"What I Did for Fall Break"

We had a wing-dinger of a fall break. Our original vacation plan was to go to California for Marden's User's Conference. We were going to spend a few days with Naomi and the beach, then head up to our hotel at Disneyland. We got to do those fun things, but we also added one more stop to our agenda that has sort of overshadowed everything else--the Emergency Room in Anaheim.

Seph kept waking up in the night with pains in his back, side, and lower abdomen. They would go away by daylight, so we weren't sure what to do, but we finally decided to go get checked. My first instinct had been to call Naomi, have her get us an appointment in Temecula with someone she knew, and go from there. But I was worried that his appendix would rupture or something as I made my paranoid way to Temecula, and I would get sent to DCFS for passing several perfectly good ER's on my way. I also don't know my California cities very well, and thought Naomi wouldn't know the ER's in the area--I didn't realize that Naomi would know Anaheim from having lived in the Redondo Beach area. So, I went to the ER without talking to her first. I was in what she calls "the 'Hood." It wasn't a pretty sight.

It turns out that Seph has a kidney stone. We've been told at least five times now that it is really unusual for a kid his age to have one. We are going on two weeks now since he first started having pain, and he still hasn't passed the stone.

We had almost a full week of no pain, and thought we must have missed catching the stone, since it isn't exactly easy to strain your pee while at Disneyland and umpteen gas stations between Temecula and Spanish Fork. Unfortunately, the pains are back today. We spent the afternoon in the hospital getting x-rays every five to ten minutes, and get to go back tonight for some more. Seph has had an ultrasound, an MRI, about 10 x-rays, two vials of blood drawn, three i/v's installed, and a flu shot all in the past two weeks. (We figured we might as well throw it into the mix while we were at it.) Some fun, Huh?



Here is Seph's class report about Fall Break: What I did while I was gone
"What I was doing while I was gone this past week was going on vacation to California.
My family and I stayed at my aunt’s house for a couple of days, then we stayed at Disneyland Hotel for a couple more days. We went to the beach and went boogie boarding and also to Disneyland with my cousins. We had a lot of fun, but I woke up three nights in a row with a strange pain in my right side. Well we thought it was serious so my mom rushed me to the emergency room. I had to sit in the waiting room in pain with some huge lady sitting in front of me in some sort of wheelchair with her pants down so far I could see her whole bottom. It wasn’t very pretty. Then I found out I was one of the only twelve-year-olds in the world that has a kidney stone. So pretty much this vacation turned out pretty bad in the end. That’s what I did while I was gone. By Seph Pace"

He even included clip-art of a kidney stone!

In all reality we had a lot of fun. The kids had a good time with their Yocum cousins, and a fun time hitting the beach and the D-land parks. I had fun too, and Aurora did great for a two month old, but the trip was still pretty exhausting—and I kept forgetting to take pictures. I’m going to have to steal them from Naomi’s blog!

One of the highlights of the trip for me was a photo shoot of Aurora with Naomi’s friend Alisha. I’ll post a blog about that next time I write, but now it is time to head back for more x-rays!