Ramblings: Inebriated and Herniated

This morning I took the little boys to get their hair cut at the barbershop. Avery did fabulous--didn't cry at all and wiggled an appropriate amount for a three year old. Aidan sat there like he was made of stone but kept asking, "He's almost done? One more thing?" through tight lips.

I was really happy with how Avery's turned out--a nice trim and now the back doesn't fro up like it did before. Aidan's however, is a different story. Everything was going well until the very end when the guy went to trim the front.
Aidan doesn't have much hair, but now the hair he does have looks like this. The guy took the scissors right up to his hairline and then cut it straight across. Oh my. Luckily it's pretty blond, so it doesn't look as bad as Alex's has in the past with this same haircut. Hopefully it'll grow out fast. Haircuts for the little boys is such a toss of the dice. I get ulcers the night before I know I'm going to take them because either they act atrocious and I'm mortified the entire time, or they act ok and get totally bizarre haircuts.

After that, the boys and I dropped Jeremy off to have his back fixed. He's been moaning and groaning since Thanksgiving after he played football for a couple of hours. We attributed it to the fact he's just becoming an old man, but last Wednesday, he really messed it up during a basketball game at the church. He came home way early and then couldn't find a position to lay or sit where it didn't feel like someone was stabbing him in the lower back. So after I checked and made sure the giant butcher knife I sleep with under my pillow was still there and not accidentally lodged in his spine (hey--accidents happen), I made him a doctor's appointment.

But not until after he raided my hydrocodone drug stash at about 2 in the morning. Doesn't he know I earned those drugs birthing the children? I keep them around for a rainy day. Stop--STOP. Put the phone down. Don't call Oprah. I'm not one of those strung-out stay-at-home moms....yet, at least.

And $1100 and an MRI later, his diagnosis was not "you're married to a giant pain in the butt," but instead was a big fat herniated disk. And today he had a $1000 appointment to get an epidural in his back and steroids pumped into the injured area. They were going to put him under for the whole thing and he was sort of freaking out before. I told him the epidural would be the easy part--flashing his naked butt around in one of those beautiful drafty hospital gowns is what he should really be worried about. And then he started worrying about that.

They called me when he was done so that I could come pick him up because he was too out of it to drive home. He called me about 2 minutes after they did to tell me he was done. I told him since the boys hadn't gone down for their naps yet, I'd throw them in the car and we'd come get him. (We'd made arrangements for someone to come sit with the boys in case they were napping.) So we loaded up and got about 2 minutes into our trip when my phone rang again. This is the funny part. Jeremy and I had the EXACT same phone conversation as three minutes before. He had no idea. "Oh, the boys aren't sleeping? You're bringing them? Have you left yet?" I was laughing because I could tell his brain was still a bit foggy.

And it turned out his worrying was at least justified. He told me he accidentally flashed his buns to the cute nurse that was taking him to the procedure room. She told him not to worry, that's she's seen everything as a nurse. It didn't make him feel better...or less naked. I told him to hop up on a table, strip naked from the waist down, hoist his legs up in stirrups, and then invite the maximum capacity of a movie theater to parade back and forth in the room--and give half of them cameras to capture him writhing around and screaming in pain while bodily fluids flow everywhere. And then maybe I'd feel a little bad for his nude bumcheeks. Boys are such wienies.

And then he was feeling sorry for himself that I didn't go with him while they gave him his anesthesia. I had the boys home today so I couldn't go--I actually would have because it's funny to see how wierded out he gets about needles, blood, and hospitals in general. But he has the nerve to tell me in a pathetic voice that they were "shocked" no one came with him when he was getting put under.

Excuse me, um, do you remember that I went through all that and MORE without YOU? That I was stuck with i.v.'s, prepped, shaved, poked in the spine, wheeled into a big white room, had my abdomen cut open, internal organs removed from my body, and then had two human beings yanked from my stomach, got put back together, and sewed up, and all the while I was shaking violently from the epidural....ALONE.

Ok. not really alone--my mom was there. But for the purpose of this story and making Jeremy realize he's indeed a giant wienie, I was ALONE. He was on an airplane from Houston to Dallas and ended up making it to the hospital as they wheeled the twins to the NICU. I've never been bothered by it since then and I've never tried to make him feel guilty. Mostly because I was so ready to not be that pregnant and so huge that if someone had offered to deliver them in the freezer aisle at Kroger, I would've been spreading out plastic grocery bags on the linoleum before they changed their minds. But today I just had to remind him that I went through all that without him, and it WAS pathetic that he wasn't there for that. He was duly chastised.

So the patient is home resting today and will be back at work tomorrow. And in about a week we'll know whether the massive dose of steroids have helped or not. I'm wondering if he'll suddenly develop giant pecs and biceps...or maybe 'roid rage. Do you think Fabio had a herniated disk that prompted this look...?

For now I'll still be sleeping with my giant butcher knife in case it's the Roid Rage that shows up. If it's the giant pecs, I don't know how we'll all fit in our bed--me, him, his giant pecs, the loin cloth, his four body pillows and my hidden butcher knife will be a tight squeeze. Not to mention all that flowing hair...