Confinement

i over-think nearly everything. attribute it to a minor in english if you want to, but the reality is that it's just a part of who i am. i spend most of my days with internal conversations playing through my head. i talk to myself constantly. i'm kind of all over the place and i think a lot of that is because i can never really seem to focus my mind for longer than a few minutes or hours.

these last few days have taken my usual routine of inner rambling and decimated it. so much has spun out of control so very quickly and major plans had enormous wrenches thrown into them. had my good friend lydia not been here, i honestly think i may have ended up either laying in a heap in my bathroom or in the hospital with dehydration and chest pains from constant sobbing and no self care. timing can work in your favor and against you all at once it seems.

this morning briefly snapped me back into my inner dialogue and those thoughts have sort of immaturely, and intermittently, formed in my mind to create this blog post.

at 8 am sharp (i'm not kidding, it was 8:00am) the orthopedic office called me. "we received the ER report on your son and were wondering if you could bring him in today" "sure, what time?" "how soon can you be here?"

lydia was and her crew were packed up to go back home and fortunately for us leaving very shortly after i got off the phone. so they dropped us off at the hospital before 9am.

funny side note, because i had no car of my own and she dropped me off and left for louisiana, i was forced to haul a splinted child, a car seat, a diaper bag with 2 hours worth of entertainment+ food and my pregnant stomach into the hospital. i asked for a wheelchair, and this is what i got (forgive the poor quality, the picture was taken on my phone)

x rays were immediately (no joke, within 5 minutes of entering the hospital we were wheeling our way to radiology) redone and we were also immediately taken back to see the doctor. his fracture was confirmed and the treatment would be 3-5 weeks in a hard cast that covered his entire right leg, toes to upper thigh.

i knew that this would be the solution if the fracture was confirmed and honestly, i wanted it to be the solution if it was a fracture. his splint had already slid down his foot so much that his toes ended up in the heel section. that wasn't doing anybody any good.

but sitting on that table, holding him, and taking in the facts: no true baths (one of his favorite things in the world), no more beach trips in our short 2 weeks left here, severely impaired mobility when we'll be moving to a new house that he'll want to explore, no swimming in the blistering heat, the limitations a cast brings with it, how much he cannot possibly understand what's happening, the fact that e isn't with us right now and i'm doing this alone.... it was overwhelming.

i remembered to ask the doctor about pain management--we've been having a hard time with it since the fracture happened. our only medicinal options are tylenol, motrin, or tylenol with codeine. i am not giving my 16 month old son codeine. i would rather hold him every second of every day and comfort him that way than give him narcotics.

but the doctor did say we might notice an improvement in his comfort level with the cast.

alright, let's see how it goes.

he couldn't have been more right. jp stood up in that cast today and tried to dance. granted, he fell down, but he felt ok enough to try. once he understood the difference of weight in that leg, he was slinging it all around him and crawling and climbing (yes, climbing!) again. he likes to rub things up and down the cast because of the cool grinding noise it makes and he figured out that banging things on it makes a fun drumming sound.

he also kicked e in the groin with it. whoops? i got hit in the face also, if that makes anyone feel better about the whole thing.

and this is where my over-analytical brain kicked in.

the only thing that could truly fix my child's pain was total confinement of the injured portion of his body. it needed perfect, constant, and uniform stability. it had to be wrapped, squeezed, and held in place until the shell around it became hard and impenetrable. it didn't feel good while it was unwrapped, or during the wrapping process. but the closer the cast came to being fully hardened, the better he started to feel. and once the process was over, he was more free than he had been before the confinement.

and that is more or less what's happening to us in our lives right now. we are being forced into a position that isn't allowing us much, if any, wiggle room. the circumstances closing in around us are hard and there doesn't seem to be a way out. but i am a believer that all things happen for a reason. something in our lives isn't as good as it can be. we haven't been stretched or pushed to our limits in some area and that's what it happening to us right now.

at this moment, we are just like jp when he was in the splint. we have some of what we need, but not enough. and we're so overcome by the pain and confusion that we're spending most of our time screaming and performing our usual activities, waiting for it to all click back into place.

and it probably won't do that.

we need to go through this period of total confinement, this squeezing, wrenching, hardening process and we'll end up relearning our lives, the same way jp will relearn how to walk when this is over.

and just like a healed bone, we'll be stronger in the end.

but i still i wish i could have learned this lesson in some other way that didn't involve my precious son being thrown into a cast.