full of it

Just quit reading this post now, it's disgusting. Who writes about this stuff, anyway? But this is my life, and what my life is revolving around right now is feces. And that is not metaphorical. Actually, I think I prefer real feces life complications to metaphorical feces. If you catch my drift. Or maybe not. Toss-up.

I've had R2 home from school all week, because of his increasingly frequent violent tantrums, and I feel like I've aged 5 years. Yesterday was the worst. He woke up before 6, screaming like he was dying and then repeated that, plus beating himself up, again, in a literal sense, every 15-20 minutes for the rest of the day. We just spent the day in the ER Monday, and nobody saw anything that should be causing him pain. His pedi thought it was constipation, so I'd been treating that, but things were just getting worse. I called the pediatrician yesterday, panicking like a n00b mom, and when I explained that very little was happening, despite my efforts, she sent us back to the ER.

Now, look. I'm a preemie mom. I'm a micropreemie mom, and I am unmoved by fevers and vomiting and giant goose-eggs on foreheads and sickness in general. I don't take my kids in for easy stuff, and I'm almost never wrong when I think there is something that has to be treated. So taking a child to the emergency room for poop seemed... embarrassing. And of course, once I get there, he sits very still and quiet, like maybe no one will notice him and poke him with needles, so the report probably says, "Mom claims he's screaming, but he's not, so maybe mom is nuts. See: Munchausen." And I always get the once-over, anyway, because he looks like he's been thrown down a flight of stairs, after these fits.

But eventually, many, many hours later, they show me the X-ray from earlier, and basically, he is just full of it. In a literal sense. Like, I didn't even know poop could go that high. They said he's probably in severe pain, which makes sense, with the screaming that only I can hear. So they move us to a different freezing room and many years later, when I am old, they come and do a thing with the liquid and the tubes and they get things moving, eventually. He is fascinated. MALE.


Finally, they send us home with instructions on how to finish the job. It will take 3 days. I'm not looking forward to it, but he slept till 7:30 and has only had one two screaming fit(s) today, so I'm hopeful that maybe we'll get happy R2 back. But first, I need a hazmat suit. And a vacation.