PITA

Yesterday was one of those days that turns into a giant pain in the hiney kind of days. And it started on Monday.

Monday was the day that Kate started crying about “her bump” at what was supposed to be bath time. I took a look at what she was complaining about. On her upper thigh she had what looked almost like a blister or bug bite. Since this is the second time she’s developed one of those, in about the same area, I decided to keep an eye on it.

By Wednesday night, I was officially concerned. It probably didn’t help that Kate kept picking at it. Not constantly, but if she was sitting in a quiet moment (rare to begin with), her hand would wander down and start poking. I took a close look at it Wednesday, and was dismayed to find inflamed skin surrounding what looked like an infected hair follicle, plus a hard lump under the skin where the bump seemed to come to a head.

So I called the doctor from work on Thursday and made an appointment. Then I had to change the appointment (to later that day — I love my pediatrician’s office) and then I had to hustle Kate and Flora out of daycare to the doctor.

I had tried to schedule things so I could pick up Kate and come back later for Flora. But I had forgotten that it was “Carnival Day”, and Kate didn’t want to leave. I simply did not have the wherewithal to even attempt to drag her kicking and screaming to the ped’s office. I’m so glad they had a later appointment for me, but now I had to take both of them.

This proved to be challenging because 1) both girls were bouncing off walls from Carnival Day anyway and 2) Flora, when she is anyplace with anyone to talk to she wants to talk to them. I don’t want to say that she’s an attention hog, because truly that’s not what I mean. She’s 5, and extremely outgoing, and is still learning the conversational art of “wait your turn to speak”. As we were at the doc’s office to talk about Kate, her turn was going to be a long time coming.

It proved as challenging as I feared, not helped by the fact that I was hungry, hot, and, you know, pregnant.

The doctor initially wasn’t too concerned. Kate has mulloscum contagiosum in the same area that her bump was, and she (the doctor) thought that it was probably an inflamed one of those. (I had figured the same, but I didn’t like the hard lump under the skin.) Once she got a look at The Bump, though, she changed her tune.

The skin was tender, hot and red. It didn’t help that it’s kind of in a fold of Kate’s legs. She decided she wanted to try to drain it and culture it to rule out staph and MRSA.

Now there’s nothing like the mention of MRSA to set off alarm bells in anyone’s mind, so I jumped all over that. The doctor was VERY reassuring, and told me that she was going to put Kate on an antibiotic regardless. “I’m probably over-reacting,” she said, “but I’d rather do that than not.” I was totally okay with that.

Then, of course, we had to drain The Bump.

That was about as fun as you might expect. Kate may not be a big girl, but she is wiry as hell. I was too busy holding down her top half (and trying to whisper reassuring things in her ear) to see the pus that came out of the bump. A nurse had Kate’s bottom half, but even she was struggling. By the time we were trying to get a band-aid on that thing, you would have thought we were taking red hot pokers to Kate’s leg. I’m sure Kate felt that’s exactly what we were doing.

Once we all recovered from that, it was time to run to Target for Kate’s medicine. By this time, it was nearly 6 p.m. I didn’t feel like spending money on crappy food; I just wanted to get in and get out at Target and go home for sandwiches. Kate and Flora wanted popcorn and were otherwise pretty cranky and whiny, too. Plus, there had been some sort of toy explosion in my back seat from their Carnival Day prizes — which were remarkably similar in quality to skee ball ticket prizes. You know what I mean. And Kate had given her upper thighs — and the back of passenger side car seat — tattoos with a ballpoint pen she had found in the back seat.

Thank goodness I had called the Target pharmacy before we arrived. We picked up her medication, new band-aids (she got to pick), some hydrogen peroxide, and some fruit roll ups for the ride home.

At least the rest of the evening was fairly drama free. We all had sandwiches and chips for dinner, cookies and milk for dessert, and I went easy at bath time (just the basics, no hair washing) to spare myself Kate screaming about her bump. Bedtime was its usual chaos, however; plus they came downstairs during my viewing of X-Men 3: The Last Stand. I’m sure the glimpses of that battle scene made for some interesting dreams.

And is possibly a reason Kate had to crawl into bed with me at 4 this morning. I don’t want anyone crawling into bed with me at 4 in the morning. Unless it’s Hugh Jackman.

And now Dan is out of town for the weekend (*sob*). I’m pretty used to fending for myself with the girls, but even though Dan sees patients Saturday, we usually all get to spend time together as a family that evening and on Sunday. And now I don’t even get that relief.

By Sunday, you will probably find me in a corner quietly weeping and rocking back and forth. It’s totally unfair that pregnant women don’t get to drink. Pray for us!