First Day of School + ER Trip

I have to stay I was pretty happy with the way our first day of school shaped up this year. We got almost everything accomplished that was on our schedule. Kids got up on time, did their chores without arguing with me, and buckled down. Nicholas decided it was all workbooks during our work together time but hey, he's 4 and I'm fine with that. I'll likely give him a few choices and follow his lead for the most part during his school time and just try to make sure we hit everything over the course of a week.

But of course nothing around here can ever go smoothly, something must go completely sideways in a totally unforeseen way in order to make our lives complete. Yesterday that was with an unexpected trip to the ER for Chris. He complained a few times of a "tingling sensation" that would appear briefly. First on his face, than in both hands. Considering that was one of the things we were told to watch for, I was on the phone with the advice nurse asap. She got an urgent message over to our pedi who had his nurse call and tell me they didn't have any available appointments so take him to the ER. Lovely.

I called my MIL and asked her to come over and watch the other boys while I headed out. We ended up spending over 2hrs in the ER, most of it sitting around. The ER dr spent about 10-15min with us hearing what was going on and doing a 2min exam to check his neurological function and then she consulted with a pediatric ophthalmologist (I'm getting really good at spelling this word). The result of this....they are both stumped (for those keeping score, we are now at 5 stumped drs). She did offer to do a CT scan but recommended against it because that would be exposing him to radiation and in the opinion of both her and the ophthalmologist the symptoms presenting were not pointing to something neurological so the scan was an unnecessary exposure.

So here's what we did learn during our stay. While all double vision is worrisome, the kind he has is the better of the two because that generally means it's something ocular rather than neural. The tingling he had is not particularly worrisome in itself because it was not a full loss of sensation and because it was on both sides it was not indicative of a stroke or something equally nasty. So in other words, while they are stumped they are able to rule out a lot of the nastier things it could be. The other thing we learned is that there is only one neuro-ophthalmologist in the region for Kaiser and to get bumped up and seen in 3wks is pretty much a miracle and is an indication of how seriously they are taking this. So while I'm still concerned at least I'm no longer sitting here worrying that my kid is walking around with a brain tumor.

So we are still on with our appointment with the neuro-ophthalmologist and pediatrician next Tuesday. We already had all 4 boys scheduled to be seen so it's just a nice thing that it's all on the same day. In the meantime, we've been hearing from lots of people who have experienced similar things telling us what it ended up being for them. Some we've ruled out but others I've been making notes of to tell the Drs next week and see what they think. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this soon. If nothing else because the ER doctor has said she's keeping his file pulled so she can find out what the eventual diagnosis is because she's curious. LOL