Stress. Post traumatic and otherwise.

So to say I spent a stressfull night is an understatement. A big one at that.

After a night of fitfull sleep I headed off to work. Shay felt like she wanted to go to school and who was I to tell her she couldn't, the poor girl who loves school and hasn't been able to attend in a week. So I do her hair and take a look at her rash that is still ever present and wish them all a good day and head off. On the way leaving her teacher a lengthy voicemail.

I get to work and call the clinic and ask them give a message to Dr K's nurse to please call me with the CBC results even though I knew the Lyme titer wouldn't be back yet.

And I wait. And wait. And wait.

I'm pretty sure there's some rule I'm not privy to at clinics that demand nurses wait until a parent is certifiably mental before they call with important test results. All day everytime the phone rang I'd jump on it, only to be irritated when it wasn't the call my every breath was waiting on.

Finally at 2pm she calls. She apologizes for the delay (she was only adhering to the 'stress out the patients mother' code of delay of course) and tells me that the doc hadn't commented on the test results until now.

She informs me that the CBC showed that her WBC is still low, as are her platelets and that her liver enzymes are elevated which the doctor has decided is suggestive of......

MONO.

My first gut instinct was that she was entirely wrong. However one of the things you lose when you have gone through having a critically ill child and then burying that child is the ability to trust your gut instinct when your child is sick. The difference between a parent who is blissfully ignorant and the parent who has lived in the PICU is that to the blissfully ignorant parent a rash is chicken pox, to a former PICU parent a rash is meningitis. To the blissfully ignorant parent a stubborn fever is a virus, to a former PICU parent a stubborn fever is leukemia. It's called Post Traumatic Stress. And I'm not sure I'll ever recover from it.

So, unable to trust my gut instinct I am left with the only feasable option. Trusting my doctor who sees that rashes are rarely meningitis and fevers are rarely leukemia. And I watch and I wait and I swear to god if that child so much as trips when she's walking I'm taking her to the ER and not leaving until someone does more tests, or gives me high doses of Xanax.

Oh, and the Lyme Titer was negative. Surprise.