remember, remember, how much i hate november

On the 5th, I took to this blog to gush about our random family getaway and our first magical date night in a year. I felt a little bit like I was floating through life until the following morning when Ethan puked. He had just chugged two cups of cow's milk, which he doesn't even get normally, so I pegged that as the culprit. Until he puked again. If you're following me on Instagram you've probably seen the pathetic photos of a miserable little boy and, well, that likely explains the crickets going on on this blog. Our super special, magical, baptismal family getaway had abruptly ended and real life came rearing it's head in the form of (dun dun dun)...

viral hepatitis.

Which apparently, if you're the ER doctor who was probably sure she was going to need to call in life support for me after I had a panic attack and simultaneously imploded as soon as she said the "H" word, isn't as scary as it sounds. It just means my poor sweet boy picked up some nasty virus at the park and it's screwing with his liver enzymes. (Feel free to show me at anytime how this isn't as scary as it sounds -- I'm apparently not seeing that.) It should simply go away in time like any other ol' virus. Which sounds great in theory, but it's been almost a week and we still woke up at three in the morning to screaming, terror and a whole lot of vomit. And the welts. This was originally thought to be Hand, Foot, Mouth because of the welts everywhere and I thought it was just my mind toying with my neurotic nature that sometimes the welts would be tiny and then they'd be huge and swollen, but, nope, they grow and shrink at their leisure.

While my instincts say to curl up in the fetal position, cry and throw things at the wall, I know we just need to trudge through this one day at a time. Remind me of that when we're at Ethan's pediatrician tomorrow morning for a blood draw and he's wailing and I'm wailing and the world feels like it's crashing down all over again. It took the emergency room nurses about thirty minutes to find suitable veins to run Ethan's IV and draw blood and it was the longest half hour of my life and I thought I was going to just grab him and run out of the hospital faster than I've ever run before, but I tried to remain strong in my conviction that he needed to be there and seen by a doctor. (And he did.) My husband was the 6'4" giant hunched over in a chair in the corner trying not to pass out at the sight of the butterfly needles the nurses were using on Ethan. We make for a good team or, really, anything but.

This marks the third November out of Ethan's three Novembers he has wound up in the hospital. His first November on this planet, he contracted RSV and November was a blur of breathing treatments and doctor visits and devastation and chaos. The second November was a stomach virus were life was only made possible with the healing powers of Zofran and now, well, this. Because viral hepatitis was all our Novembers were lacking, somehow. I'm trying hard not to be bitter. I'm also trying hard to stay positive that our trip in eight days for Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and my sister's dance competition is still going to go on even if the doctor remained confident. I think I'm too bitter to remain confident. Optimism isn't one of my finest qualities (I mean, to be fair, my two year old's four pound weight loss in the span of a week isn't really helping).

...And so it goes. One day at a time. And all that other stuff, too.