Hangin' with the Mancub

So it’s been awhile since I last posted. Let’s see . . . what’s been happening?

Dr. Kat is leaving tonight to go to London for six days!!! Yay! I’ll be working tomorrow and Tuesday but I get a four-day weekend. Not sure yet what I’ll do with it. Hoping we’ll get to hang with the mancub for part of it.

The mancub’s surgery is still scheduled for September 5th. As I understand it, he will have his nasal conchae scraped. The nasal conchae are bony protruberances that curl out from the side of the nose into the nostril. They force inhaled air to move in a slower whirling pattern down into the lungs so that the air can be warmed, moisturized and cleaned by the mucus membrane. The mancub’s are somewhat enlarged, which may account in part for his terribly horribly heartbreakingly labored breathing while he’s sleeping. He struggles so hard to breathe while he’s sleeping, you just feel like crying. And then he stops breathing and you nudge him or shake him to try to stimulate breathing. Sometimes he gasps a long shuddering breath and sometimes even moving him around makes no difference. You just see his chest heaving with no breath coming in. It’s horrible.

Anyway, so he’ll be having the conchae scraped down a bit. In addition, his tonsils and adenoids will be removed and he will have tubes put in his ears. I am still not clear on whether his language delays are due to hearing loss as a result of ear infections or whether he has language processing issues or both.

His pediatrician put him on an anti-biotic, which seems to have cleared up the infection. He doesn’t seem to have any difficulty hearing. If he doesn’t have an ear infection and doesn’t have permanent damage, why should we put the tubes in and leave his middle ear open to more bacteria entering? I wish I could be present at these pediatrician’s visits. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only parental figure who even knows what questions to ask but I can’t be there and it’s very frustrating. So I have to send T-Bone off with a grocery list of questions and just hope that I’ve explained well enough that he knows what he’s asking and why.

Okay, enough about all that. Let’s catch up on the last couple of weeks . . .

The only exciting thing really has been hanging with the mancub. T-Bone brought him over a couple of Saturdays ago and we had a great time playing. I really wanted to take him to the park because we didn’t have any toys or fun things for a little boy to do AT ALL but it was so swelteringly hot that we couldn’t go. I mean the boy already can’t breathe! So we hung out in the apartment and I wheeled him back and forth on my massage stool, which he loved.

My mom had bought him a stuffed bison on her vacation. I wasn’t sure whether he would like it since stuffed animals are more of a girl thing. But when I held out the little plush toy, he grabbed it and rubbed his hand over the fur. “Nanoose,” he announced. T-Bone and I looked at each other. “Nanoose,” he repeated, holding the bison over his head, and so his first toy was christened.

I had also bought him a bouncy ball from the drug store. Thank goodness we had the bouncy ball! Fortunately he didn’t really bounce it very hard – not very smart to give a little boy a ball to play with in the house, I know, but it was so wide that he couldn’t throw it very hard against the ground. We rolled it back and forth, which he found fascinating.

Then when he got tired, he crawled up where I was lying on the couch and curled up on my chest. He does this cute thing when he's falling asleep - he likes to hold your hand and pinch the loose skin around your knuckles. If he can't find another person's hand, he'll hold his own and pinch his knuckle skin drowsily as he drifts off to sleep. Adorable. So he fell asleep on my chest and I read my book while T-Bone napped in the bedroom.

Aargh, I'm too hungry to continue. I'll tell you more about last weekend once I get sprung from this joint.