First, I didn't fall asleep until 2am - which is pretty normal for me. Anywhere between midnight and 4 am is my window... oye...
Let me back up a second... yesterday, I woke up to the sound of Nathan throwing up. It was pretty early in the morning, I think, like 6 or 6:30 AM ... ZERO idea why he'd be sick, but he was. He threw up for a little bit and slept really restlessly. By the afternoon he was feeling better. Got him changed in some clean clothes... and changed him, and I noticed some Petechiae around his eyes and down his cheeks ...
Petechiae is small red dots on the skin that are caused by blood vessels breaking ...
This can be a common thing with straining hard. But he wasn't straining hard when he was vomiting. He's vomited a lot worse and never gotten Petechiae. But he did yesterday.
Just seeing this immediately took me back to when Calahan was 2 years old.
I don't tell the story very often, because it is one of the most traumatizing events of my life. I often joke it was just to prepare me for what was to come (Noah & Nathan) but it remains to be one of the most horrific moments of parenthood I have had.
First, Calahan (back then he was "Joey") suffered from Night Terrors from the time he was 8 months old. For those who confuse Night Terrors with nightmares, they are two completely different things. Night Terrors is actually in the wheel house of Sleep Walking. Night Terrors is when a child (or adult) will wake up screaming in a panic and will (sometimes) become violent. In actuality - they usually aren't awake but in a "sleep walking" type state.
Imagine your 8 month old going from sleeping soundly, without anything but the soft sounds of breathing, to screaming like you are being murdered in a half of a second. It makes a parent panic.
This went on until he was three, and then slowed down until he was 5, and then he started to sleep walk rarely for a few years. There was one time when he was five that I heard something, and he was two floors above me in his room, so I slowly went up one set of stairs, turned to look up the next set of stairs and he was just standing there.... just.... standing ... there.... at the top of the stairs, like one of the children from The Shining. I admit, I screamed. It scared me. Then I calmly took him back to bed, tucking him back in, but not waking him up. There was another time when he was 7 or 8 where he was frantically shaking the back door knob trying to get out of the house, and thank goodness I had dead-bolted the door, or he would have gotten out and I'm not sure what would have happened. It's scary.
Anyway - after the Night Terrors started, he began to get bloody noses that were horrible to try to stop. They came on for no reason, and took awhile to stop.
I would repeatedly take him into the DR and ask what was wrong with him, I got two answers... either "well you must have dry air and need to get humidifier' ... which I did, I always had it running in his room. To... "well get him to stop picking his nose" ... he didn't PICK his nose, but I was just a stupid teenage mom (young twenty something mom.) ... and they wouldn't listen to me.
Finally - when Calahan was 2 1/2 ... my Godmother (we called her Grandma Linda to Calahan) was in town, and we had gone to the zoo. We were on our way back from the zoo when I had been playing with Calahan (who was in his carseat) in the backseat - I had looked away from him for just a few seconds to look out the window of the van, and looked back, and his face was covered in blood.
I was done at that point. Done. D-O-N-E.
We went into the ER and I told them all this and was demanding they figure out what was wrong with him. They noticed his legs were bruised up pretty good and asked about it, and I told them - they had always been like that since he had started walking around the age of one. I just figured it was a little boy thing. (Being the dumb young mom I clearly was, lol)...
Anyway ... they ran tests on him, and noticed his white blood cell count was high, his red blood cell count was low (I think that's how it was) .. they wanted to do a bleeding time test on him, which they did and he failed ...
Bleeding Time Test - is where they take this thing that resembles a diabetic finger poker, only it's bigger and has two small razor blades in it... and you push the thing (like you do a finger poker) and it makes these two small cuts on the arm. Then you time how long it takes for those cuts to stop bleeding. I think it was (it's been 17+ years) anything under 10 (or 12) minutes was "normal" and anything above 12 was high, and they stopped the test at 15 minutes because that was extremely abnormal. I remember during the first test the guy goes "don't worry, no one makes it to 15 minutes" ...
Well, Cal did. He hit that 15 minute mark.
We were referred to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.
They did a repeat Bleeding Time Test .... but this time, only one of the razor blades hit Cal the way it was supposed to, the bottom one only hit partially, and so he only really had the one cut. He didn't last the fifteen minutes that time, but I remember he lasted over 10 minutes.
We met with some doctors. The examined him and didn't seem to think there was a thing wrong with him. They were like "We'll send you a letter when the test results come back, but we don't anticipate anything coming back abnormal." And we left it at that.
At this point, I had no idea how bad and scary this would be.
I was working at the time - and I went ahead and went back to work thinking nothing would come of any of it... but the very next day I got a call at work. We weren't allowed personal calls. So when one of the gals from the front desk came to my station and pushed my hold button (which didn't allow any calls to come through, I worked at a call center) ... I was thinking I was in trouble. So I finished up my call and took off my headphones, and she says "you have a personal call up at the desk" ..
I'm thinking ..... great.... I'm gonna get in trouble because of this.
So I get up to the desk and they point to the phone, tell me how to connect to the call and I said "Hello?"
My ex husband was on the other line, he was hysterical. I could barely understand him. I remember hearing him finally - and he said "they think CJ has leukemia" ... and I remember - I let out a gasp, or a little scream, and I burst into tears, and I said "What do you mean they think he has leukemia?" and my knees went weak. One of the girls had pushed a rolling office chair under me just as I was falling to the floor. I kept saying "he's only two" .. and I was hysterical myself. He told me they wanted us back at Mayo the very next day for a bone marrow test.
I guess he had every single sign of leukemia - blood work wise - and some symptoms too ...
After I got off the phone, they told me that they'd find someone to cover my shift for the following day, and that I could leave for the day (clearly I was upset and in no shape to work)... and that one of the girls could give me a ride home if I wanted ... I said no, I'd go ahead and drive myself. I wasn't really in a condition to drive, I should have accepted the offer, but I need to go tell my Grandma face to face, and my Mom.
So I had drove to my Grandma's and then to my Mom's work... we were all in shock and heartbroken.
Got home, called my ex husband's parents to let them know what was going on...
His Dad reacted like everyone else, but his Mom was all "Oh he doesn't have it. Don't make such a big deal out of it" ... I told her he was going in for a bone marrow test, that was pretty freaking serious. She just kept blowing it off as if it were no big deal.
The following morning, we left and headed down there .... Calahan (no longer "Joey" now, but "CJ" .. because Cal just seemed so old for him yet as a nickname) ... wasn't allowed to eat or drink...
We got there, we were sent to the Oncology floor .... I remember sitting there seeing all the families, many with bald headed children attached to IV poles, and it broke my heart. I kept thinking, "that's going to be us," and "I don't want my baby to die" .... It was hard. I can still bring up that mental picture.
We were called back, and he was prepped....
This was the first time I would ever have to let doctors take my child back to a surgery room - where I couldn't be with him... They let me go back for a few minutes, walked me through everything, put the mask on him and got to count him back to sleep, and then I had to leave. I walked out and burst into tears. I couldn't take it, I couldn't deal.
We took him home that night, and had like five messages from my ex husband's mom, and I rolled my eyes and called her back, and she was apologizing ... saying how she did some research and how she didn't realize he had every single symptom (which I had told her) ... and on and on - telling me what a good mom I was for following my gut or blah blah blah..... but I was glad she was finally understanding.
A few days later, though it felt like a life time, we got the news that his bone marrow test had come back showing he did NOT infact have leukemia.
We were so thankful, but also realized how it could have been way different, and there were plenty of families that did - indeed - get the diagnosis.
We were told the bleeding time tests wouldn't scar ..... LOL.... I just took these today ...
There is a small little needle shaped scar in the middle of the circle - that's from the bone marrow test. The bleeding time #1 - you can clearly see both cuts. #2 you can see the top one and how the bottom one just BARELY nicked him.
Anyway - it was bad enough yesterday - when all that came bubbling from the never want to remember this ever again back of my memory - because Nathan had the Petechiae...
So when we were getting him ready for school this morning...... and I saw this..... (Nathan's knee)
I just wanted to burst into tears.
I joke about how Calahan's leukemia scare taught me how to be a stronger Mom and how it lead me to better deal with Noah and Nathan's medical issues when they came around.
But let me tell you - I am crying just from the memory, and literally panicked about this so much that after the boys went to school and I feel asleep again, I had a dream.
We had to take Nathan to the hospital and they were doing an exam, finding more bruises and more tests, and found out that he needed a blood transfusion ... and I remember sitting there listening to them talk about how they were going to test the family to see if they'd be a match for bone marrow and ...
... yeah, not a good dream. I RARELY dream about real life fears and stuff... so ... it's hit me pretty hard.
I am sure it's probably nothing at all. But it doesn't take the panic or the fear away ...
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