How We Recover

We got home five days ago from a trip home that we took to clear our heads, see fall for the first time in five years, and to have boys finally meet some family that they hadn’t yet. We stayed in four different states and were gone for over two weeks, which I will put up posts about in the coming days.

But right now we’re all still in the recovery mode, which is to be expected. Lincoln especially doesn’t transition well, not from waking to sleeping, not from being the only child to the oldest child, not from not traveling to traveling or the other way around.

It’s one of the marks of a sensitive, high needs child, and he is both these things, to his very utmost abilities. So when we ended up in the ER, and I wasn’t even surprised this time. I wouldn’t say I expected it, but I expected exhaustion and sickness, because both always hit him after big life changes. And then he compounds both by not sleeping and not eating, because the natural progression from everything being slightly off is to panic, of course, and not do the things that would fix the problems, and therefore make everything twelve times worse. (I’d love to say he gets this trait from Joe, but the fact is that it is solidly from me. Sorry, baby.)

Thankfully for all of us, Eliot gets Joe’s sensibility and easy going nature. (I don’t think our family would survive with THREE out of four people being prone to feel everything and exaggerate everything. Lincoln and I need practical people in our lives to make us drink water and talk us down from the-world-is-ending-despair.)

So anyway, six days after I went to urgent care for back spasms which reoccurred due to the fact that my muscles are incapable of relaxing in normal situations, and therefore pushed to spasms during stressful situations (like trying to fit every childhood friend into the space of a week), I found myself in the ER with Lincoln.

He essentially refused to leave the couch for two days (like we expected), then got sick (like we expected), and then refused to eat or drink (like he always does) and then we realized he didn’t keep any food or drink down for almost a day and a half, with no lessening of symptoms.

We were the second people in line at the ER, but then a boy came in who had somehow had his face smashed into a ceiling fan (??? Mental note: keep in mind for future Eliot shenanigans). He was fine, but clearly in a more urgent state than my quiet boy, who barely looked sick. Then a baby with a dislocated shoulder. Then a man in a wheelchair who was carefully guarded by two military police officers. (Mental note: the ER would be a great place to get inspiration for several Flannery O’Conner-esque short stories.)

But we finally got him some anti-nausea pills, he kept down a swallow of water and a Popsicle.

Then we came home and Joe got sick.

Then the next day I took the boys to the store to replace the lotion that the scary-looking Seattle security man confiscated, and we got smoothies. It was idyllic, it was peaceful, we were walking happily around the store looking at everything, until Eliot threw up the blueberry smoothie right in the middle of the store. (I couldn’t have gotten the banana one that at least didn’t stain absolutely everything in its path.)

Anyway, I pretended that nothing had happened, cleaned it up as quickly as I could, met no one else’s eyes, and paid for things and came home. And we pretty much haven’t left since.

So far, I haven’t gotten sick, which is unprecedented. I think I’ll avoid any populated places until I’m sure we’re out of recovery mode.