so MonkeyBeef, man of few words (5, to be exact, missing his 2-year-old milestone by 45 words), has taken an interest in learning how to spell. a few months ago, he would just jab a finger at each letter in a word, and utter an amorphous hoot for each letter as if he were spelling it. but over the last week or so, thanks to the magic of scrabble cheezits, he’s started saying the letters correctly – and his favorite letter is N, almost emulating his big brother SpazMonkey’s love for the letter M.
his new winning record at the letter-recognition games on his toy laptop aside, the boy’s kind of retarded. i have yet to convince him that saying the word “cup” or “milk,” or pointing at a cup, or even standing next to the drawer of his cups and crying, would be easier ways to communicate that he wants a cup of milk than his preferred method, which is jumping over the back of a living room chair, wrapping himself like a spider monkey around the head of whatever brother happens to be sitting there, grabbing that brother’s cup of milk, rolling to the floor, and running away cackling (this isn’t even a terribly effective method, since he usually gets in only a couple of slurps before his victim regroups and hunts him down to reclaim it, leaving him wailing and empty handed.)
i probably haven’t mentioned this since the boy was born, but he got a big damn head on him. he’s way the hell off the growth charts in head circumference. we’re talking two or three standard deviations off the mean, here. as it turns out, he went in for his 2-year checkup today, and his head isn’t just ginormous, it’s getting ginormouser. since his last visit 6 months ago, it’s hit a bit of a growth spurt, and the graph of his head growth since birth now has a skyrocketing s-bend in it.
this, especially when coupled with a massive language delay, sets off a little red flag on the “2 year checkup” checklist. and apparently, this particular red flag says “CT SCAN OF THE HEAD” on it. not my area! like peeing standing up, first-person shooter lessons, and how not to zip your scrotum into your fly, this is PRM’S area of expertise. i called him, he got it all set up right away, including a morning off his rotation at the VA. so tomorrow, PRM gets to kick MonkeyBeef out of bed at 6 am and take him to the hospital with him for his first annual “take your son to work” day, to check him for tumors, hydrocephaly, and other neurological wierdness.
but here’s the funny part. while the boy’s pediatrician, a resident, is very, very good, the attending physician who comes in for the last 5 minutes of the boy’s appointment to check things over and wrap things up is maybe a tiny bit… clueless? like, to the point that i was wondering how the hell she got, let alone kept, this job as a pediatrician.
after confirming that the boy had a vocabulary of exactly 5 words, she asked, “and is he using any two-word sentences?” my impulse control was apparently used up for the month, because my immediate reply was “seriously? with what?” i mean, SERIOUSLY? i know that’s the next question on your little list, lady, but his vocabulary consists of “uh-oh,” “daddy,” “go,” “hi,” and “mitten.” there’s your answer. after a few other boneheaded questions, she finished up with the one that left me unable to do anything else but laugh, “we’ll have someone to call you to schedule the CT. he’s old enough that he won’t need to be sedated for it.”
right. the kid who hasn’t had his ears cleaned in months because i’m afraid of stabbing him in the brain with a q-tip. the kid who has literally tried to chew through his restraints in a car seat. the kid who had a mullet for half of his second year because haircuts were nearly impossible. the kid who thinks “sit down and eat your cereal” means “climb onto the back of the couch, throw a handful of cereal up as high as you can, jump off the sofa and try to catch some cereal in your mouth. repeat until you’re not hungry anymore.” yeah, sticking his head in the big-ass claustrophobia merry-go-round and telling him to hold reeeeeeeeal still should work out just fine!
so anyway. let’s just say i got her to agree to sedate him. the anesthesiologist called to ask the standard list of pre-op questions, but he at least had the sense to apologize for asking stupid questions. he even found my smart-ass answers funny, unlike the doofus attending pediatrician, (when she asked if big heads ran in the family, and i told her the boy was related to a lot of lollipops, i got a blank stare.) some of my favorite pre-anesthesia questions:
Q: does he have any bruises?
A: he is one big bruise.
Q: does he have any emotional or behavioral problems we should know about?
A: yeah. that’s what the sedation is for.
Q: has he been dizzy or faint recently?
A: only on purpose. he likes spinning in circles.
and remember not to feed him after midnight.
but he’s already a gremlin.
yep. at least PRM will be there, and he talked to the pediatric neuroradiologist today, who agreed that the CT was appropriate, and said he’d read it the minute it was finished. and just like the “just in case” xrays of EvilGremlin’s spine (nope, that hairy patch on his ass wasn’t indicative of a spinal disorder, just of him being the kind of kid who’s going to have a 5 o’clock shadow at 10 AM… in 6th grade), and the “just in case” MRI of SpazMonkey’s forehead cyst (nope, it wasn’t growing into his brain), and the “just in case” xray of SpazMonkey’s chest wall defect/heart murmur (cosmetic only/benign and transient), the worry machine has kicked on. i’ll feel better as soon as i know that the images of the boy’s brain are good for nothing more important than covering in graffiti and making fun of him later in life.
though of much more immediate danger than the remote possibility of some weird shit growing inside his cranium is the very real and present danger of him waking up from anesthesia pissed as hell and ready to tell me all about it at the top of his lungs for a few hours. so fuck that little boy; wish ME luck tomorrow.
