Oliver's Adventures

Hey everyone. Long time no write. Wow - where to begin? "Let's start at the very beginning - a very good place to start." Thanks, Maria. I'll just give a brief overview of everything that has happened so far. Sorry if this is redundant for everyone - but I don't know who knows and who doesn't. ANYWAY. On December 19th, Oliver woke up from his nap and kept falling down. It seemed to get worse and worse and his eyes were shaking like the room was spinning. It was freaky. I took him into the after-hours clinic, and I could tell they were a little freaked, too. They sent us in an ambulance to Primary Children's to see a neurologist. He had two CT scans - one with dye. He had really high blood pressure, but they couldn't figure out how it was related to the dizziness. On the second ct scan they found a coarctation, which is a narrowing of the aorta, that he's had since birth. So that was the cause of the high blood pressure. The dizziness went away after a day or so. He had an EKG which showed he does need heart surgery for the coarctation and then had an MRI to rule out possible causes for the dizziness like a stroke. The results from that were normal. So after several days in the hospital, they sent us home with a date for surgery and no good explanation why he was dizzy. Whew. What a whirlwind.

After a couple days of being home, I finally discovered the reason for his dizziness. I kept having this nagging thought about a bottle of Delsym (cough medicine) I had bought not long before this happened. I hadn't been able to find it since I bought it. I thought maybe I'd left it at the store. I even mentioned it to the nurse at the ER and she quickly dismissed it since it was a brand new bottle with the plastic still on it. Well I found that bottle with the plastic still on it, only it had the lid off and was completely empty. Here it is in all its glory:


It was downstairs in our storage room underneath his old walker that he sometimes likes to sit in for kicks. He's too big for it, but he sits and plays with the toys and then calls for me to get him out, because he gets stuck in it. This is why this is so VEXING to me. Why didn't I see him doing this? I don't remember him playing in that walker at all that day. I remember I went to the kids' school Christmas program at 12:30 and he was running around and playing and acting completely normally. Here's a picture from that:


Okay, he looks totally wasted, but I swear he was just fine. He's just squinting in preparation for the flash like he does in every picture these days. I probably got home from the program about 2 and put him down for a nap, and he woke up at 4:30 and immediately started falling down. There was no time after he woke up that he was out of my sight. So it's JUST WEIRD. I can't figure out when he had time to open a brand new bottle of cough medicine and guzzle the entire thing.

Now lest you think I am a horrible mother that doesn't watch her child, I have to tell you that this child gets into EVERYTHING at lightning speed. I'll start doing my makeup in the bathroom and within 30 seconds he's got the lid off the Vaseline and has smeared chunks of it all over his hands and face. That's happened at least 3 times. We came home from somewhere the other day and within minutes he had covered the floor with an entire bag of lentils. Here are some other documented Oliver classics:

Cold cream on the couch.

He had just taken a bath and I went downstairs to get his
clothes from the dryer and came up to find this oatmeal delight.

Immediately following a pancake dinner.

I don't know, maybe this proves that I really don't watch him very well. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Anyway, his surgery was put off because of his sinus infection and now he's done with the antibiotics and he's healthy, but they're telling me it may be the middle of February before he can have the surgery. I'll know tomorrow for sure. I'm not looking forward to it, by any means, but I sort of just want it over with, so I can relax and he can be all fixed. It seems agonizingly dragged out now. But it seems like all of this was meant to be, somehow. I'm so glad they found this problem with his heart and can fix it before it gets any worse. Sometimes bad mothering can pay off. That's the lesson for today.

When I get my bro-in-law's pics of him in the hospital, maybe I'll write more about that experience. What else have you got to read these days?