Welfareloser's Blog

see, here’s the thing… i’m not actually prepared to post pictures of the wedding itself. i can tell you it’s pictures of IAlsoHaveADream and NurseSexy’s wedding, and you’ll nod and smile, and give a token scroll-through to a series of pictures of “generic happy girl in makeup and big white dress,” “generic smiling dude in tux,” with the same kiss, the same flowers, champagne flutes and cake cutting that you’ve seen a million times before.

so. here are the parts that distinguish this particular wedding from the 100s of other weddings of people you don’t know.

it’s a peanut butter power bar. but squished into an irregular phallic shape and left outside your hotel room door, it becomes something else entirely: a sign that your friends love you!

LiquidCourage rented the car to haul our asses around. when he picked us up at the airport, IAlsoHaveADream said he was on his way in a mustang convertible full of strippers. and though he wasn’t kidding about the car, the strippers were apparently bullshit; i rode behind johnny knoxville and steve-o instead.

after a night of dominating grade-schoolers at laser tag (and which red team member had 61 kills? that’s right, bitches! okay, no. it was definitely not me. it was the jackhole with a wallet the size of a laptop full of government “i get to shoot you if i feel like it” credentials), and before an afternoon of marrying the mother of your future children, the only appropriate noms are SNICKER BAR PANCAKES. three plate-sized pancakes covered in chocolate syrup, caramel, peanuts, and whipped cream. while the girls were off getting hair and makeup done, we were stuffing ourselves on ridiculously tall plates of awesome. i finished off the leftovers of my plate and IAHAD’s before flying out the next morning. everyone else went back back to the same restaurant, and IAHAD also ate the same thing again. win!

in the back of the chapel, at the edge of the water, was a 300 year-old banyan tree:

SuperBestFriend had apparently not had to fasten a tux around himself since IAHAD’s dad’s wedding about twenty years ago, so PositiveRoleModel had to help with all the doodads:

then, someone had to pin on the booty-nears (which for some reason, go on the lapel rather than anywhere near the booty.) LC insisted that women know how to do this. being the only woman in the room (it never occurred to me that i should maybe step out of the room until after they had dropped trou to change into their tuxedos. yeah, i’m observant like that!) i volunteered. i didn’t realize that the “pin” in question is not a safety pin, but two huge straight pins. it took some spatial reasoning tricks that i haven’t used since the SAT to figure out how to use the two pins to secure the booty-nears without the pins showing AND without drawing blood, but since there are flowers on all the lapels in the pictures (and no bloodstains,) i think i pulled it off.

the reception was at the chesterfield hotel, which apparently was being picketed by a guy holding a sign that said “chesterfield SUCKS!” he was reportedly standing in front of the venue during every pre-wedding visit made by members of the Sexy-Dream Team, and IAHAD promised to invite the guy in for dinner if he was there during the reception, just for the lulz. sadly, he was not.

the reception consisted of hors d’oeuvres in the grotto, followed by dinner and dancing in the “cheetah room.” this is the carpet in the cheetah room:

aaaaaaaaand this is the ceiling in the cheetah room:

lulz.

this is LiquidCourage reviewing the photos PRM took with LC’s camera. the last 60 or so are shots of the feet of everyone who walked by our table for the past half hour or so.

it was a gorgeous night for a walk – especially since it was still in the 30s in iowa. PRM and i took a couple of walks during the reception, enjoying the coconut trees and the weather and the water and the gorgeous gardens all around. the chesterfield sits a few blocks from a palm beach landmark, pan’s garden, which PRM and i happened upon while walking. the earl t. smith park is especially nice – flowers, a fountain, stone benches, and a hedgerow that leaves you completely invisible from the street. win!

we brought back our usual assortment of nonsense as souvenirs for the boys – collectible holographic x-men slurpee cups from 7-11 (a chain that doesn’t exist anywhere we’ve lived – the boys were excited that the cups were from a place JUST LIKE THEY HAVE ON THE SIMPSONS), airplane cookies (the biscoff caramelized biscuits with the delta airlines logo are quite possibly the most awesome cookies on the planet), and a coconut. they were very impressed with the fact that they not only grow on trees, but also fall off them, making a stroll down Cocoanut Row in Palm Beach, FL a potentially deadly outing.

playing catch with the coconut:

trying to hear the slosh of coconut milk:

we took it out back, beat the holy hell out of it with an axe, let the boys drink the liquid, scooped out the meat, shredded it, tossed it with some orange blossom honey, and toasted it into a caramelized sheet of awesomeness that didn’t last long enough to top a pan of brownies like i had planned. so we made s’mores brownies instead. brownie mix with a graham cracker crust stolen from my favorite candy recipe, and half a bag of mini marshmallows. because we’re all about the nutrition around here.

a couple of months worth of stuff.

the failboat jeans:

the gardening minions deploy:

receive their instructions:

and get busy:

Spazmonkey makes his little brother very, very concerned with his choice of “alien brain-vampire” for headgear:

a very civilized mcdonalds lunch:

so i got up with PositiveRoleModel’s alarm this morning, at 6 am. it was still dark outside, and of course we had stayed up way too late the night before, so i had my eyes open just enough to avoid slamming my elbows into the banister and walls as i careened down the stairs. since the boys generally wake up on their own around 7 AM, with the occasional need for a boot to the butt at 7:30, i figured i’d have some time to myself to make coffee and breakfasts and lunches, maybe get some laundry folded.

so i was startled by the front door opening inward (and nearly smacking me in the face.) SpazMonkey and DramaQueen came tumbling in the door, in sweatshirts and rainboots and stocking caps. with mud-caked shovels. peeking out the glass panes in the front door, i could see, just at the limit of the porch lights’ reach, a pretty impressive hole next to our front walk.

the boys noticed me, and froze there with eyes wide and mouths clamped shut. we were all trying to think of something to say.

it was SM who came up with something. “I’M LOOKIN FOR MY CEREAL.” he marched off to the kitchen as if he had been heading that way all along, theatrically craning his neck this way and that.

DQ grinned. “Yeah. I want cinnamon toast crunch, please!”

so after i delivered my “Lying: How Much Worse a Punishment Becomes When You Do It” speech, we discussed exactly why it was a punishment to have to fill the hole back in. with teaspoons.

let me start this by saying that i will never, never, NEVER let MonkeyBeef go away to college. we’re going to live in a small midwestern town that hosts a big 10 school – ann arbor, madison, champaign-urbana, iowa city – so that he can get a quality education while living at home WHERE I CAN WATCH HIM. seriously, after today’s sneak peek at the boy’s immature relationship with the fun drugs, i can just see him, 19 years old, sitting on the floor of his dorm room playing the bongos while having a conversation with a 3-day-old pizza, mildly curious as to why his alarm clock hasn’t stopped going off for the last 7 hours.

the boy got his ear surgery today; a pediatric otolaryngologist suctioned out the year-old pus that’s been keeping his eardrum from vibrating, and then popped in the tiny little tubes that will keep it from happening again. it was a quick surgery, maybe 5 minutes start to finish, and left him with little more than a mild grump from the mild pain.

quick as it was, though, it would have been painful, and more importantly, the little turd needed to hold still, so he still went under general anesthesia. the procedure for an 8:30 AM surgery is: show up at 7 AM, get checked in, examined, changed into scrubs, and get a dose of valium at 8 AM, followed by a mask with nitrous oxide (laughing gas – or whippits, if you’re the fairy-wings-glitter-and-glo-bracelets type), sevoflurane and isoflurane at 8:20.

we arrived at the ambulatory surgery center, and once we were checked in, the boy got to go check out the toy room, which was full of little kids getting tonsils out and ear tubes in and other assorted minor surgeries. so i got to witness a couple of other kids get their little mouthful of cherry-flavored valium. they’d sit and play, then they’d crawl up into mommy’s lap, and after about 20 minutes, they’d either be asleep or darned close to it.

this, of course, is nothing like what MonkeyBeef did when it was his turn to drink the kool-aid. the nurse said that it would start to kick in pretty noticeably at around the 5-minute mark, with full effect around 20 minutes, so as soon as he had downed it, i should hold on to him so he didn’t fall and hurt himself. since he was hell-bent on wearing two large plastic trucks as roller skates in the linoleum-floored toy room, i scooped him up as soon as he had drained his medicine dropper (or, as we call it in the loser household, his “candy spoon”) and started walking up and down the hallway with him and his trusty sidekicks, GreenBankie and HiBear. he was annoyed – for a couple of minutes. at the three-minute mark, he suddenly got a far-away look on his face. instead of craning his neck and giving himself whiplash looking at all the people and doors and machines, he stared straight ahead, looking confused and mildly surprised by each thing that passed before his eyes. at the five-minute mark, he was pretty mellow, so i sat down in a big vinyl hospital barcalounger with MB in my lap.

MB popped his thumb in his mouth, GreenBankie draped over his shoulders and HiBear’s butt snuggled up to his cheek. for a moment, i was foolish enough to think he would just pass out peacefully from there. yeah. not so much. after a moment, he uncorked his thumb, turned his face up to me, and a slow, loony smile spread across his face. and stayed there. “oooooooooo,” he said. “what’s up?” i asked. he held up his hand to my face, then held it up to his face, moving it back and forth, side to side, chuckling and saying “whoa… whooooa… OOOOOOOOOOwhoa!”

“so you’re saying you’re good and stoned, huh?” he lazily made eye contact, then snorted. and then giggled about the snorting. “yep,” i said. he replied with a slow “YEEAAAAAH! yehyehYEEEEEAAAAAH!” okay… stoned babies are funny. but wait; it gets better.

i flipped HiBear over and pretended that HiBear was giving him kisses. drooling out his steady moony grin, MonkeyBeef smashed his hand into HiBear’s face and sort of slow-punched him away, possibly because it was much easier to focus on him at arm’s length. then, he swung his head waaaaaay over with an exaggerated motion and a “wooooooooooo!” to bury his face in the crook of my elbow. he snorted, then swung his head back – passing up HiBear by a ridiculous margin, and then swinging it back with a “woooo, weeeeeooooo!” when his eyes pulled HiBear into focus, he cracked up so hard he was screeching. he repeated this game of stoner hide-and-seek several times, his laugh getting slower and sillier every time, before finally flopping back against me like he was worn out. i thought he might fall asleep after that, but after one of his spazzy little squirrel-on-meth-doing-lamaze-breathing yawns, his fist shot up into the air. he swooped his hand around, giggling at it, and then waggled it in HiBear’s face, hooting and laughing so hard i figured he was about 90% of the way to throwing up.

and this was all BEFORE they even gave him the laughing gas. you’ll have to forgive me for not assuming my kid is above average in every respect like a good mommy is supposed to do, but seriously, he was not only enjoying every minute of being stoned, he was utterly convinced that his teddybear was as stoned as he was, and thus in on the joke. this is a kid who is going to take one hit off his first joint and wake up under his porch 3 days later smelling like froot loops and dog piss. with a big, stupid grin on his face. LOOK at this kid. seriously:

so the nurses and anesthesiologists and otolaryngologists came with a crib gurney and hauled Rasta Happy back to the procedure room. i had time to read all of about 5 pages of a book before they wheeled him back to me, looking distinctly (you guessed it!) hung-over. sitting up, bleary-eyed, groaning, elbows on knees, forehead in hands. i almost offered him a red bull’n'tylenol cocktail and vegemite on toast.

so. holy crap. he can HEAR. the anesthetics he got for this procedure cleared his system pretty quickly, and he was mostly with it by the time i packed his butt into his carseat to go home. “YEEEEAAAAH!” he yelled as i handed him a power bar. then he stopped, his eyes wide. obviously, it sounded really freaking different. so he experimented with all the noises in his repertoire, utterly amazed by how they sounded. when i talked to him, he listened. he stopped moving, he watched my mouth, and he concentrated on the sound of my voice so hard he looked like he was trying to shit a 7-layer burrito.

i turned on the car stereo, and he was blown away by the music. and then he was singing along and dancing in his seat. when we got home, i doubled up on the elbow braces, popped some extra ibuprofen, and hauled out my banjo for the first time in about a month. He was absolutely enthralled, wiggling his almost-too-large butt into the fat end of the banjo case and snuggling GreenBankie and HiBear as he listened, grinning so big it looked like his IQ points were leaking out his ears.

now, his language therapist (after a going through some not-so-helpful social workers, we found one that i feel like knows what she’s doing; she’s been really helpful and i like her a LOT) had warned that, since he’s pretty laid-back and self-sufficient, it might take quite a bit of coaching to get him to decide that talking is by far the best way to get things done. but after i put the banjo away, he immediately spent the next two solid hours running around, pointing to things, watching me say the words for them, and then repeating them back to me.

he’s still got a long row to hoe; he has yet to focus on getting the consonants on the end of most words, and he hasn’t managed to make several key consonant sounds yet, like “s” and “f” and “j.” but on his very first day of hearing, he spit out a shitstorm of words. so far, he’s managed to very clearly say “up,” “mama,” “nonoNO!,” “veesh” for “fish,” “icks” for “six,” “ka-wheeeeee” for “green,” “eeeeeYEH-yoooooh” for “yellow.” he’s completely cleaned up his vowel sounds, so for the first time ever he has a nice, rounded “o,” and his “i” and “a” sound like they should instead of sounding the same, somewhere in between. the best was how hard he worked at saying the name of the letter “y.” he’d hold the wooden letter from his alphabet puzzle up to my mouth and watch intently as i slowly repeated “why” over and over. finally, with ridiculously exaggerated facial contortions, he said “ooo-waaah-eee!” pucker-gape-grimace, and he jumped up for a high-five as soon as he got it out.

when we got to “w,” i think he decided i was just fucking with him. he grabbed that letter away from my mouth and tossed it over his shoulder without comment. moving right along, then!

as this went on, he got more and more excited, running back and forth, jumping up and down, doing flips over the couch, high-fiving and somersaulting. of course, his discharge instructions included “no rough play for 48 hours so he doesn’t knock the damned tubes right back out of his ears.” the nurse did add a “good luck with that one, of course.”

so, yay! he’s not retarded, and he’s not deaf anymore. i got a really satisfactory repsonse to my howler from the head of the pediatrics department, complete with apology and promise of an investigation. it could have just been appeasing lip service, but i’m really optimistic that it was sincere. in the meantime, the family practice clinic down the hall, where my primary doctor is (i like him a lot, and i just googled him and found him on the “america’s best doctors” pimplist) now has four totally awesome new patients.

also, i’m taking bets on how many days it will be before one of his brothers teaches MonkeyBeef to say something inappropriate.

you know how most people have bad backs, bad knees, something like that? yeah. apparently, your elbows can fail you, too. two months ago, i had to shovel snow every other day for two weeks straight. this involved not only tossing a total of about 4 feet of snow off our driveway and sidewalk, but also beating the holy hell out of as much as an inch of ice so i could scrape that off, too. apparently, this went beyond the sphere of “good upper body workout” and smack in the middle of “permanent damage to your aging joints, you dipshit.” i had to admit the soreness, pain, and intermittent numbness were a problem when they were joined by several fingers going dead white, cold, and completely numb for hours on end. an appointment in orthopedics ended with a diagnosis of cubital tunnel syndrome, and a month of curtailed activities and wearing some dead-sexy elbow pads. at the end of that month, it was a little better, but definitely not all better – so i wore the pads for another month, and really scaled back the activities. at this point, i’m down to no fencing, no banjo, no violin, no snowboarding, and a really limited repertoire of sexual positions. (think about it. how many sexual positions don’t involve bracing yourself with your arms in some way? yeah.) on top of that, i’ve now had to ask PRM to do all the vacuuming, mopping, and lifting of laundry and dishes, which is just what he needs in the middle of a 6-month period of his residency class taking twice as much call as normal (to buy themselves 6 call-free months at the end of their residency to study for their final board exam.)

unfortunately, it’s steadily gotten worse. i spent a couple of hours last weekend staring at a white, then purple left arm that felt like it was under alien control. it finally started to go back to “normal” (which at this point is about 30% incapacitated) just a couple of shades shy of crayola’s newest color, “time to go to the emergency room puce.” yeah, i’m thinking i might not make it to the fencing tournament i had registered for this saturday. dammit.

k. so i have another appointment with ortho friday, during which i think we will schedule surgery. this appointment will be just a couple of hours after i get a probably very stoned and/or grumpy MonkeyBeef out of HIS surgery to slap some tubes in his eardrums and un-deaf his stupid little ass. i’m sure he’ll be SUPER impressed with yet another doctor’s office at that point, to a degree that maybe can’t be solved by obscene amounts of candy.

anyway, the basic point here is, we’re kind of busy. on top of the call schedule and the bitchwork, PRM is trying to get his exact snoring/non-restful sleep issues diagnosed and solved. so, he finished off a 6-day run of 14-hour night shifts last saturday morning, tried like hell to catch up on sleep and get his schedule reset for work monday morning, and then monday night went straight to the sleep lab to get hooked up to a bunch of fancy machines. the sleep lab lets you go to sleep at 10PM, then wakes you up and kicks your ass out the door at 530AM with a shower and a continental breakfast. so PRM went straight to work tuesday morning at 7AM, and then rolled straight from that into the tuesday night shift. he called to talk tuesday afternoon, and he was calm and happy… and also sounded like he had just smoked a full ounce of the stickiest produce the great state of iowa has to offer. i kept trying to get him to admit he was hallucinating, but he swore up and down he was fine. like, fiiiiiine, duuuuude. it’s all good.

yeah. all i know is, i’d hate to be the guy in the ER trying to carry on a conversation with dude on call in radiology tuesday night.

ER: have you read that study yet?
RAD: the study?
ER: the found-down head CT?
RAD: yeeeeeeeeah. yeah, i think… i think so. yeah.
ER: and?
RAD: duuuuuude.
ER: does the patient need surgery?
RAD: who is this?

yeah. he was tired. but he survived, got home at 4AM, and went right back to work at 1PM today.

so. that’s the big update on the random health complaints of the loser household. the elbow surgeries each (yeah, i managed to fuck up both of them, and i’m assuming they’ll fix them one at a time) have an 8-week recovery period, in which PRM will continue to do all the gruntwork around here at the same time as his bitchin’ double-call schedule. and all the kids will conveniently be out of school. hehehehehhehhee. but so far so good! he gets run down by too much time away from home, and i get depressed about not being able to do any of the things that really make me feel good – i don’t get to be an athlete, i don’t get to be a musician, and i don’t get to do the housework… yeah, i know. i’d be happy as hell to not do the housework if i were shoving it off onto, say, an underpaid illegal immigrant. but i’ve always taken a lot of satisfaction in being able to lighten PRM’s workload so that when he’s not at work, we’re not running errands or cleaning or doing other stupid shit. we’re playing with the kids, playing music, hanging out, enjoying ourselves. kinda sucks right now; on top of the workload mess, my elbows, and PRM’s sleep issues, we’re both trying not to beat ourselves up over assuming that MB’s pediatricians had ruled out fluid in his ears instead of letting it leave him unable to hear speech for who knows how long, and worrying about how hard it’s going to be to get him caught up with the talking thing, when he’s developed some pretty satisfactory non-verbal strategies for taking care of his baby bidness. i don’t think we’ve had this much stress piled on us since the year PRM was finishing his PhD, starting his second year of med school, we had a toddler and two newborns, and $300,000 worth of hospital bills to keep SpazMonkey alive.

somehow, neither one of us has had an emotional meltdown. far from it, actually. we went out for a movie and wings saturday night, and wound up laughing pretty hard about how our only goal for the next three months was to be really, really nice to each other, because we had to be just one hurt feeling away from a front-lawn fist-fight worthy of an episode of cops. i’d like to say that we’re handling this with such grace because of how mature and spiritually evolved we are, but it’s probably more likely that we’re too exhausted to register anything more than a lukewarm “fuck it.”

anyway. enough of that crap for a while. the twits have turned 6, spring has finally arrived and stayed, we’re flying kites and planting tomatoes, and i have lots of other fun stuff i want to talk about in upcoming posts. like pranks. and boobies!

so that ER trip i mentioned in my last post…

PRM was on call tuesday night. i had $200 in barnes and noble gift certificates, and decided to make it rain for the turds, let them smash and grab and buy whatever they wanted. as we’re at the checkout with donkey kong jenga, mario monopoly, and a shit-ton of books, MonkeyBeef decides he’s had about enough and bolts for the door. there are actually two heavy sets of doors he’d have to get through to get to the street, so it wasn’t a full-out emergency, which is why i didn’t tackle him immediately. EvilGremlin, bless his heart, thought it was, though, and tried to tackle him. Since he tackles his baby brother gently and carefully to avoid head injuries and broken bones, MB wiggled out of it, and EG wound up holding him by the hand and begging him not to run into the street. MB jerked hard, and EG said he felt something in MB’s wrist pop, and they both stood there looking at each other in horror.

crap. so as i’m reassuring EG that he did the best he could and popping his wrist was better than letting him run into the street, and carrying whimpering 2-year-old who can’t use his left arm, and trying to distribute 200 lbs (200 lbs = 1 shit-ton) of books and games between 3 shrimpy little skinny dudes so they can drag it to the car, and trying to talk to PRM on the cell phone about whether or not we go to the ER (and since i couldn’t determine if it was the suspected nursemaid’s elbow, which i could fix myself, or a dislocated or fractured wrist, which i definitely can’t fix myself, the answer was a resounding go straight to the ER)… i look down to see that my jeans, my favorite fucking jeans, have ripped. from crotch to knee. my whole leg and half my underwear are hanging out. and all i can think is, really? i mean, REALLY? this had to happen NOW?

so i walked into the ER looking like i’d just lost a barfight to the two year old. all i really needed to complete the picture was to dump a beer all over myself. we sat in the waiting room and then an exam room, dragging games in progress with us as EG explained to rapt audiences of nurses and residents what had happened, right down to why it was “definitely a dislocation and not a subluxation.” we got a really good resident, who was like, dude, it’s nursemaid’s elbow, and this is the most awesome diagnosis you can get as an ER physician, because the fix takes 3 seconds, recovery is 100%, and you don’t even need tylenol afterwards. he grabbbed MB’s arm, twisted it gently, popped the offending ligament back into place, and MB immediately threw his hands in the air, yelled “YEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHH!” and ran for the door, hanging off the handle like a monkey and trying to bounce hard enough to get it to open. we stopped off for happy meals, at dinner and went to bed at 10:30. i emailed the kids’ teachers to briefly them what had happened, and that i would not be setting the alarm and that’s why the kids would probably be late to school in the morning.

epic. i’m printing out a bumper sticker for my minivan right now that says “FAILBOAT.” anyone watching us get in out of the vehicle will immediately understand.

this letter pretty much explains what’s been going on with MonkeyBeef. PRM just let me sit and write it, saying he trusted me and to keep in mind his standard advice: delete the word “fuck” and make it 50% shorter. pretty big of him, especially since i’m basically sending this to his employer. specifically, every attending physician in the department of pediatrics, and every attending physician in the pediatric division of the department of otolaryngology. and just to make it a little more fun, the heads of departments should be getting their cc’s a day before everyone else. yep.

for those of you with short attention spans, here are the highlights: MonkeyBeef can’t talk because he can’t hear. He can’t hear because his ears are full of fluid. They probably have been for a long goddamned time, and yet none of his pediatricians bothered to actually take a good look at his ears. also, i compare social workers to chlamydia. and i only use the word “fuck” once! i’m mature like that.

It’s a good thing i have fencing. i can go stab people in a controlled environment and get that urge out of my system before i have to go see any more pediatricians. PRM doesn’t fence though, which is another reason he’s not even going to read the letter. reliving the bullshit is just going to piss him off even more, and his fists are already itchy.

WelfareLoser
MyHouse
Iowa City, IA 52242

April 8, 2009

Dr. HeadoftheDepartment, MD
UI Department of Pediatrics
University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics
Iowa City, IA 52242

Dr. HeadoftheDepartment:

My 26-month-old son, MonkeyBeef H. Loser, has been a patient at the General Pediatrics Clinic since the age of 6 months. By 18 months of age, he had a clear language delay, with roughly the language skills of a 9-month-old. At his 18-month well-child visit, he was referred from your clinic to Grant Wood AEA for a hearing test. Given that appointments for hearing tests are available only two half-days a month, I was able to schedule an appointment 3 months in the future. My car broke down that morning. I had to reschedule, another three months in the future. He finally had that hearing test at 25 months of age. MonkeyBeef visited Pediatrics at least once, possibly more than once, in the interim. He was examined by several different residents and attendings. By his 2-year well-child exam, his language skills had made little progress, and were roughly equivalent to those of an 11-month-old.

At every Pediatrics appointment, the physicians looked in his ears. Every time, they commented that there was “a lot of wax” in them. Then they asked what I do to clean them, if anything. I explained that I do the same thing I do for my three older sons: Debrox twice a week. They asked if that gets anything out. I said yes; I flush until no more wax comes out. Somehow, this always ended the conversation, usually with a sympathetic statement about how hard it is to clean a child’s ears at that age, leading me to believe that the amount of wax in his ears was not a big deal.

Apparently, however, it is a big deal. At MonkeyBeef’s appointment in Otolaryngology today, the resident got two nurses and me to help hold MonkeyBeef down, spent 5 minutes yanking huge globs of wax out of his ears, looked at his eardrums and said his ears were full of fluid. The attending physician, Dr. Manaligod, spoke with me for a few minutes about MonkeyBeef’s speech, and the option to give antibiotics and see if the fluid drains on its own, but we agreed that, given the state of his language development, the fluid has probably been there for quite a while, likely would not drain on its own, and that putting tubes in his ears was the next appropriate step.

It seems highly likely, given the ungodly amount of wax that I saw pulled from MonkeyBeef’s ears today, that the cryptic discussions of his earwax over the last 8 months with various pediatricians were because they could not see his eardrum at all. I want to know why it took 8 months worth of appointments before MonkeyBeef was seen by someone who realized that not being able to see an utterly speechless 26-month-old child’s eardrums was a problem that you don’t just shrug off. Since his 18-month visit, I have specifically told several pediatricians and social workers, when asked about his language, that he sounds like a deaf kid when he talks – no consonants, badly mangled vowels. Red flag, anyone? But it did not lead anyone to actually take the extra five minutes to clean his ears and get a good look at his eardrum, to tell this child’s mother that her cleaning his ears isn’t working, or to somehow deal with the fact that he hadn’t been able to have the hearing exam he was referred to 6 months ago.

At the very, very least, this should have been caught at his 2-year well-child check-up. There’s no way his eardrums were visible at that visit. But instead of addressing the ears, the attending physician ordered a head CT out of concern for his language delay and large head (despite the fact that my husband and I both have huge heads; they even went so far as to measure my head during MonkeyBeef’s appointment) before anyone cleaned out his ears and actually looked at them. I know I don’t understand the reasoning behind that decision, and I’d bet your accounting department wouldn’t be impressed, either.

As I said, he finally got his hearing exam at Grant Wood AEA. It was useless. First, they did a tympanogram, for which they didn’t even attempt to make him hold still. It registered no movement of the tympanic membranes, and an ear canal size of zero. I was told the test results were “probably invalid.” This didn’t seem to particularly concern anyone. Next, they sat him in a soundproof room, handed him a wooden puzzle to play with, and he sat clacking the pieces and hooting happily as they recorded whether or not he heard various tones. I’m not exactly feeling confident in the results of that test, either. So after filling out a piece of paper with the test results (the punchline being “mild hearing loss in the better ear”) I was told I “could” make another appointment with his pediatrician to discuss it, but I should probably just wait another few months and AEA would repeat the exam. Then they set up home visits with various social workers and language therapists for him. He’s now been seen by a barrage of AEA social workers based on this referral from Pediatrics. Most didn’t look in his ears. The one who did wasn’t capable of diagnosing his problem. I’m infuriated that 6 months of MonkeyBeef’s life were wasted sending him to people who couldn’t help. What was the point? Because it’s free? So is chlamydia. I don’t particularly want that for him, either.

After the hearing test, I made a Pediatrics appointment, and the resident I saw last week was the first person in Pediatrics to regard this now-26-month-old with a vocabulary of about 7 horrendously mangled words with any kind of urgency. He was also the first person to specifically tell me that there was so much wax in the boy’s ears that he could not see the eardrum at all. He made referrals for an exam and a hearing test in Otolaryngology (saying that they would clean out the earwax), and an appointment with Speech Pathology.

Those appointments happened today, a week after the referral was made. The icing on the cake was when the ENT resident who saw MonkeyBeef couldn’t find the AEA hearing test results in his chart, she said it didn’t really matter, because they always redo AEA hearing tests anyway. I fail to understand why MonkeyBeef was referred to a service in Coralville that couldn’t see him for 6 months (and did nothing helpful whatsoever when they finally did see him) when the people who could actually help him (and who were going to redo the AEA tests anyway) were two floors away and available within a week. All I can think is that this was done out cost concerns. MonkeyBeef is covered by House Staff insurance. That’s written in lots of places in his chart. And cost concerns don’t mesh with the knee-jerk head CT referral, anyway.

I wasn’t even offered the option of a referral to Otolaryngology. Not initially, when his language delay first became apparent, and not at any subsequent appointment, where I was always asked if he had gotten his hearing test yet, and I always answered no, it’s pretty hard to schedule one and his is months from now. AEA started language therapy services knowing that he hadn’t been able to get in for a hearing test yet. Had I had any idea that, as I now strongly suspect, in all these months, none of the pediatricians who saw him was actually able to see his eardrum, my husband would have referred MonkeyBeef to Otolaryngology himself. He’s a radiology resident. He has looked at our older kids eardrums many times, but still sends them to the pediatrician to get a definitive yes or no on any suspected ear infections, and definitely feels more comfortable letting pediatricians handle a squirming toddler. We assumed that, since nothing was mentioned, the eardrum was at least partially visible and appeared normal. What a mistake that was.

My son has a surgery to put tubes in his ears scheduled for two weeks from now. At the age of 27 months, after God only knows how many months of being functionally deaf, he’ll finally get the opportunity to learn how to speak. And there is no reason I can see why this couldn’t have happened 8 months ago. Those responsible for this delay in treatment can console themselves with the fact that he’ll catch up. I can’t. I’m angry that his quality of life has been diminished by a frustrating inability to understand and communicate that could have been prevented.

For example: last night, I was at Barnes & Noble with my kids. MonkeyBeef suddenly decided to try to run out the door. His older brother yelled at him to stop – which of course he didn’t – and grabbed him by the arm. MonkeyBeef struggled while his older brother tried to talk to him, and within seconds, MonkeyBeef had nursemaid’s elbow. We spent a miserable night in the ER, at least in part because he is unable to hear and understand the words “no, stop!” I’m not in the best mood right now, so I’m going to go ahead and blame that on your clinic, too.

There’s also some relatively recent data that kids who go through more than one round of general anesthesia before the age of 4 or 5 have a higher incidence of learning disability. Along with the cost, and time lost not attending to the obvious problem, that’s one more reason I’m upset about the ridiculous head CT.

I can’t tell you how many times in this letter I have written, and then immediately deleted, various forms of the word “fuck.” My sincerest hope is that I have sent enough copies of this letter to the right people that meetings will be held, heads will roll, protocols will change, and this never happens to another child again.

Sincerely,

WelfareLoser

cc: 22 other MDs, including Dr. FuckedThisUp.

holy crap, is that a big holiday in this house… with christmas and halloween, it forms the holy trinity of awesome days of the year.

so i intended to sit down tonight (actually, i intended to do so monday, but, you know) and post at least my rant on the endless stream of bullshit that comes flooding into your life the moment you seek services for a disabled/possibly-just-fucking-with-you child, but that’s going to have to wait til next week. he’s probably deaf. he could just be refusing to speak or respond because it’s funny (the shit-eating grin and putting his hands over his mouth last night as i tried to get him to repeat a word was one of those things that makes you wonder… specifically, it makes me wonder how much of last week’s hearing test he threw because fuck all y’all and whatnot).

i just registered for my first fencing tournament (in three weeks, ack!) and we’re packing for tomorrow morning’s flight out to IAlsoHaveADream’s and NurseSexy’s wedding weekend.

so for now, i leave you with this little buttnugget of information:

chile mangoes are an instantaneous detector of previously unknown papercuts.

i mean, yum, but OW.