Well, I finally have some time to catch up – I should be watching The Bachelor online because a friend said it was DRAMA-RAMA last night but I need to get some blogging done real quick first.
Our trip to Florida was eventful before we even left our house. Friday night I was trying to get Mallory to bed when the dog started freaking out in the kitchen and living room. He was all tense and spaced out for about five minutes, during which Mallory was freaking out because Cooper was acting so weird so I got her into bed while Rick sat with Cooper (thank GOD for her extreme hatred of the baby gate in her doorway at bedtime, since she stays in bed now so we don’t put the gate up!) and then I called Animal Emergency, who said to bring Cooper in.
Rick took Cooper and by the time they got there, I guess Coops was acting normal (one of the pitfalls of living so far away from civilization) but they took some blood (from Cooper) and asked some questions (of Rick) and determined that Cooper had another seizure (Idiopathic Epilepsy or something…I’ll have to go back to my blog posts from June 2007 when Coops had his other seizure). They said most everything was normal but one thing was elevated and something else was low but nothing was life-threatening so they sent Cooper home on a valium and cleared us to leave him for a week. He was supposed to stay at my dad’s for the week but my dad got nervous about Cooper having a seizure while locked in the basement so Coops is spending the week with Barkley & his family. Apparently he’s doing fine there, and has only eaten one sock so far.
Moving on…we were an hour late departing Detroit on Saturday morning since the snow came in super fast that morning which caused the luggage loading people to slow down and then we had to get de-iced twice (which was SUPER reassuring…). Mallory was awesome on the flight, even when the dumbass lady in front of her reclined her seat so that Mallory literally had NO room for her feet. Up until that point, Mallory had been great about not kicking the seat in front of her, we were so proud, but when that stupid chick reclined? Go for it, kid; that lady deserves it. I mean seriously – I hardly ever recline my seat because I know how much room it takes up for the person behind me. Anyways.
We got to Florida an hour late and picked up our Honda Accord rental car. Rick didn’t add me as a driver and we were joking that we had to come all the way to Florida and rent an Accord for Rick to be able to drive one. Get it? Because I always want to drive our new car at home? We’re so funny.
We went and saw Rick’s dad & step-mom for dinner on Saturday night. Rick & his dad had to go check out Rick’s condo so the girls just hung out for a bit. Mallory talks to Papa & Nina on the phone a lot so she warmed up to both of them right away. We had a nice visit, and then it was off to our SUPA-fancy hotel.
Sunday was only a half-day for me for the conference and after I was done, we hit the beach but it was almost freezing, especially with wearing only a thin coat & capris. We met Nina & Papa at a bar across the street from the beach where everyone else drank beer and Mallory & I drank milk.
Oh – forgot to tell you – the Dallas Stars (my old favorite hockey team) were staying at our hotel because they played the Tampa Bay Lightening on Monday night! I got in touch with my old trainer buddy with the Stars to get tickets and found out they were staying in the same hotel as us. So when we got back from dinner on Sunday, we ran in to Brett Hull outside the hotel when we pulled up. I asked him for a picture with Mallory (I tried to play it off that my mom was a big fan) and he obliged, which was nice. We told him that Mallory has a rubber duck for the bathtub with his name & number on it (because my mom gave it to me years ago), and Hull’s wife, who was standing right there, got a kick out that and started laughing. Nice!
Monday was a full day of classes for me. Mallory usually gets up with me in the morning and then we go down and get a plate of fruit from the conference’s breakfast buffet, mostly to give dad a few more minutes to sleep in before being on duty all day.
My trainer buddy invited Rick to watch the Stars’ skate on Monday (the rink is literally a block from the hotel) and my class happened to get out early so I met Rick & Mallory over there. She was so excited to see the players up close and showed me the goalies! That night we went to the game and again she was all about the goalies, showing me one-two goalies. It was so fun. But the best part might have been that Mallory & I left the game at the start of the third period, and walked back to the hotel and it wasn’t freezing out, like it always is whenever we leave a hockey game back home. Rick stayed for the end of the game and ended up running into a dude who played hockey at Michigan and got invited to some gig with free beer where he chatted up Marty Turco for a while. I’m so sure.
Today’s excitement was in the form of a visit to an Urgent Care Clinic and the pediatric ER. Mallory has had some rapidly developing cold sores on her upper lip and a rapidly growing blister on her lower back. If we had been at home, I would have let my sister look at her and then probably done nothing for a few days. But being away from home, and Mallory quickly looking like she needed to be in isolation (the cold sores had also turned into disgusting blister-looking things), I decided we should have her looked at. We can see Tampa General Hospital from our hotel room, but when Rick called there, they recommended we go to an urgent care thing first. I bailed out of my class this morning and we drove 30 minutes to the clinic (what a CLUSTER-TRUCK – most urgent cares are only open after hours, and you can’t go to a regular pediatrician during the day so WTF were we supposed to do? Thus the closest place we could find was 30 minutes away). Anyway, after waiting for an hour and finally being seen by a doctor (which prompted Rick to recall the joke “what do you call a doctor who finished last in his class? a doctor”), it was determined that Mallory might need IV fluids, maybe have some blood drawn and for sure needed antibiotics for her blisters, which the doctor thought was impetigo. Because this urgent care facility can’t do any of those three things for pediatric patients, we were instructed to go to the emergency room at the hospital of our choice…including freaking Tampa General Hospital. OMG.
Because I’d already missed half of the morning sessions, Rick had the idea that we wait until after my classes were done for the day to go to the ER – give Mallory a chance to sleep and they would hang out. 40 minutes in to my afternoon class, he texted me “going to doc”. Oy. So I left class again and off we went, for the 3.5 minutes drive to the hospital. We were brought back pretty quick and were seen even quicker and the doctor there confirmed the impetigo diagnosis and took a culture of the thing on her back. He said we didn’t need to do IV fluids or take blood and that he’d give us some antibiotics to use for a week. If the culture came back with anything weird, they would call us. He was surprised when we told him about our travels to urgent care only to end up at the ER anyway and apologized that Rick was given misinformation about that (he was also surprised that the urgent care place couldn’t give us the antibiotics in the first place). But anyway – Mallory was an awesome little patient at both places, letting the doctors look at her and even turning around & pulling up her shirt to show her back before being asked to (since she could hear us talk about the blister on her back). We have some antibiotic cream to put on all three spots and we’ll follow up with our doctor next week when we get home.
So next week I get to call the vet about Cooper’s seizure and the pediatrician about Mallory’s impetigo. Don’t let me forget.
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Since I haven’t been keeping up with the blog in real life, I have been keeping notes on my phone of funny things I need to remember to write about.
- Sunday’s funny: “No horsey, Jose” = no way, jose. I MUST get it on video.
- As we were getting ready for the hockey game on Monday, Mallory asked if Baby Arlo was coming to the game. I said yes. She walked over to my stomach and said “You come out? To come to hockey game?” and tried to pull on my belly button.