What A Weekend

This weekend was spent babysitting my three nieces while my sister was on a mini-vaca in Puerto Rico.  My friend, Kelly came along with her gang of four.  That left two adults with nine children!

It worked out quite well.  Kelly took care of the seven bigger kids the majority of the time, while I laid around and was on baby duty.  I am used to juggling the care of multiple newborns at once...so it was a piece of cake with two.  I have a routine at work with my babies.  Change diapers, vital signs and meds, feed and back to sleep for 3 hours. I tried to get Kathryn and Sydney on that schedule and for the majority of the time it worked, except the sleeping part.  They wanted to "play".

We took the whole group to the park down the street, watched the older ones kayak at the beach in Jen's backyard, set up sprinklers for the younger ones to run through and baked a ton of cupcakes.

I ate more this past weekend than I have in quite awhile.  We ordered pizzas, sandwiches and made homeade macaroni and cheese with hotdogs.  When I say we...of course I mean Kelly!

It was nice to get away and feel like I was living a little outside of the four walls of my bedroom.  But...by the end of the 3 days...I was ready to go back to my little hole.  I now remember what it was like to get up every couple of hours in the middle of the night for feeds...and didn't miss it.

I have to say though...since being home...I am missing those sweet faces, baby toes, ruffled little butts and their yummy smells.  I could snuggle all day long with a baby sleeping soundly on my chest, burying their little faces in the crook of my neck.  I am definately in my element that way.

On to some updates about my ever puzzling health.  I continue to be on a leave of absence from work.  While my employers and co-workers are nothing more than supportive, I have this tremendous amount of guilt and anxiety about not being there and letting everyone down.  So I am a little stressed about that.

I went and saw yet another Neurologist yesterday...and loved her!  Let's see if we can make it past the honeymoon phase and last long term.

She...and I kinda like the fact that she is a she...took the standard medical history and did the usual neuro exams.  She said my symptoms reek of something neurological but it could be difficult to pinpoint the cause.  She informed me that sometimes people have symptoms and never find out what is causing them, in which case we just treat the symptoms.  That is kind of difficult for me to accept as I want an answer to this mystery.  I had more labs drawn and next week I am having an EMG and nerve conduction test. 

When I was discharged from the hospital a couple weeks ago, I was put on Amitriptyline.  I had worked my doasge up to 50 mgs every night before bed, but I am not tolerating the side effects very well, so she decreased it to 25 mgs every night.  I still woke up groggy this morning and feel like it is sucking the moisture out of every cell in my body.  Hopefully it'll get better.

She is switching my beta-blocker to a calcium channel blocker.  While this will not help with my daily chronic headaches or my numbness and tingling she is hoping it will keep my basilar migraine attacks at bay...keeping me from any more admissions to the hospital.

I explained to her what happened with the Botox and how Aetna has now denied coverage because of my hospitalization due to migraine and them assuming it is not effective.  She offered to write a letter to Aetna explaining that I was not actually hospitalized for migraine but for other neurological symptoms.  See why I loved her?!?

It also didn't hurt the fact that she called my previous doctor "sloppy" and was disappointed in the fact that he was prescribing medications specifically contraindicted in basilar migraine. I got some satisfaction out of her basically calling the guy an idiot.

What I liked the most about her was that she listened.  She listened and believed every word I said.  Rather than just put my symptoms in this neat little box of complications from basilar migraine she is investigating further causes.  Migraine doesn't cause your legs to be numb, blue and cold.  They look like they belong on a corpse.

For the next 2 days I am off to be pampered.  My dear friends are cutting and coloring my hair and giving me a massage and pedicure to help me feel better.  I love having close friends in the spa industry!