Thursday, January 21, 2010

Difficult Recovery

Well, it's been about 48 hours since S's "incident". I think yesterday was almost worse than Tuesday because reality had begun to sink in, and there was no more anesthetic in her system to dull the pain.

She's in quite a bit of pain, physically. Her upper lip is very swollen, and you can tell the inside is all torn up. She refuses to shut her mouth, and I'm not sure if it's out of pain or fear. She usually don't attempt to talk other than an "uh huh" or "uh uh". When she does talk, she tries to not move her mouth or lips at all, so it's very difficult to understand. She gets frustrated when I don't guess what she's saying right away.

I'm having a very difficult time getting any fluids into her. I took her to the store yesterday, and she picked out "blue juice" (blue sports drink), and chocolate milk, however she has been hesitant to drink much. Don't even mention food. So now, I have to worry a bit about dehydration on top of everything else.

She refuses to look in a mirror. She told K (how she managed this, I'll never know) that she was afraid to go to school or the gym because she thought her friends wouldn't like her anymore. I cry to even think about her worrying like that.

She refused to look under her pillow to see what the tooth fairy left. Before bed last night, she looked and saw the money, and looked like she wanted to cry. Refused to even touch it.

My parents came up last night to give her a get well gift (princess tiara and other princess accouterments along with fancy ice packs). She was initially shy, but was willing to be with them after a while. My sister in law and family have expressed interest in seeing her too, so I'll try to get that arranged. I'm hoping that as she sees her loved ones seeing her, and still loving her, she'll feel better about everything.

Her dentist called yesterday morning to see how she was feeling. I thought that was very thoughtful of him. He seemed a little surprised that they'd pulled three teeth, so now I'm plagued with doubt over whether it was the best decision to just pull all three. Maybe we should've risked having to take her back and just pulled the one tooth that really needed to be pulled. I shouldn't think that way; it's too late to second guess it. I did bring up the pedo partial with him, since S is taking this much harder emotionally than I expected. It sounds like it's not as outrageously expensive as I originally thought, so I may consider it in a couple weeks, once she's had time to heal a bit.

I'm forcing pain killers into her, which makes her very, very angry. It's kind of nice that she won't shut her mouth, it makes squirting it in there much easier. But, she feels a lot better afterwards, so I only feel a little guilty about it.

I think time is what she needs most, but it moves so slowly. I'm going a little stir crazy because I haven't gone to the gym all week and I can't go anywhere because S doesn't want to be seen by anyone, and she doesn't want me to leave her.

Since I'm stuck here and already miserable, I've thought about potty training Z, just to make things even funner. He's sad he hasn't been getting as much attention, and that I'm not sharing the chocolate milk or blue juice with him. Maybe he'll perform just to get the attention and juice.

1 comment:

Kristen said...

I love you and I really look up to you right now because I wouldn't want to be you. That is one of the hard mom jobs. As for potty training I say "why not give it a try if you are stuck in the house?"