the whole world turned upside down...

On Tuesday morning, we set out for an adventure in Brenham, TX, which is about an hour and a half from here. We visited Blue Bell Creamery, then went out to lunch and poked into some antique shops. On the way home, Isaac fell asleep in the car. When he woke up, he said his leg hurt. I thought it was asleep from sleeping in a weird position. When we got into the house, he seemed kind of cranky and a little warm. Maren had had a bit of a virus on Sunday, so I thought he was coming down with the same thing. I gave him some Tylenol, and he seemed to bounce back.

When he woke up on Wednesday, he was still running a fever and said his leg hurt too much to walk. We gave him more Tylenol, and gave him the option of staying home or going out shopping and going to lunch. He thought shopping and lunch sounded fun, and he sat in the stroller as we poked around Rice Village. This time, the tylenol didn't perk him up quite so much, and he was miserable by the time we got home. The other kids had flu shots that afternoon, so while we were at the pediatrician's office, I asked the nurse what she thought about his symptoms. She thought I should bring him in, so at 4pm on Wednesday afternoon, the pediatrician saw him and told us to go to the emergency room for blood tests and an x-ray.

By 10pm on Wednesday night, he had had lots of blood drawn, x-rays of his knee and hip, and a needle aspiration of his knee and the surrounding muscle. They admitted him with a tentative diagnosis of an infection of his left knee, his femur, and/or the quadricep. On Thursday morning he had an MRI, which confirmed that the has osteomyelitis, a bone infection. That afternoon he had surgery-- a hole drilled into his femur to relieve the pressure and drain the infection. We're waiting for final lab results to come back, but the doctors think the infection is MRSA (a particularly nasty staph infection). I guess he didn't realize that he was doing the trendy thing by getting MRSA the same week Newsweek did a big article on it.

We hope that he's now on the road to recovery, but it's going to be a very long road. He'll be in the hospital for about a week. He needs to start eating again (he's only had two chicken nuggets and three french fries since Tuesday), needs to get moving a little bit (he's swelled up like a balloon right now), and needs to stop spiking fevers. He may need to have more surgery to drain the bone again. On Monday he'll have a PICC line inserted, because the course of treatment is 6-8 weeks of IV antibiotics, administered 3 times a day. We're not sure how soon he'll be allowed to walk again. One of our doctors said he'd be in a wheelchair for three months, and the other one said he thought he could start to bear weight as soon as he felt up to it.

My mom and my godmother are staying with us for a little more than a week. Ed's mom is coming right before my mom leaves and will be with us for another week. So we've got family help until November 12th. We'll see how things are after that point. It's going to be a long fall for us, I think, and Isaac is pretty sad. He was supposed to be hosting his third birthday party right now in our backyard, complete with a bounce house, a bunch of friends from preschool, and a Diego birthday cake. Instead he's in the hospital, and it's so sad.

I probably won't be around all that much. The hospital doesn't have wi-fi and so far Isaac isn't feeling good enough to leave the room with me to go to the computer labs. I'm still shuttling back and forth from home at least four or five times a day because Maren nurses every three hours. The good news is that Isaac does seem to be getting better, albeit much more slowly than I'd like to see. I have a feeling that this might end up being my only marathon this season, and even though it's a much different marathon than I was training for, seeing him get better will be a much more satisfying result than crossing any finish line.