high anxiety

and then all hell broke loose.

I don’t really want to write about all the medical details. I thought I would, at several points throughout the ordeal I was writing it in my head and thinking about how therapeutic it would be to process all of those intense moments. Looking through a window at my boy having a head CT. Meeting his glance as he lay strapped inside the tunnel of a massive and otherwordly MRI machine. Getting annoyed at the post-surgical kid sharing our room for having a fever at 3AM. But I can’t, not yet. It’s still too raw, and too unresolved.

I am very good in crisis mode. I kept my shit together the whole time, and although I’m now fairly desensitized to the image of my boy lurching around like a drunken sailor, I get caught off guard at unexpected times, like reading a supportive email from someone at work, trying not to do the ugly cry while finishing a great book at karate with my girl (The Art of Driving in the Rain, read it), or sitting down to try and write a blog post.

If you know us you’ve probably already been updated ad nauseum, if not feel free to email me and I’ll catch you up. Suffice it to say that my boy is okay, those creepy test assure us that there is nothing evil lurking, and all expert opinions agree that he will eventually lose this wobble. His diagnosis is Acute Cerebellar Ataxia. But it's not cute. Not even one little bit.

When will it resolve?

Yeah. I’d very much like to know.

But hey, I've got photos! And I want you to know that he insisted that I take these, with my phone. He was irked that I refused to videotape the insertion of his IV.

Our day started in the ER:
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He was mobile, thanks to those clever cavemen who invented the wheel:

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After shlepping all about the palace, we were finally deposited into a little room with a very fun bed in which one could fold oneself in two if one desired.

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One desired.

I had a little convertible chair contraption to sleep in, but my boy offered to trade places with me. Awwwwww.

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But he totally hogged the laptop.

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I thought we had the bad side of the room because we had to amble past the other boy and his other mom to get to the bathroom, but we really had the good side. The one with the escape hatch.

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To the pretty little courtyard with windows to the outside world
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Where we could yell obsenities greetings to approaching visitors
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One visitor in particular declared: "This place is awesommmme!"

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I do not concur.

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But they took good care of us, and we are grateful and so very relieved that nothing ominous appears to be looming in my baby boy's nervous system.

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We are very much looking forward to the time when this is a memory, and maybe some of the good stories will come out and we can laugh and sigh and then get back to the business of being 11. There are bikes to ride, trees to climb, boards to break, adventures to take, not to mention trust in gravity and peace of mind to regain.

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So we wait. Maybe tomorrow?