Same call. Different year.

We never wake up and suspect that we are going to wind up in the ER before the day is up, do we?  I have never found a single shred of evidence to support the suggestion that life is at all predictable.  Which is what makes it so darn scary. Especially when one is a mother.  

Nothing on earth can flip me inside out more than receiving an unsuspecting phone call informing me that my child is anything less than perfectly okay.  Which is exactly what happened to me early Saturday afternoon.

I once wrote a post about an isolated incident that happened when Dracen was in kindergarten.  He had been on an antibiotic, had a dose just before leaving for school and within minutes of dropping him off, I received a frantic phone call informing me he'd either passed out or had some sort of seizure and that 911 had been called.  

Yeah.  I don't think I need to tell you what kind of state that put me in.

I won't go into all the details of that but you can click on the link and read all about it if you want the long version.  The short story is that I squealed tires all the way to the school, burst through the door and ran down the hallway like a raving mad lunatic to find him on the classroom floor with an audience, but otherwise okay. I had beat the paramedics there.  

I blamed the doctor for prescribing what I researched and discovered to be the absolute highest dose of an antibiotic for a child his age when he really probably didn't even need one at all.  He'd only had some cold and cough symptoms with a negative strep test when it was prescribed. 

I switched doctors, never allowed him to take Amoxicillin again and in the nearly four years since that happened (he's in fourth grade now), we have never had another similar incident.  

Until this past Saturday. 

He'd had the little stomach bug I wrote about last Friday.  But although he didn't feel super on Friday and stayed home from school, he never vomited again and kept food and drink down.  By Saturday morning, after sleeping in late, he seemed and proclaimed himself perfectly well.  

He and Devin asked if they could go with Uncle Dave and their buddies to the mall and I said that was fine.  I had not yet heard the details of the plan when I left for the grocery store.  Charlie was here and they were in the bonus room when I left.  

Fast forward about an hour...

I had just pulled into the garage, put the door down, and opened the back of the car to get the groceries out when my cell rang.  My cell never rings.  I assumed it was the boys calling from within the house since I did not even know they'd left yet.  

But I looked down to see it was a friend of ours and mother of their two friends who were going with them to the mall. And the words that came out of her mouth were almost identical to the ones I heard the day of the kindergarten incident, years earlier. And the ones I hoped and prayed I would never hear again...  

The four boys and Dave were all about to walk out the door to leave their house when Dracen collapsed, only this time no one saw him in time to catch him so he busted the back of his scalp open on  the corner of a floor lamp.  

It was clearly going to need stitches though it was several minutes before I was able to coax him up from their couch, from where he looked at me sideways and asked, "Why are you shaking?!  I'm fine!"  because (and he gets it honest from his mama) that boy goes ape sh*t crazy over the mere thought of someone coming at him with a needle. 

But off to the ER we finally went.  Thank God Charlie was there to drive because I was in a horribly frazzled state. 

Surprisingly, the ER was almost empty so our wait time was minimal but the drama, screams, and pleads we endured during the blood test and the stitching (well, mostly the time awaiting the stitches) was almost enough to push me off the cliff of sanity that I was already dangling by a thread on.  I was this close to checking myself in as a patient experiencing an anxiety attack. This close.

But we all made it through it.  The CT scan showed nothing wrong with his brain, the blood test did not indicate anything unusual, and he got three Duke blue stitches on the back of his head that are completely hidden by his hair.  And it only took four of us to hold him down.  

I am not kidding.  Even a little.  

At one point he screamed at Charlie that he couldn't breathe.  But then added quickly, "Don't stop holding me down though, Charlie!"  Bless his heart.  He knew he'd go berserk and kick somebody's teeth out if we let up.

I kept him out of school again yesterday because he developed a sore throat (which may have been from all the screaming at the ER) and some chest congestion, like Devin has had.  We went to the doctor in the afternoon and she thought he checked out fine too and thinks that it's likely from being sick and maybe dehydrated but since it has happened twice now, we are going to schedule an EEG to be on the safe side.

He went back to school today and before he got out of the car I reminded him to drink lots of water (he takes a water bottle to school each day) and sit down quick and let someone know if he feels dizzy.  He replied with, "It's NOT my first day of school, Mom!"

I nearly came unglued when the phone rang a few minutes ago.  But it was only Terminix calling to set up a quarterly appointment.  

I'm no stranger to Jesus (we talk daily) but I am never more thankful to know Him than when I find myself in such an intense state of worry and unrest.  And it always comes back to (He always reminds me of) this verse...Psalm 46,

Be still and know that I am God...

In other words, Take a chill pill.  I've got this!  

So I'm slowly unwinding.

Slowly,