The Joy's of Womanhood

Miss M is pretty sick today. She was recently diagnosed with yet another ear infection, and then last night she had a fever close to 104. Today the fever has slowly been going down, but we thought it best to take her to the doctor... just in case.

Our appointment began at 11:15am with the usual round of questioning, how long has she had symptoms, how's her appetite, etc. She made it through the first cut - on to the second round, blood test. "Oh! She squirted! She's a really good bleeder." These are the nurses exact words. I looked down at the table and saw the tiny droplets of "squirted" blood and felt faint. That blood just squirted out of my kid's finger. Gross. BUT... not as gross as what was to come.

Third and final round of our competition for America's Sickest Baby - the pee round. In this round we're looking for a urinary tract infection. So, how do you get a 14 month old to pee in a cup you ask? Well, you don't. A nurse came into the room and taped a plastic pee-pee bag to my daughters hoo-haa and suggested that I try to get her to drink as much fluid as possible. Um... what fluid? I really wasn't prepared for this, but after about 30 minutes of no-flow another nurse came in and offered up some formula. So here we are, sitting in the world's hottest exam room, both of us are falling asleep, Miss M can barely move she's so sick, and the nurses are all "just down the hall for lunch, just come get us when she pees". Fifteen more minutes pass, then another 30, finally Miss M wakes up from her snooze and gets down to business. She's so ready to win this round that she not only pees in the plastic bag, but poops in it too! I took off her diaper to check things out and THANK GOD the poo was actually on the outside of the bag. If she had actually gone inside the bag we would have had to start this whole ridiculous thing over again. So, like any momma that just wants to get her sick kid home - and knows via motherly intuition that her kid does NOT have a UTI - I scoop the poop out of her diaper with one hand and half a paper towel and do my best to hide it. Seriously, now Daddy isn't the only one that's touched poop.

The competition is over and the diagnosis is.... wait for it... it's a mystery! Yay! Just like every sickness in this family, it's just a random thing and should go away. The ear infection is clearing up with the antibiotics, just got to keep giving her Tylenol.