A Further Update: Finally Home!

I've wanted in the last few days to write something terribly profound in my blog, but the last few days have prevented me from writing anything at all because I've only had my phone to use. I can blog from my phone (and my last post Update was written and posted from my phone, but it's much harder since I'm limited to my smartphone's keyboards which are not very conducive for speed of typing. As it is, I think faster than I can type, but it's nice to be able to at least keep up with my thoughts a bit better using the conventional keyboard on my laptop.

After that last, rather choppy update, things didn't quite go as I had hoped. Gray woke up not long after Balinda and I got back from the grocery store and lost the small amount of food he had eaten a couple of hours earlier. We tried to give him something to drink and he couldn't keep that down either. The next morning he was much the same and very weak from almost three days of no food or liquids in his stomach, so needless to say, he was in no fit shape to even sit in the passenger's seat and ride the first leg of our journey home. We decided (well I made the decision) to stay another day and let him try to gain more strength. He stayed in bed most of the day, although we tried to give him tiny sips of liquids and bites of very bland stuff, but he just wasn't improving and was (I later learned) fighting serious nausea all day long. Late in the afternoon, I went to check on him and could tell he was just not getting better. Balinda suggested that we might ought to get him to the local urgent care clinic and see if they could give him something for the nausea and make sure he didn't have something more serious going on. I took him there and they did blood work (which caused him to lose his fight with the nausea), examined him, and gave him some Zofran in the clinic to quell the nausea. After making sure that the Zofran and a cup of water were going to stay down, he was released with a prescription for the same medicine and instructions to drink plenty of fluids and follow a very bland diet. The final diagnosis was acute gastroenteritis.

We got him some Powerade and saltine crackers at the grocery store on the way home from the clinic and he started drinking one of the liter bottles as we rode. Unfortunately, he drank it a bit too fast and wound up losing it later. The next day we once again made the decision to stay an additional day. This meant that not only would Gray miss a second day of work but M2 and AB would miss a day of school. Thankfully, in 1st and 2nd grade, that's not super critical and since it was only the first day back after the Christmas break, I was reasonably sure they wouldn't miss too much. Gray spent all of Sunday taking his Zofran on schedule and sipping on fluids and eating little bites of graham crackers and other bland foods. Thankfully, after a full day of that and a good night's rest, he woke on Monday feeling like he was about 80% better and was ready to get on the road.

We didn't get going until close to noon local time, but we made good time and were able to meet up with my dear friend Jae and her husband and daughter for dinner at a local Cracker Barrel near her which was about an hour from our hotel for the night. Tuesday morning, we set out on the final leg of our drive home (it's a 17+ hour long drive from our house to theirs in one direction and we split it into two days). With a bit of luck, we managed to arrive in time for me to make my weekly appointment with Pendragon and get dinner and girls in bed in a timely fashion so they could be well rested for school.

Today I am still really tired from our trip and still trying to get things in our house back into some semblance of a sort-of order again. That said though, I am going to try to get in some writing tomorrow on some things that have been on my mind and then on Friday I'll be participating as usual in the Five Minute Friday community link-up which has been on hiatus for the last two weeks.

Until next time, peace be with all of you!