And now, the rest of the story

I'm back from Doc in the Box with a fresh bunch of azythromicin with the hopes that it will kill whatever funk this is I've caught. Tell you what, the look on the doctor's face when I told him that I'd been sleeping on the hospital room floor was priceless. Try it sometime, it's kind of a mix of disbelief and sheer horror.

So here's the scoop. As it turns out, they ended up doing another throat culture on Monkey Man on Sunday and it turns out that he had a staph infection on his tonsils. Not strep, but staph. Lovely, huh? I can't even begin to imagine how the hell this has happened. But apparently, you can get really weird symptoms from staph infections, including swollen joints (like his leg and neck/shoulder problems), rashes, etc. Velllly interestink. But we didn't even find this out until this morning when the doctor came in yet again with a fresh set of discharge papers and I finally cornered her into telling us if they'd ever narrowed down exactly what had caused all of this.

We had originally been released to come home yesterday; however, Monkey Man acted kind of odd all morning, took a nap, ate some lunch, and then proceeded to yak all over the place. It was like almost scoring a touchdown and getting a leg cramp on the 5-yard line....sooooo close. Joey was pretty upset and disappointed - and the strange thing was that Monkey Man and I were just like, "oh well, there's always tomorrow." I guess after spending all that time with my dad in the hospital, I've almost gotten a little blase about everything and nothing phased me at all.

One thing I will say is that we had excellent nursing and physician care at the hospital. It was such a breath of fresh air after dealing with the bush doctors down at my parents' hospital that I called our HR person at work and am trying to lobby her to change our company's usual Christmas donation from one charity to the PICU at the hospital. Seriously, it was very impressive.

As scary as everything was, though, I knew that what we were going through was just a drop in the bucket compared to most of the other families on that unit. The four-month old little girl named Kaylie across the hall who almost died on Sunday. The eleven-year old boy named Dustin who was just diagnosed with bone cancer. Some of the kids there will never go home. It's a sobering thought.

I drove home from the Doc in the Box this afternoon and finally let myself cry. Damn, it has been such a horrible two months that I can barely remember what life was like before my dad got sick. I'm hoping that some normalcy returns soon.