Good Snooze

All hell has broken loose at the hospital. They are building a new cancer center and the old clinic and lab have shut down, everyone has been moved to temporary spaces, and the staff are trying to adjust. For three weeks now we've dealt with little administrative glitches, nothing serious, just the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. You head to the hospital for a quick finger poke, and you can't get out of there for hours: no one put in the order for our blood test, the new nurses have given us orders with other kids' names on them (I guess I should read that stuff too but I try to get on automatic pilot in there), the new nurses don't seem very skilled at drawing blood from little kids, we don't recognize anyone and no one has any sympathy for us, the new clinic is in the children's hospital, but the lab is now in Stanford hospital, about a block and a half away, so when the labels are wrong I'm running back and forth, usually with Dayssi in tow. Argh.

Yesterday the chaos reached new heights. We arrived at noon. There was no order for the blood test. "Have you had labs done here before?" asked the nurse. "Every Monday for over a year," I said. A nurse called our doctor, who gave the order. Forty minutes later, someone gave us a label. A new, very nice nurse said, "I'll do it for you in here so you don't have to go to the lab." We stepped into the utility closet in the clinic, where the new nurse tried to use the finger poke apparatus. I should have known we were in trouble when she didn't start by warming Dayssi's fingers. She couldn't get the poker to work, because it had a safety lock that had to be removed (I pointed that out after a while). She poked, and squeezed the blood out, but didn't tip the bottle back and forth a hundred times like the experts do. We left with a false sense of completion. I dropped Dayssi at home, and about 10 minutes after I got into my office (1:30pm) they called me to bring Dayssi back. The blood had clotted and the tests couldn't be run. I asked Kirsi to meet me at the hospital with the girls at 3:30. We ran into the clinic and the nurses acted like they knew who we were, and that we had come back for another blood test. They handed me a label. I took it, with Kirsi, Dayssi and India, around the block to the other hospital. They called us in, looked at the label, and said "Alessandro?" I ran back to the clinic while Kirsi stayed with the girls, and the nurses who I thought had recognized us earlier looked into the file and pulled out the correct label. I ran back. At 4:10 Dayssi and I sat in the chair together for her second (and ultimately, third) poke of the day. She put her head on my chest and, having skipped her nap two days in a row (she is experimenting with staying up all day, heaven help us), she fell asleep. Slept through the first (second) poke and all of the squeezing. But then her finger dried up, so the nurse had to poke her again. She slept through the second poke too; didn't even flinch! That is some good coping.

Dayssi's counts look good. She is riding her new bike with much mojo. India is now working on riding wihtout training wheels, which is also a big thrill. And, she did two whole pages of writing in the last two days, without asking for any help with spelling!