sicknote strikes again

• By Alison
• 16 October, 2009
• Comments Off on sicknote strikes again

Ok so, (ok, so I completely forgot that I was going to use that as my opening line in all blog entries. So sue me, but I did predict this eventuality didn’t I)

I am about the take the cat to the vet for his second shot of cortisone. I’ve carefully checked the calendar to ensure that today’s appointment is the cat’s appointment, and not one of mine, or one of my daughter’s. That’s because right now we seem to be a really dysfunctional family in a health sense.

The cat is trying to remove his hair, one clump at a time, my gallbladder is full of sludge, and Miss Trouble Pants (aka sicknote) is suffering from nondescript “chest pains”

Normally on a Thursday I drop both girls off at school early for gymnastics, then saunter back home to enjoy in slow motion my coffee. Not this morning. Oh no.

After convincing sicknote that she’ll be fine, I manage to get them down to the school earlier than normal. In the gate, across the quadrangle (I bet they don’t call it that) and into the gym. All that remains is kiss kiss hug hug, run away very fast. But my plan is thwarted by sicknote bursting into tears. Her chest hurts, her tummy hurts. Her big toe hurts too apparently. She doesn’t want me to leave. She’s sobbing so hard that she can’t catch her breath, so starts to gasp “I can’t breathe!” inbetween sobs. Real tears are running down her cheeks and by all appearances going up her nose like some kind of continuous water cycle. I am momentarily impressed.

I feel like shaking her and shouting “get yourself together!” I think there is a queue of people behind me waiting to take their turn at it, ala “Flying High” (that’s Airplane for the rest of the world, bar Australia and Holland).

But I flick the soothing mummy switch and start to try and untangle the cause of this panic attack. Eventually I manage to eek out the snippet of information that she wants me to be there when she joins the class line after gymnastics. Aha, news to me. I thought she went straight to her classroom. But that was last year, and only reception, 1 and 2 do that. Now that she’s in year 3, she has to walk out of the gym into the playground and join the line for her class with her classmates – with all those other mummies standing there amking loving coos at their offspring, and not me.

So I make a deal. I require coffee, which means she has to go into gymnastics now and let me go home and make it. Then I will come back down to school a second time to wave and kiss. Deal done.

This whole debarcle has put a new light on the so called chest pains. We already know that she can bring on a tummy ache through fear. If she has to do something she’s afraid of, she suddenly cries that her tummy hurts. So it would appear chest pains are the new tummy ache.

I don’t really know what to think.

While I was at orchestra last night she was crying her eyes out at home with Mr Boxer Shorts. Her chest pains enabled her to sit with him and watch tv. Seems to me that he was done over like a dinner there.

This morning she came crying to me at 5.30am that her chest ached. How inconvenient. We are talking about a time of the day that I generally reserve for getting up and hanging about in the bathroom when I have an attack. That’s my special time. If I happen to be not throwing up at that time of morning I would prefer to be asleep. The last thing I want is to be woken up by a child who found herself sleeping the wrong way round in her bed and had a panic attack about it.

Do I sound harsh? The doctor declared that the pain must be growing pains. I do worry that growing pains are a cop out diagnosis. But he’s tapped, probed, prodded and listened, and she’s had a chest x-ray. It’s all been clear, and there is no obvious cause for pain. I am not doubting that perhaps there is some pain there to start with, but I am getting more and more convinced that she is elevating the pain to a higher level with stress attacks.

This wouldn’t be such a hard problem to solve if the most trivial things didn’t cause her stress. Anything that disrupts her routine will cause her stress. Getting to school just as her class line disappears through the door will produce tears, despite the fact that she could have just gone through the door and they’d have all been there taking their jackets off and hanging them up. Going back in to get her violin when she forgets it will cause a major upset – especially if I suggest she can go in and get it herself. Not to mention not getting to sit in the car seat she wants, not getting to sit on the dining chair she wants, not getting what she wants… etc.

So my dilemma is what on earth do I do about it all?

By the way, the cat has now been injected, which ordeal he was particularly unimpressed about, and is now flicking his tail at me in fury. I think I might knit him a hat.