Doctor's Office Visit #4352

PART ONE:

Seriously. We go to the doctors office all the time. Or we call. Today when the nurse called me back, instead of asking for me by name, she asked to talk to "the mom who's children have weird issues." That's why I love the office we go to, they never forget us. And we sometimes get the royal treatment, like today, when we didn't have to make a real appointment, we were told just to come in. And instead of having to sit in the waiting room, we just got to go straight to the back. We were in and out in less than 20 minutes.

So, just as Ms. Kristen suspected, Spencer has a case of the "Slapped Cheek Syndrome", AKA 5th disease, or the more medically savvy name- Parvovirus B19.

Fun times.

There were no typical warning signs, no fever, no symptoms, but such has been the case with Spencer. One of the 14,000 other times I took him in, Dr. Andert was surprised as she looked in his ear to find a bulging, inflamed ear drum. The surprise was the fact that Spencer said he felt completely fine, he was fever free, and had no complaints of any pain. He was his normal, happy self, with a raging ear infection. So, I wasn't much surprised today when she told us that we were at the end stages of this crazy virus. We just get to sit around and wait for the next kid to get it, avoiding pregnant women at all costs at the same time.

Our #4351 visit/call to the office came a few weeks ago when Sophie was battling a horrible diaper rash (she has them almost weekly, ugh!) and woke up one morning with two red marks that looked like bites on her right thigh. We watched them carefully and over the course of a few days they grew, had a red ring around them, were hard, and were radiating heat. We were super paranoid, checked them constantly, and made some calls to the on-call doctors. Since she was not running a fever, they told us to just keep watching them. Around the 4th day, they started getting smaller and a full week later I noticed they had bruised. Something made me realize that the bruises were in the same spots as her vaccinations had been two weeks prior. After calling the office, my favorite nurse Gayle, confirmed my suspicions as a definite possibility and had me call the health department. It turned out that Sophie had had a reaction to her shots, and that because one of them had been a live virus (the MMR maybe?) it had the potential for a reaction as much as two weeks later.

Our nurse laughed at me as she told me that in her 20-some years of being a nurse, no one she knew of had ever had a reaction like that. She just added it to the list of all the strange things my kids come in for.

If history repeats itself, Carson should be up next for some weird and crazy medical need any time in the next week or two.


PART TWO:


When Spencer heard we were heading in to see the doctor today about his rashy face, he started getting all upset that he might need surgery. No real idea where that concern came from. I kept telling him that he wasn't going to need surgery but he didn't believe me, he kept asking me how I knew that he wouldn't need surgery. His Aunt Rachael piped up with "Because Spencer, surgery would mean that they would take your face off, and they just won't need to do that." That stopped him from asking, for awhile. On the drive to Richland he started asking again, and said that he was worried because Colton told him he would have to have surgery. I asked him what he thought surgery meant. He answered, "Its when your leg gets cut. Or a shark bites your leg off. That's surgery." I reminded him that since he only had bumps on his face, surgery was definitely not going to be an issue.