Monday, November 28, 2011

Before and after

I am a worrier by nature. When I had a kid, I just simply ramped up the worrying, but that's really because there's just more to worry about. I mean, you get to run the wprry-gamut from whether baby is cold or hot or sick or comfortable to worrying about a plugged tear duct and dry skin and unusual discharge.

And then, on Thanksgiving, there was a line drawn, and I went to a new level.

Baby had some sort of event on Thanksgiving. She had a tremor in her left arm; or some sort of seizure but only involving her left arm. We spent that evening in the emergency room at a country hospital in KY and then in the pediatric emergency room at the University of Kentucky. She spent two days at Children's Hospital. They ran every test*. They all came back negative. So they discharged us with a diagnosis of "dystpnic posturing" which we both googled and got freaked out about and have sworn off the googles because of. I know that's a lot of poor preposition use. Bite me.

We made an appointment with our pediatrician before we left the hospital. We were hoping that it was a fluke of sorts -- after all, there had been no activity while we were at KCH.

And then yesterday, I saw the shaking again. And again today. So either it's simply something she does and we're overprotective or something is wrong and nobody knows what. I keep looking at the pictures we took Thanksgiving when she met her paternal grandparents. They are from "before." We live in the "after," where we're all scared.

*I am not joking. From 10pm on, we were in an episode of "House" -- they did a lumbar puncture, an mri, an eeg, bloodwork. Travis and I were waiting for one of the residents to say "auto-immune."