Dinner loogie tipping point

So it seems that kids are capable of some seriously inappropriate timing. During dinner, with a monumental sneeze, Liam demonstrated that his cold has passed from stuffy and can't get it out to can't stop purging. Fortunately today he is much better.

Sleep Training Update #1

CB has been diligently training the boy at night.

LB only got up once (for a feed) between 7pm and 7am. Hooyah.

Of course, I (GB) was up at 4am and couldn't sleep for some reason :(

Advocate for your child

Liam has been having screaming fits that, from our uninformed-first-time-parent experience, appeared 'severe'. All of the doctors, nurses and professionals kept telling us that "no, this is normal for a child with [acid] reflux." Based on our research, this was fairly consistent, so we uneasily acquiesced.

The fits began escalating in frequency, so we raised the issue again. Carolyn took in a video and showed it to our pediatrician.  She said that the behaviour was normal, but, to ease Carolyn, reviewed Liam's prescriptions and such. It turns out that he had outgrown his domperidone (gets things moving through his stomach faster) and we had incorrect preparation instructions for his prevacid (for reducing acid).

Four days after fixing both of these issues, still no screaming fit since the day of the correction.  He is much happier and sleeping much better.

I fully appreciate that Liam would not be alive without the level of care he received.  On top of that, had his care not been covered by OHIP, we very likely would have lost our house or at least our equity in it ($10,000 per day for 114 days + all of the followup).  Having said that, we have seen a lot of the medical system over the last eight months and if we had not been questioning and educating ourselves, there seems to have been something every step of the way that I feel would have gone seriously wrong. 

Most of the problems we saw distill down to information problems:  incomplete, not captured, not followed up, not shared, not current.  In defense, there was a LOT of information and a LOT of places where things did not wrong.  As a percentage, our experiences may have been perfectly within accepted norms.  This may be just the nature of medicine.  There is always one more person to help or just a little more that can be done and every choice is a balance of the minimum that can be done to derive the maximum return.  This is particularly true in a public system where we are trying to share the resources equitably.

Stepping out of the emotions our experiences, this is a very interesting systems problem.  I've often wondered if I could make a reasonable career servicing the medical industry.  It speaks to a need for a broader purpose than my current career path and there certainly appears to be a need.

Colonoscopy FTW

I'm sure it's the f*cking Merlot talking, but I think Steven Colbert's colonoscopy (minute 4:04 of this clip) slam dunked* his ascendency over they Daily Show on February 11 which he reinforced somewhat more cerebrally on February 12.

* Low comedy for mouth breathers, but very very funny; this surpasses the snot episode

Little Liam now 100% hernia free

Well, we got through the surgery on Thursday.  Talk about anxiety.  I was afraid of the anesthetic more than the surgery itself.  

He is not sleeping quite as well at night as he might otherwise, but is very happy during the day.  He used to have screaming fits of 20 to 40 minutes a couple of times per day.  Those are gone.  Hopefully he will start sleeping more soundly at night as he gets back on to a regular schedule.

I have to say the hospital did not instill us with a great deal of confidence.  We answered the same questions about his prematurity at least five times (but only to four different parties :P).  In the end, they were about to release him from the recovery ward when I mentioned that he was four months corrected age.  The nurse was a bit flustered because she thought he was seven months and needed to keep us longer.  As much as the doctors, nurses, and institutions they work in are quite capable, you really do need to advocate for your child.  I can't imagine the numbers of problems that must occur as a result of language barriers. 

Geeks 'R' Us

I was thinking of getting this for GB, but then I saw the price tag....

The joy that is home ownership

Why is it with house maintenance it just seems to keep going and going and going?

We actually have two different contractors working on the house right now. There is progress being made, but it sure is painful at times. Of the work started in May (I think), we still have the doors to replace, the windows to cap, and a floor vent to be installed in the kitchen. As long as it's done before winter I'm cool with that.

The second contractor (much more timely) created a vent for us from the basement so we can install our new dryer (more on that in a moment). He also replaced the trim around our basement back door as it was rotting, repointed the brick around our outside faucet and replaced the circa 1920 faucet (pretty cool mechanism to deal with the winter actually). Of course, when he did that I noticed that there is quite a bit of repointing necessary on that wall so now he'll be coming back before November to do that.

I probably should have blogged this earlier, but we had a bit of a situation with our clothes washer. It was a pretty cool device, if a little cranky. I however, managed to break it (sort of). We were planning to move it downstairs as we now have stairs (woo hoo, I might add) and so I was doing a little plumbing. Now, the plumbing went fine except that when I turned off the main, I did not turn off the taps into the washer (I still don't think that should strictly be required). In any case there was a bit of a shock when we first turned it on (physical shock, not electrical). This caused leak due to a pipe coming undone inside. We had that maintenanced and about three days later the thing starts smoking. Not just "oh, I smell something weird" or "is someone smoking rubber in the back yard", but rather billowy "oh, shit" smoke. Short story is it would be $500 bucks to fix and the maintenance guy said we'd probably just have more problems. So we are now the proud owners of a new washer and dryer set.

Well, after all this, what could possibly go wrong?