Bah humbug for sure

SO MUCH HAPPENED YESTERDAY.

Let's start with me.  I woke up with a scaly raised plaque on my face ON MY FACE MY FACE OH MY GOD MY FACE that looks like psoriasis.  I am really hopeful that it's a spider bite (oh please let it be a spider bite because I love thinking about a spider biting me ON MY FACE while I am sleeping in my bed) because my psoriasis hasn't flared up since before I had kids and even then it was on my palms and soles, not my FACE.  I made an appointment with the dermatologist because OF COURSE I DID but in the meantime I hope it was a spider. But not a brown recluse, obvi.

This picture has nothing to do with that story or anything really but it didn't upload yesterday for some reason and didn't I make an adorable first snow snack for the kids to enjoy after they came in from playing (about 8.5 minutes after they went out to play, but who's counting?)

 The red plaque (not to be confused with the red on my cheeks or around my nose which is plain old rosacea)  is below my eye and above my cheek.  And the big black thing on my face is mascara because I am clearly awesome at makeup.

 I had a supremely shitty Monday, which has become so much of a trend that I am like one bad Monday away from sharing those stupid drowned cat hanging from a branch Monday memes.  Cooper has had a sore throat since Sunday and an upset stomach since Saturday (well, he has been refusing food and saying his stomach hurts, anyway-- no puking thank goodness), so I finally took him to the doctor.  Not our usual doctor.  And she could only see us over lunch so both kids were like hungry caged animals.  And he needed a strep test, which he hates so bad that he sometimes coughs up blood (blood because he freaks out so violently that the doctor sometimes accidentally gouges the back of this throat which makes him hate strep tests all the more.  It's a cycle.  And he has had a TON of strep tests because he was getting sore throats at least once and sometimes twice a month before his tonsils came out and everyone was paranoid about bacteria and Harry's effusions even though his infectious disease docs (Harry's-- Cooper doesn't have any--- yet) said strep was not a factor in his recurrent effusions because he's not Beth March for goodness sake.

TL;DR:  Justavirus.

After Ben came home, I spilled the beans that my campus meeting wasn't happening, and I used my work time to buy supplies for the speech contest I am running today and to take Harry with me to do some urgent work at a coffee shop.  He looked so grown up.

 And also like such a baby.  Have I mentioned that he is having another effusion right now (and that Cooper is sick again at the same time-- this s WAY TOO WEIRD)?  Well, he is.  It started after Zoo Lights Friday night.  We immediately started Ibuprofen and called the pediatric cardiologist on call, who told us to keep on keeping on the the NSAIDs and check in with Harry's doc on Monday.  She called us right away and said to give him meds through tomorrow and then stop and see what happens.  If there's pain, we need to bring him in for an echo.  She's so lovely and reassuring because Harry is far from the most dire case on her load.  But still, it scares the hell out of us every damn time.  And of him, although he is handling it really well this time, and he is getting really good at catching it quickly.

 I also picked up a Costco pizza for dinner and called Ben as Harry and I were getting in the car (Harry with the great news that his hockey stats were updated and his third assist from last weekend was finally credited to his number, which means I will get to sew another patch (playmaker this time) on his damn coat!  Lucky me!) to remind him to turn on the oven.

"Oh man," he said.  "i just got off the phone with urgent care.  I really thought Dorothy's wrist was broken, but now I think maybe not."

I was all WHAT THE WHAT?

Jack and Cooper and Dorothy were all sledding in our side yard, and Jack pushed Cooper and Dorothy down the hill-- something he had been doing over and over, with Ben listening through the open kitchen window to their shrieks of delight.  Only this time, there were just shrieks because Jack pushed a little harder, and Dorothy flew off the sled and crashed into the fence, right arm first.

The urgent care doc told Ben that if it wasn't red or swollen (it wasn't) and she calmed down after icing it (she sort of did) and she could use it to grip things (she could), then she could wait overnight and see her doctor in the morning,

But when I got home, she was not using her right arm when she could avoid it and was whimpering, although she did happily climb up to the table and color while I folded laundry and made dinner plates for everyone.  When she went to wash her hands before dinner, though, pumping the hand soap made her cry fresh tears.  That's when I was like oh shit Dorothy broke her wrist.

The urgent care doc said he was 90% sure it wasn't broken, especially since she was indicating that the pain was right above her hand.  But he sent us back for an x-ray just to be sure because I told him that when her dad squeezed her forearm a bit, she cried.

 She LOVED looking at the pictures of her bones, and the Tylenol I gave her after the hand washing incident seemed to be kicking in, so it was a not-too-bad trip to urgent care surrounded by kids in masks who were there because they had the flu.  Jack came along for moral support and to tell the doctor that I made him play 2 soccer games after he broke his wrist.  Thanks,  Jack.

I knew when the nurse-- luckily our pediatrician's normal nurse who is our favorite and just happened to be working after-hours-- smiled sadly at us and asked us to come back to the exam room to talk about the x-rays that it was broken.

It's a tiny buckle break in her tiny little ulna that the doctor almost missed because he wasn't looking closely there because it wasn't where she told him it hurt the most.  He enlarged the picture to double check it, though, and saw the ossification.  Then he re-examined her arm and realized that she was sitting quietly and not protesting when he touched areas that hurt.  He initially mistook her total bad-assery for no pain.  Turn out she's one tough little toddler.

Speaking of toddlers, normal people with a buckle break would not need a cast, but 3 year-olds are not normal people.  We see the pediatric orthopedist tomorrow, but the nurse I talked to today thinks that yes, Dorothy will probably get a cast.  I don't even want to think about all of the work this entails in terms of winter wardrobe and activity limitations, but we did sort out the next session of gymnastics, and I have a call in to her dance teacher because PRIORITIES, people.

If you want to hear about something other than our ongoing health dramz, I also wrote about our damn elf over here.