By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (189)

January 15, 2024

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 286: The first Monday back after winter break, whew. PAINFUL.

Someday Smol Acrobat will start sleeping through the night, every night. Or most nights. Someday!

The icy wind is really getting to me this week. My bones are extra grateful for the heating pad when winter gives us this extra kick of cold. It also makes me curious about electric blankets and how they work.

Year 4, Day 287: The good news: My new chair arrived! PiC put it together! It’s so much better than my old chair!

The bad news: there’s some weird stuff going at work that I can’t get into or pry into because it’s above my paygrade but my Spidey senses are tingling. They’re probably right and if they are, I hate this.

I goofed on the size of one nibling’s gift this year. The sizing at Old Navy ran much smaller than I expected so I put in a make up order today. I threw in a few shirts for JB and a couple pairs of jeans for myself in a possibly futile attempt to get one more good pair that are NOT skinny jeans. Before you know it, I’ve spent $80. SMH. While I’m decluttering, too! Tsk. But the goal is one of those jeans will fit. If so, I’ll return the other pair, and then I can donate the skinny jeans I can’t bring myself to wear anymore. If not, I’ll return both pairs and give up for the year.

Year 4, Day 288: I thought I was starting most days at 0% charge but I have to recalibrate my scale. I’m probably starting most days at 10% and this morning was 2%. I worked until 11pm, then was up until 2 am because Smol Acrobat needed soothing, then got less than five hours of sleep before startling awake. It feels like sandbags were attached to all my limbs. Sigh. Grateful for my nice comfy new chair. That helps a little.

We’re having some work done on the house. We suspect that all unexpected noise unsettled Sera so much that she threw up. Unfortunately we didn’t discover that until this morning so that was a half an hour of scrubbing out the rug. Sigh.

At least she otherwise seems generally ok, if still a bit slow and less interested in food than normal.

Year 4, Day 289: On the one hand, I’m grateful we’re still getting notifications from the daycare. On the other SIGH for still needing to get notifications. Someone in Smol Acrobat’s classroom was diagnosed with COVID and they were exposed this week. Their privacy restrictions mean we don’t know whether it was a teacher or a student or have any way of really assessing how much exposure there was. No one has spoken up on the parents group chat, though, and they tend to be proactive about informing the other parents when it’s their kid that’s sick so our semi-educated guess is that it was an adult (teacher or aide).

Then we got a notification of a recall on Smol Acrobat’s helmet. Great! Sigh.

Year 4, Day 290: It turns out that Sera is a silent vomiter. I used to always wake up to the sound of a dog horking but she threw up her dinner twice last night and I heard nothing. Then Smol Acrobat was holding their stomach and doubling over crying that their tummy hurt. We didn’t know what to do for it since we didn’t know if it was just a gassy tummy or what. But they resolved those doubts after I dropped off a headachy-but-otherwise-fine-and-masked JB at school by throwing up on me. And then on PiC. They asked for a fruit pouch after their stomach stopped hurting but couldn’t keep that down either. So we had to throw out our two old gel mats in the kitchen. They’re about 12 years old, have wide swaths of cracks across them and I’m not trying to clean vomit out of that.

So basically the entire morning was trading off holding Smol Acrobat and cleaning up vomit after they vomited on each of us. Why are they both (Sera 🐶 and Smol Acrobat) silent vomiters?? Thank goodness we were able to grab a video appointment with a pediatrician who immediately prescribed an anti-nausea medication because apparently stomach flu is going around big time along with all the other awful germs.

Then I had to get Sera to see the vet while PiC handled school pickup with a lump of Smol Acrobat.

Unfortunately the news for Sera isn’t nearly so straightforward. Initial diagnostics point to liver problems. We don’t know how bad it is yet or even what it is yet, but liver problems are never easy to treat. We’re running tests to narrow the field from “maybe cancer, maybe systemic” to one or the other. A few months ago, a new cancer screening blood test came out, we might want to do that. The vet advised me to have a conversation with PiC about exactly how much we want to do. That’s the warning they give when it’s unlikely to have either a cure or a straightforward treatment plan with high success rate. I already know PiC will support whatever path I choose, and we both put their quality of life first. I just … *deep breaths* really hope that we can keep her comfortable long term. I’m not ready to contemplate losing another furry family member. We were finally in a good place after so many years of working with her on her reactivity.

I have just enough presence of mind to be grateful that Smol Acrobat’s vomiting didn’t start in the middle of the night like Sera’s did. It was all in all a terrible day but at least we got some sleep before it went to hell in a handbasket. Everyone is on anti-emetics for the night. Cross your fingers?

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