I am so busy. I am so tired. I’d thought I had a fair amount of extra time, but I added a part-time job and now I am run off my feet and stressed and tired all the time, not to mention losing all my Candy Crush streaks.

It is at least a job I like. I am working mornings at the library. I’m a page, which means I re-shelve things and fetch things and collect materials from the book-drops. I don’t know if I will like it long-term (I seem to like jobs for six months and not any longer than that), but we will see. I like being at the library. I like library stuff, and library activities, and library fundraisers. My co-workers are smart, which is nice for an entry-level job. And something about putting things in decimal order does something therapeutic in my brain.

Also, the work is surprisingly physical. I have had to deliberately switch which knee I naturally kneel down on, so that I wouldn’t get one leg so much more exercised than the other. I am the indoor type, so this is an improvement in my usual physical activity levels.

It feels like a financially/mentally/physically good change in many ways, but also I am so busy and tired. And, more importantly, things like “Oh, Edward has to go for another follow-up appointment” are HUGELY stressful, now that I have to continually ask for the time off from work. I started the job two days after we came home from the hospital after his first surgery, so I’ve already had to ask for many, many schedule changes, which makes me feel unreliable and difficult when I KNOW I am NEITHER. It would be so much better if this had happened after, say, two full years of showing up five to ten minutes early, leaving five to ten minutes late, and never missing a shift without giving two weeks’ notice.

And without the recent Edward complication, this job meets all my weird job requirements for this stage of life. It’s part-time. It gives me a pleasing answer to the “And what do you do?” question, which is higher on my list of priorities than you might expect. It’s moderately flexible. It’s nearby. It’s not a “warm body” job: if I have to have a day off every seven weeks for Edward’s Remicade infusion, they don’t have to find a substitute for me as they would if I were a bus driver or a caregiver; on that same note, I won’t be called EVERY SINGLE DAY and asked to cover shifts for other employees, as I was with my last warm-body job. It’s entry-level, but not fast-food or retail or customer service. It’s indoors, and a comfortable temperature. There’s room for learning more skills and adding more hours as time goes on. (It doesn’t pay well, but with a list like that, SOMETHING had to give.)

And I do like the work. The other day, I went home after my shift and had lunch, and then texted my supervisor to ask if she wanted me to come back for a couple of hours, because I’d had to leave a TON of work behind (the long weekend meant a FULL book-drop) and I found I was itching to get back to it. Like, I WANTED to do it. And another day, I was re-shelving some books in the New section, and a patron asked if I’d recommend any of them, which was on one hand WAY too much pressure, and on the other hand I COULD recommend one of them, and then she sat in a chair in the library reading it for like an hour, and then checked it out!! That is close to the level of thrill I used to get at the doughnut shop when someone would let me pick the doughnuts for their dozen.

Things that have made me sad since William left for college:

• Mistakenly thinking I heard the washing machine going (it was someone doing dishes) and briefly assuming William must be doing laundry, then realizing William is no longer here and so is not in my way doing his laundry. This should have been a happy thought but WAS NOT.

• Finding in the laundry room a last basket of clean laundry scraps from William doing all the rest of his laundry and then leaving behind the cloth napkins, dishtowels, handkerchiefs, aprons, and other things that were tossed into the empty washing machine and so got mixed in with his things.

• At the grocery store, not needing to buy pasta, pasta sauce, buffalo chicken patties, or frozen burritos. (These are the things William makes himself for Second Dinner.)

• Briefly thinking we should wait until William gets up to see if he wants to go to Target with us.

• Getting a dozen doughnuts (a family tradition after anyone has a medical procedure) and doing the Doughnut Math wrong. (The children don’t understand why this one made me sad instead of happy, since it means more doughnuts for each of us.)

• Going into William’s room to make sure he didn’t forget anything important, and not needing to knock.

• Going into William’s room to look for the cat, and seeing the bed stripped, and the cat sitting on the folded comforter.

• Talking with Paul about something related to Thanksgiving, and saying “the boys” will probably be home for that.

• Putting out only three plates for kid dinner. Getting out only three vitamins.

• Doing all meal math wrong, then correcting it. “Let’s see, toasted cheese, I need 8 slices of bread…no, 6.”

• Doing Child Inventory and briefly thinking William is at work or up in his room, instead of at college.

I am worn out and wan, and WordPress just told me I failed to “prove my humanity” by correctly answering a math problem, which was 3 + 1 and I am just CERTAIN I got it right, but I have to live with the idea that I will never be able to achieve vindication on that.

This past Tuesday, Edward had a follow-up with the surgeon for his sinus surgery. The surgeon took one look at him from across the room (Edward’s eye area was still slightly puffy, and a little lump had appeared along the bridge of the nose the day before) and switched us to a different exam room, one with a giant up-the-nose camera system. He looked up Edward’s nose and ordered another CAT scan, which he said he’d be able to review the next day. The next day the office called to say we had another surgery and overnight hospital stay scheduled for Friday.

It was another abscess, in the sinus near the side of the bridge of his nose. The surgery was done partly by going up through the nose, and partly using a 1/4-inch incision on the side of the bridge of the nose (no stitch because they wanted it to drain). I don’t remember all the right terms, but the infection there had broken through the barrier between that sinus and the area where the eye is, so we had to have the whole ophthalmology-doctor experience over again, with her suitcase and the eye drops; she said the eye still looks unaffected but we have to go back and see her in a month.

We also had a visit from a doctor from Infectious Diseases, because ENT wants him on an entire additional month of antibiotics, and especially with his Crohn’s disease (but even without it), that’s something they like to take extra care with. She seemed very, very bored with us, which is an encouraging if annoying thing for a specialist to be. We will see her again in a week, at the follow-up with the ENT surgeon.

(Also, last time we were at the hospital it was freezing, and all the staff were wearing fleece with their scrubs, and I wore my cardigan the whole time and was cold at night even under the covers. So this time I was smart and wore jeans and brought a warmer cardigan. And our room was nearly 80 degrees and I slept with no covers on and was constantly slightly sweaty. One of the nurse assistants told me they are working on the broken air-conditioning room by room.)

I put a little rant-question on Twitter last night about how to administer an every-8-hours antibiotic (when the specialists emphasized it should REALLY BE every 8 hours), without having to wake the child or disrupt the school day, and I took the tweets back down because I realized I already know the answer to that, and it’s that you can’t, and you just have to figure out what you’re going to do: fudge the 8 hours or else DO IN FACT wake the child and/or disrupt the school day. There’s no weird schedule thing I’m missing where it does work.

The lovely thing about the timing of the surgery is that he has this long weekend to recover. The downside is that I am increasingly concerned as his Remicade infusion (for the Crohn’s disease) gets more and more overdue (he missed it when he first came down with the sinus infection near the first week of August), and I need to call his GI specialist to ask about that, and I also want to be reassured that ENT and Infectious Diseases really did consult with them about the antibiotics plan, but I can’t do that until Tuesday. Well, no, I could do that right this minute and talk to whoever is on call. But it is not that much of a thing to me. Like, I have already worked through the “You REALLY CAN call the person on call; that is WHY they are on call” thought process, and I DO KNOW I could call, but it REALLY ISN’T that urgent to me: he can’t have his Remicade infusion over the long weekend ANYWAY. I can wait until Tuesday to hear about when he CAN have it.

Also William is now at college, and also I have been working at a new part-time job for two very poorly-timed weeks, and those things are adding significantly to my worn-out wanness so I mention them here but will have to talk more about them later.

Some of you with a lot of sinus infections in the family wanted more information about how a sinus infection ended up in a Tuesday-Saturday hospitalization, and that is something I am not sure I can answer well: we DON’T get a lot of sinus infections at our house, which makes it hard to compare a typical one to this one. I got a sinus infection a number of years ago, and when my teeth started hurting I went to the doctor, and she gave me an antibiotic and I took it, and the sinus infection went away, the end. So that’s not super helpful. But I can tell you some of the miscellaneous things doctors mentioned as if they were important, and maybe those will make more sense to those of you with more experience.

One key element in Edward’s case is his Crohn’s disease and the immunosuppressant medication he takes to manage it (Remicade). One of the doctors said that this can make him vulnerable to some of the weirder little bugs that the rest of us would fight off easily.

This might be why the first antibiotic didn’t work: the pediatrician was assuming it was a sinus infection from one of the usual culprits, but maybe it was a weird culprit. Many doctors asked about MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant infections, and whether anyone else in the family had dealt with one. (No.)

Is it helpful to know that the ER doctor said the CAT scan showed allllll of the sinuses were infected? I didn’t know there WERE “allllll”; if asked, I would have thought there was one sinus that stretched across the face, or maybe two sinuses, one on each side—something like that. But there are sinuses up all the way around the cheek/eye region, and all of them were involved. I don’t know whether that’s typical.

The ER doctor mentioned that one sinus region (he pointed near his own eyebrow) has a membrane divider, and that there was so much infection in there, the membrane was “bulging,” and there was concern about rupturing. That’s just so gross.

An ENT doctor said that all the little passages up there were very small (that is, Edward’s set of passages were unusually small), and very swollen, so the sinuses couldn’t drain.

There was a lot of concern about the possibility of an abscess—a walled-off area of infection. If I’m understanding everything correctly, they did find one or two of these.

There was a lot of concern about his eye possibly being infected. The area around one eye was swollen and a light reddish-purplish color. (At one point it was swollen almost shut: that was after we arrived at the children’s hospital but before surgery.) Apparently it is not unusual for sinus infections to cause a little puffiness, but this must have been more than typical, because everyone involved was very interested, and we had an ophthalmologist in our room at 8:30 at night; she brought a suitcase of equipment. If there HAD been eye involvement, he would have needed immediate surgery that very night. Two doctors (the ophthalmologist and an ENT doctor) had a rather heated discussion about it right there in the room, when she (the ophthalmologist) had determined there was no eye involvement, and he (the ENT doctor) questioned her judgement and wanted to do another CAT scan “just in case.”

Something they found during surgery was that the flesh of his cheek was disintegrating. I will tell you that freaked me right out. The surgeon acted like that was a normal thing to say. I asked if my child’s face was going to continue to disintegrate and he acted as if that was a funny question to ask, but SERIOUSLY IS HIS FACE GOING TO CONTINUE TO DISINTEGRATE, I DIDN’T REALIZE IT COULD START TO DISINTEGRATE.

Cheek disintegration suggested to the doctors that this could be a fungal infection rather than a bacterial one; fungal infections are apparently another thing that can happen with immunosuppressing medication. They cultured everything, but didn’t get any decisive answers: one doctor mentioned they’d found some bacteria, but later more than one doctor mentioned finding no bacteria and no fungus. At first I thought that was a good thing (LESS bacteria/fungus in my child’s face) but it’s not exactly good: if they don’t find what it is, they don’t KNOW what it is, and that can make it harder to treat.

One of Paul’s co-workers gets a lot of sinus infections, and she was interested in the antibiotics, so I’ll put that here. The first doctor gave him cefuroxime, also called Ceftin; that’s the one that didn’t work. I don’t know what exactly he got by IV: he got a dose of something in the ER, and then they put him on two different IV antibiotics in the hospital; after a day or two, they took him off the one that was for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, because they felt that was not as likely to be the situation. They sent him home with cefpodoxime, which they said was fairly equivalent to the other of the IV antibiotics.

If you have any questions, like about things that I might not have thought to compare to regular sinus infections, I can attempt to answer those too.

I wrote a long post about where I was right now (children’s hospital) and why I was there (Edward sinus infection), and when I proofread it later, I noticed it was very boring. So I re-wrote it and made it a lot shorter, hoping that that would reduce the boredom if only by reducing the bulk, and I was also very charming about how much I like being in hospitals. Then I hit post, and that is when WordPress, which is what I used to write this blog, asked for my password, and I gave it, and when I had entered the password, it brought me to the old version of the post. Usually when this happens (why does it ever, EVER happen???), I can get the other post back. This time, nothing worked. I am starting to feel as if the universe is trying to protect you from a long boring post and/or a post in which I brag about my own charm.

I will SUMMARIZE why we are here, as I did in the SECOND version, the version that was lost. Friday night Edward seemed ill and had a fever. Saturday morning I took him to Urgent Care, and the doctor said it was a sinus infection and prescribed an antibiotic. Tuesday I called the pediatrician to say he was no better, and they gave me an appointment that morning, and at that appointment they sent us to the Emergency Room. The Emergency Room did a CAT scan and labwork, and sent Edward by ambulance to the children’s hospital in the nearest big city, and he started IV antibiotics. Wednesday evening Edward had surgery to get stuff out of his sinuses. Today we are seeing how that went and whether he will need a second surgery. We have been here for two nights and will be here for at least a third night.

Boy, that is still pretty long. You will have to take my word for it that the original version gave that same information (plus more detail than anyone would want about which doctors we saw and what his symptoms were and the entire evolution of the treatment plan) in triple the words.

I will now tell you some reasons you might want me as your hospital companion, and I will try not to be as obvious about my own charm. …No, I have tried several drafts, and there is no way to do it. I am just very charming about hospitals. Except: there is a shower in our room, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to use it or if it’s just for the patient, and I’m too shy to ask, and there are no towels so I can’t just sneak one, and also there are people coming into the room continually but unpredictably, so I feel as if the MOMENT I stepped into the shower, an entire team of medical professionals would arrive. And a person might think, “Well, of COURSE you are allowed to use the shower! That is what it is THERE for!”—except that when I stayed in the maternity ward long ago, the nurses were Very Strict about the room’s bathroom being ONLY for the patient, NOT for guests. And it wasn’t just the shower: guests were not allowed to use the toilet, either. Guests were supposed to use the bathroom down the hall. And “guests” included the baby’s other parent. So I think it is VERY POSSIBLE that this shower is only for Edward, and that’s why there are no towels in there, because he cannot shower yet. And you may well sigh with impatience about my reluctance to JUST ASK, WHAT IS THE HARM IN ASKING, but you KNOW staff can get a little snippy about things like that, you KNOW they can. Like, SOME of them will say really nicely, “Oh, I’m sorry, the shower is only for patients!” and seem genuinely understanding and regretful about it, but OTHERS of them will act as if you’ve suggested violating HIPAA in there.

(More about this sinus infection if you’re wondering “Wait, how did a sinus infection lead to hospitalization?”)

I am back from an assortment of short vacations/road-trips (people who chose the postcard subscription in the fundraiser will get this month’s postcard from the road), and so today I am feeling mixed feelings: the fun is over and so is the vacation/road-trip food, but on the other hand I have my familiar shower and my non-travel-size hairbrush and my full assortment of clothing.

I’d ordered some earrings from Etsy before I left (I ordered a duplicate pair to go into one of the fundraiser care packages), and they were waiting for me when I returned. It is challenging to take a picture of one’s own ear, but I persevered until I got at least a mediocre picture:

One of the things I find discouraging on road trips is getting a glimpse into how very many women feel comfortable peeing all over toilet seats. I remember learning in psychology class that the human brain will work very hard to take a person’s behavior and force an explanation for it that lets it align with their concept of themselves as a good person doing the right thing, and I am wondering how anyone’s brain manages that feat in the case of peeing all over a toilet seat and then leaving that pee for someone else to have to clean up. Perhaps we should have a couple of special stalls reserved for people who don’t want to sit down, so that we are not wasting nice clean seats for other people, and to minimize the number of peed-on seats for the people who clean the bathrooms.

While I’m complaining (I am drinking black coffee after a week of adding, for example, Hershey’s syrup and heavy cream, so my mood is iffy), I would like to complain about how frustrating it can be to share the road with other people. I’ve noticed that if the speed limit is 55mph, I can usually cruise along contentedly in the same lane without needing to pass—but when the limit is 65mph, I have to keep passing people in order to go the speed I’d like to go. And it happens again and again that I am stuck behind someone going about 60mph, and then as I attempt to pass, their speed climbs and climbs until we are twinning it along the road at 75mph and I still can’t pass them. I am familiar with the right-lane phenomenon of “Oops, someone is passing me and that makes me notice I am going slower than I want to be going, better pick up the pace!” so I try to be understanding, but it happens SO OFTEN! How can SO MANY people just be noticing their speed as I pass them? And could they perhaps let me pass them and THEN pick up the pace? That’s what I do when it is me in the right lane, because I am ALSO familiar with the left-lane phenomenon of trying to pass someone who is going faster and faster. EMPATHY, everyone; EMPATHY.

Another complaint: people who are UP IN MY TRUNK as I am in the passing lane, when I am going Nice and Fast but also can’t go any faster than the person in front of me in the same lane, and/or can’t get over to the right because there are cars there. If I could say ONE THING to The Car Behind Me, it would be something like: Look WIDER than just the back of my car. This is not a case of my one single car unfairly blocking someone’s way by going deliberately slow in the fast lane. I CANNOT go faster than the person in front of me. I CANNOT get over to the right if there is a car to my right. I am JUST AS STUCK as the person behind me, so could I have A LITTLE SPACE. We are going VERY VERY FAST and it seems like the safety distance should be more than three feet.

The last time I was on a road trip, there was a scary situation where someone switched into my lane without looking, and luckily I had noticed that it looked like they were about to do that, and luckily I had time and space to scooch over to the lane to my left and avoid the crash. It was a lot closer than I would usually like to cut it, but it was an emergency. The guy I cut in front of LEANED on his horn, pulled so close behind me I was sure he was going to hit me, swerved his truck back and forth, was visibly flailing his arm and shouting. He did this for several minutes. Like, was he attempting to communicate that he felt my driving had been unsafe? In that case, why was he communicating it by being WAY WAY WAY MORE UNSAFE? It is a mystery. When I was finally able to get back into my own lane, he drove beside me for another minute or so, continuing to honk and shout and gesture. My good sir, you are teaching me nothing about road safety/manners.

I wrote about this bee shirt on Twitter but wanted to write about it here, too. I love it so much. I might buy it in more colors.

(image from Amazon.com)

I was nervous about what size to order. I am long-torsoed, narrow-shouldered, medium-to-medium-small chested. Men’s/unisex shirts are typically terrible on me: huge/boxy in the shoulders, tight in the hips, shapeless/baggy in the waist. But women’s sizes (especially in graphic/fundraiser tees) tend to run small/fitted/short. I wear an XL Tall in Old Navy / Gap women’s shirts. Sometimes I wear an XL in other brands; sometimes I wear a 2XL (my Notorious RBG shirt is 2XL); sometimes nothing works because all the options are too small or too fitted or too short, or else too big or too baggy or too boxy.

I ordered a women’s 2XL in the bee shirt. I didn’t try it on before I washed it so I don’t know if it shrank; but after washing, it fit the way I like a cute comfy weekend t-shirt to fit: soft and casual and a little loose. And it was nicely long. If I were ordering a second shirt in another color, and I may very well do that, I’d risk the XL.

I also finally bought a bee mug. I’d been looking for awhile, but nothing seemed just right until this one:

I wish I could include a link, but I found it at a non-chain candy/card/gift shop, and it doesn’t have a brand name on it. They had one each of several similar mugs, and I narrowed it down to two and then asked my sister-in-law and my sister-in-law’s sister which they preferred, and they both preferred the same one, and it was the one I was leaning toward, so that was happy.

One more bee-related shopping story. I had a packet of Mrs. Grossman’s bee stickers, bought who knows where. As with most of the stickers I buy, for a long time they just sat in a cubby on my desk. Then when I started mailing stuff for the fundraiser, I started putting a bee sticker on the mailing label, and/or tearing off a little panel of stickers and putting them in with the book/earrings/whatever.

As I got low on bee stickers, I started nervously wondering where it was that I’d bought them. I suspected I’d found them while shopping with my sister-in-law and my sister-in-law’s sister, but those are stores outside of my usual rounds. I looked online, and that’s when I’d found information that the bee stickers had been discontinued, and that the stock remaining in stores was all that was left. And so I was greatly anticipating an upcoming shopping trip with my sister-in-law and my sister-in-law’s sister: MAYBE we would find the bee stickers!

We found the bee stickers:

They were at a crafts/stationery/gifts store. I bought all they had.

(Each time we talk about bee stuff, there are questions about what’s with the bee stuff. Here is the Erin Keane tweet that started it: Erin Keane tweet that started it. Here is the article she later wrote: Welcome to Bee Season. Bees have become a symbol of pissed-off liberal/progressive women. Here’s a whole post of gift ideas for same.)

Elizabeth is going through her room and she’s been getting rid of tons of stuff: a giant bag of clothes, a giant bag of stuffed animals, two boxes of assorted toys and knick-knacks and miscellany. One thing in the pile was the book The Care and Keeping of You—the version from before they split it into a book for younger girls and a book for older girls.

I was leafing through it to see if I should just discreetly put it back onto a shelf in case she might want it again later, but it really did look much too young for her. She’s 14 now, and will be a freshman in high school this fall. She hangs out with friends in coffee shops. She French-tucks her shirts. She’s growing out her bangs. She needs an older-girl book and I’m wondering if you have any to recommend. We have the Scarleteen book on the bookshelf, but that seems like that’s TOO old: “to get you through your teens and twenties” sounds like a broader range than what I’m looking for. I’m looking for something in between American Girl and Scarleteen. Like, to get her through ages 13-16.

I leafed through one book in a bookstore this weekend, and it looked like the kind of thing I wanted: casual, cool, friendly, a section on tampons, answers to questions people might not want to ask the grown-ups in their lives. The only reason I didn’t buy it right then and there is that as I was skimming through I saw a lot of stuff about how can you tell if you have a crush on a boy, what is it like to go on a date with a boy—and nothing about any other possible situation. I’d like such books to show they know that situations other than “girls get crushes on boys” EXIST.

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OH! Also! Elizabeth is having her first sleepover. We haven’t had one before for various reasons, including “because I hate sleepovers” and “because we have so many children sleeping here already,” but I am finally at the stage of life where I can imagine managing it, and also there was a reason to have one, and so here we are.

What I would like to know is if there are things that make sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag more comfortable and that are also worth purchasing/storing to have on hand for sleepovers. Like, what about those rolled-up squishy-foam things? Should I get a few? We have hardwood floors. I personally would not want to sleep in a sleeping bag on them.

Or air mattresses? I associate air mattresses with being gradually lowered from “sleeping on a balloon” to “sleeping on the hardwood floor,” and also with “endlessly trying to find where the leak is this time,” but perhaps that is not always accurate.

Or do we just let the kids put their sleeping bags on hardwood floors? I don’t remember caring much about the floor when I was a kid. Though thinking back, I’m pretty sure my friends’ floors had carpeting.