When Getting Good News Is Weird

We got good news on Thursday.  Great news, in fact!  Ironically enough, I was not super thrilled about it.  I’ll tell you why.

It all started Wednesday night.  After a rousing day at MOPS, Gabe and I came home and crashed.  By crashed, I mean I fell into a heap on the couch and he continued to troll around the house, leaving a path of destruction in his wake.

At some point during the afternoon Gabe mentioned his leg was hurting.  I thought little of it because he seemed to be moving fine.  He was keeping himself quite busy, in fact!  Because I had to go out again that evening, I took Gabe over to my parents’ house so they could keep him while I was gone.

While there, Mom noticed him limping a bit.  Truth be told, I hardly ever have noticed him limping when he has, in fact, been limping.  He moves so quickly that I find it hard to determine when he’s actually limping and when he’s just jerking himself at warp speed around the furniture.  However, this was consistent with what he had said to me earlier so I assumed he was a little uncomfortable.  No big deal, I thought.  He’d had a full day and had spent a bit of the afternoon racing, chasing, and being chased by another little boy at church, so I figured his legs were just a little tired.  I asked him about this several times, and he insisted he hadn’t fallen, gotten bumped, or run into anything, but I figured he was just forgetting.

Tahd was gone this week, and when he’s gone Gabe often sleeps in my bed.  He did so Wednesday night and when he awoke Thursday morning he hopped out of bed to go to his room to open his next advent present for the advent tree Tahd’s mother sent him.  This didn’t take long, and in a moment he was back in my room trying to get back up onto the bed to show me his ornament.

Except he couldn’t get on the bed.

We have a very regular bed.  It’s not high off the ground.  It’s not enormous. It’s just a regular bed, one Gabe has climbed onto and off of a hundred times in his life.  I found it very odd that he needed a boost to climb onto it, but it was early and muscles can be tight in the morning so I thought he might loosen up once we were up and around.

By lunch time it was clear it wasn’t loosening up.  He had an extremely pronounced limp and had asked me to carry him down the stairs because “his broken leg didn’t work very well on stairs.”

Alright.

An hour or so later, my arm brushed his body.  That’s when I felt it.  He was hot.  All along, I had planned to keep an eye on him and see how he was doing the next morning.  Had he been getting better I would have continued to watch.  Had he been no better or worse, we would have gone to the doctor.  A fever, however, complicated matters.  I scurried upstairs to find the thermometer.

When I got back downstairs, Gabe was attempting to “hide” on me beside/under his train table.  He’s completely fixed on Tom & Jerry movies right now, and he loves playing “nicks” (code for “tricks”) on people.  I laughed at his little joke and told him to get up so I could take his temperature.

He couldn’t.

I insisted.  I showed him where to put his feet and how to use his arms to pull himself up.  He still couldn’t do it.  Feeling quite alarmed, I picked him up and took his temperature.

99.7.

I don’t usually get worked up about fevers.  I certainly don’t get worked up over anything under 100.  I also don’t get worked up about aches and pains.  But the two together bothered me.  I immediately started thinking about bone infections.  I’ve known a few children who have had bone infections and have basically done what Gabe did and stopped walking.  In these instances, the parents could think of no injury and decided to watch their child to see what happened.  In the end, their children required intensive treatment to recover.  Having seen how serious infections can become, I wanted to have him seen sooner rather than later.  After a quick call to my totally non-overreactive husband and hearing him strongly concur, we took off.

We arrived at the walk-in clinic where I assumed they’d do some blood work and take an x-ray.  The nurse was kind but brief, but the doctor was another story.  Alarmed would be the best way to describe him.  He did a few basic assessments on Gabe while repeatedly saying, “We don’t like to see limping and fevers in a child.  It’s not a good thing.”  He said that although he could do an x-ray and some blood work that if it were his child he’d want a bone scan or MRI because although the pain could be as simple as growing pains, we could be looking at leukemia or neoplasms and he’d want to be sure.  I appreciated his concern; I truly believe he was telling me what he’d want for his own child.  The number of times he referenced cancer, however, was terrifying.  He hardly mentioned infections!  I was horridly upset by his vehemence that we might be dealing with cancer.

We left the walk-in clinic for the emergency room where they could order any test we might need and picked up my family along the way.  I felt much better knowing I’d have some company, and called Tahd again with an update.  He had finished his class early and thought he might be able to catch an early flight home, and I practically begged him to do so when I knew it might be an option.

The Children’s Hospital was wonderful.  I really appreciated how everything was designed to make life easier for the kids.  Gabe’s limp was horrible by the time we got there; he practically dragged his leg behind him.  They quickly got us to a room and I was impressed that the first person joining us was a doctor (a resident) – not a nurse or a tech.  She did a thorough examination and left to start writing orders.  In the meantime, her attending stopped by and went through the same set of questions as well as a few extras.  Everybody concurred that blood work and x-rays were in order, so we set off down the hall for a small series of x-rays.

What began as a small series of x-rays turned into (I think) 15 different x-rays.  Gabe was a trooper and followed all their instructions.  Because of all our trying-to-conceive stuff I couldn’t be in the room while they took the pictures.  I helped him get settled on the table and waited outside.  When his x-rays were done the lab tech had arrived for the blood draw.  I wasn’t worried about this because during our ivf he had seen me have blood drawn several times and enjoyed pretending he was a doctor and had to “draw” our blood.  Luckily, they had a skin spray that freezes skin on contact, so his experience wasn’t at all upsetting.  The tech was quick, too, which is always nice.

We had to wait quite a while after that, but eventually the attending came back and said the bloods looked good.  The whites weren’t high or low and nothing else was abnormal.  Whew!  They eventually got the x-rays, also, and the doctors, the radiologist, and an orthopedic surgeon who just happened to be breezing through all felt his x-rays were completely pristine.  No fractures and no pockets of fluid.  Another sigh of relief!

The assumption, then, is that he was dealing with a virus.  Sometimes viruses send immune deposits to certain joints, causing pain that could cause limping like Gabe’s.  They gave him some ibuprofen and said if that seemed to improve matters it would further confirm the viral diagnosis.  If a person has a more severe problem, ibuprofen may take the edge off but won’t cause a marked improvement.

Interestingly, partway through our x-ray process Gabe improved, even before the meds.  In fact, he improved so much that he went from calm and slow-moving to intense, rageful, and bouncing off the walls.  Literally.  It was like he was omnipresent in the ER room.  It was all I could do to keep him from breaking the remote, jamming his fingers in the door, and ripping the curtain off the ceiling.  I have rarely seen him that wired.  Unfortunately for all of us, that side effect seems to be lingering.  Yay.

The good news, however, is that he doesn’t have cancer.  That’s good news I’ll take any day!  However, it certainly wasn’t any sort of good news I expected I might be getting this week.  In the process, I think I may have lost 5 years off my life.

Oh – and Tahd was able to catch an early flight, too.  That was great news, too.  I was only too happy to have him home once Gabe’s crazy behavior stuff began.  It’s nice to have an extra set of hands and another dose of patience!  Hopefully it’s just a side effect of all the yuck from the week and it’ll pass soon.

*Hopefully.*