Monday, July 23, 2007

5:27 AM 7/23/2007

Can a weekend be fun and scary? Well, I suppose if one can be then we had one. It all started early Saturday morning with Sydney waking up with hip pain. It is really hard to discern the cause and exactly what was going on. We both took our turns with her trying to get to the bottom of it. I wasn't present for Sydney's discussion with Lynley. I was busy doing some high powered cartoon watching with the other twerps. Lynley came away from the experience sufficiently scared. I watched Sydney pretty closely but I did my best to not let her know. What I noticed was that when we were paying attention to her hips seemed to be hurting much worse than when we weren't watching. She also seemed to come down with clearly life threatening bouts of pain every time our attention was focused on the other two for any long period of time. As the morning progressed she continued to complain of pain but at the same time I would catch her running and jumping through the house without any hint of pain. After watching this for an hour or two I finally pulled her aside and tried to get to the bottom of it. In hindsight, I probably should have let it go but, nonetheless, I just had to find out the answer. Regardless, I had a serious discussion with her. I explained that hip pain was very serious and we need to know the truth about exactly how much it hurt and where. I touched the top of her right hip where she had been grabbing earlier - no pain. I came about 2 inches lower and applied pressure - a minute amount of pressure. She screamed in pain. I knew this was a complete over reaction and led me to believe that she was faking it. I asked her if the other hip hurt and she said 'no.' It did not take long before I had her changing stories and the next time I touched the left leg she screamed in agony as well. She is a horrible over-actor but it still did not make me feel any better. In the end I never really got much out of her. It left me feeling no better and no worse. I still had no idea of whether she had pain or not and I had no idea of the intensity, the onset, or the location. I elected to not mention hip or stomach pain any more and just see what happened.

The day went on with very few mentions of pain and all were confined to the morning. We spent the day doing hard activities. We swam in the pool and rode our bikes around the block. These were hardly the activities of someone who was in pain from cancer boiling in the marrow of her hips or of someone whose hips were being eaten away. I began to feel better but I was still far from satisfied. To tell you how worried we were I elected to delay her start of Accutane because of the pain. First off, we have had enough courses of Accutane to know about the various aches and pains that can come along with that. Sydney's last few courses were full of scares. I wanted to ensure that we got to a satisfactory conclusion of what was going on with her hips before we had to consider Accutane as a source as well. Secondly, I also know that Accutane is antagonistic to chemotherapy and the last thing I wanted to do to her at a potential relapse is make her chemotherapy less effective. Yeah, I know, we are scaredy cats. Regardless, we made the decision and stuck to it. Saturday evening and all day Sunday brought us complete silence on the pain front but we had other surprises.

Yesterday afternoon Graham decided to fall off the diving board. He was not following the rules and he was being a certifiable "kid". Although he knew better, he was dancing on the end of the diving board. He fell and hit his head, mouth first, onto the side of the pool. There was no blood but he did do a good job on his tongue. He almost bit clean through it. Worse yet one of his teeth was knocked in. It is only slightly visible but he very definitely moved one of his front teeth into toward his mouth about a millimeter. This will mean a trip to the dentist today. I don't know what will come of it but I am pretty sure that he will eventually come out of this experience with one tooth less. Thank goodness for baby teeth.

So I guess you are wondering what was so fun about this scary weekend. Hmmmm, good question. There was nothing special but I guess another weekend home with my family doing mundane things is about as good as it gets. We went and played at playland in McDonalds. We swam on no less than 5 occasions. We went bike riding, tree climbing, and bug finding. We even got to watch Daddy get out the chain saw and do some tree trimming. It doesn't get more mundane or more ordinary but it also does not get any better.

This is my purpose and these are my purpii.

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