this point, I am just so done with this week. I want it to end so I can move on to better times. We have no big plans for the weekend other than to enjoy visiting with the in-laws. Personally, I plan to sleep in as long as possible for the next two days and try to make up for all of the sleep that I’ve missed out on all week.
