And everybody hurts...

...sometimes

Everybody cries

And everybody hurts, sometimes

-REM, Everybody Hurts

Friends, I'm here to answer the question that I just KNOW you've been dying to hear: So what ever happened with Luke's sleep study?

Want to predict the results? Anyone? Anyone? Yup, you guessed right - he DOES in fact have sleep apnea. Shocking! As his mother, I could *never* have told you that! (Okay, done with sarcasm.)

Actually, his sleep apnea is pretty bad. He stops breathing and snorts himself awake an average of 21 times per hour, and over 40 times an hour during REM sleep. (How fun that I found an REM song to go along with this post, eh?!) Yeah, that's a lot, even on sleep apnea scales. For reference, normal is like ~1 episode of apnea an hour.

But, to credit the ENT, he did share a little more about why he wanted a sleep study before removing his tonsils. Abbreviated, minimally-medical version: The thing that tells your body to wake up & breathe is not just a lack of oxygen but an overload of CO2. In some very young kids with sleep apnea, their little bodies learn to live with very high levels of CO2 before snorting awake. Then, when they are tonsil-free and should be breathing easily, they still wait for super high CO2 (which doesn't happen so much anymore). So he wanted to know how high his CO2 levels got before inhaling to know how much of a risk that would be for him. Luckily, his levels in sleep are fairly low, and the ENT is very confident that getting them out will help dramatically.

But never fear - he still earned an overnight hospital stay! Oh joy! (oops - slight sarcasm snuck in there. Sorry.) Not this week, but the following Tuesday he'll head to Durham for the fun. Here's hoping for great things from surgery #2.

But in other news, he's hurtin' for certain right now. On Thursday afternoon, he had a little bit of eye goo when I picked him up from school. Nothing major, but it was a bit of an odd time to get an eye booger, not being right after nap. (Oh admit it - we all get the occasional sleep-induced eye booger!) Friday his eye was a tiny bit red when he woke up, so I thought I'd swing by the pediatrician just to get the all clear before sending him to daycare.

Suffice it to say that we did NOT get the all clear, but instead got some Ofloxicin drops as a parting gift. He was getting a little cold, and the doc said that a cold bug/virus can settle either in the eye and become pinkeye or the ear and become an ear infection. He warned me that he wouldn't be surprised if his ear started draining, too. By Friday afternoon, he was much, MUCH, MUCH worse. Ear draining? Yep. Eye red & nasty? Oh yeah. Nose running? Bring out the snot rags. Luckily an early evening call to the pedi saved us another office visit (and saved us the $25 copay!). We were given some oral antibiotics and permission to use the ear drops that we still had from his last ear infection 2 weeks ago. Geez.

By this morning, he was absolutely pitiful. The pinkeye has now spread to eye #2, and he looks like he's been punched in the face and left to cry it out for hours on end. Top it off with the worst diaper rash he's ever seen, and the poor child is just absolutely miserable, top to bum. Like hurt-your-heart to look at him pitiful. Jay has been all kinds of sick, but this is right up there with the most pitiful I've seen. It's not just the red eyes - somehow, he's absolutely MASTERED the pitifully sad, hold-me-mommy look. I'm not posting pics because that would just add insult to injury. Someday when his pre-teen friends are threatening to send his mom's old blog posts to the girl he's crushing on, he'll thank me.

Here's hoping he gets this out of his system quickly because I surely do not want this to postpone surgery. I know how tired I was to get up with my babes 5 times a night. I can't imagine waking up 40 times an hour.