Home Sick

Early Sunday morning, it became clear that something was not right with Little Miss Elsie.  She was fussy and clingy and kept complaining, pointing an index finger emphatically at her forehead, "Feel yucky here!"

For the rest of the morning, I checked that forehead compulsively, as well as the base of her scull.  It wasn't a logical behavior, just residual trauma from Laurel's diagnosis.  Laurel's conditions CAN be hereditary.  We have no reason to believe that they are in our case (and we have searched to the limits of science for evidence), however just knowing it could be in our blood leaves me particularly attuned to complaints of headaches from Elsie.  What if Elsie is hiding a much milder case of the dandy walker?  Sometimes people with mild cases don't express symptoms until, quite out of the blue, their dilated forth ventricle turns on like a faucet into the scull and, BOOM: Hydrocephalus.

This is ridiculous.  Elsie does not have a brain malformation.  But she does have a bug, a paranoid mother and a really prominent, protruding forehead!  She's had the latter ever since she was a baby:

While I fretted about Elsie's strange behavior and perfectly normal forehead, she napped for the better part of the day.  Eventually she woke up and begged to join me at the grocery store, a request which I regrettably humored.  She threw up right at the checkout.  "Okay!"  I thought, after a mortifying five minutes at the front of a busy line of disgusted onlookers.  "Stomach bug."  I got her home and cleaned her up.  She passed out on the couch for the rest of the evening until we carried her upstairs to bed.

Monday, I kept Elsie home from school.  I needn't have.  She was on top of the world again.

Until bath time!

Oh no!!!  Oh yes.  Dear Elsie has the chicken pox!  What a surprise to all of us, including her doctor, who hasn't seen a case in years.  Elsie is vaccinated against the virus, but the shot is only 85% effective before the kindergarten booster.  (Not entirely sure of that accuracy, but taking it from word of mouth)  I guess she slipped through the cracks!  Oh well.  Rite of passage for everyone in my generation, and a source of much attention and fawning for Elsie.

We're currently on quarantine.  It's not much fun.  But she's in high spirits and not scratching too much.  Hopefully we will survive the week of confinement!