Clean Bill of Health

It has been a little over two months since Tad got his Spica cast off. Yesterday was our scheduled post-cast removal check-up.

First off, NEVER AGAIN will I schedule an appointment for myself or one of the kids on a national holiday. The parking lot at Overlake (Tad’s appointment was at Children’s in Bellevue) was packed to the gills. I finally found a parking spot on the 7th floor of the parking garage – it only goes up to 8, and the staff is allowed to park on level 5 and up. The PA (physician’s assistant) that Tad was seeing was running behind. We ended up waiting a full hour to see him. Fortunately, they had a Nintendo Game Cube in the waiting room. Not that Ane or Tad knew how to play it, but they enjoyed experimenting with “Mario Party 4” while we were waiting… and waiting… and waiting…

When we were finally taken back to an exam room, Tad started to cry and cling to me. I had to pick him up and reassure him that it was okay, nothing was going to happen to him this time. He doesn’t have happy memories of exam rooms. Of course, Ane was busy asking, “Is he going to get a SHOT?” It was not helping.

Eventually, I got Tad calmed down and I recited Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to him to keep him quiet. It’s his favorite book of the moment and we’ve read it so often that I have it memorized.

The PA finally came in, informed us that we’d won the “Patience Award” for the day, apologized for it being so late, and then checked Tad’s old x-rays, ran him through some quick range of motion tests while he was lying down on the exam table, had him stand flat on the floor to measure the height of his legs, and asked me about his limp.

Of course, his limp has been non-existant for quite a while (unless he is very tired or running), his legs were acceptably even at this point, and he passed the range of motion exam with flying colors.

The strangest part of the whole visit to me was when Tad was weighed by the nurse. When he broke his leg, he weighed 33 pounds. At his three-year-old check-up by the pediatrician, he weighed 32 pounds. Yesterday, he weighed 31 pounds.

He’s been eating like he has an empty leg and keeps weighing less. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Tad is one weird boy.

So, unless we notice that one leg is suddenly longer than another or his limp returns, Tad is good to go with no more doctor visits for the leg. We celebrated – sort of – by going to Bellevue Square Mall to eat our lunch and go window shopping. It was also packed – the play area was so crowded that I tried to convince Ane that maybe we should just come back another time, but she insisted and I had already promised them playtime – but we had a good time checking out some of the shops that we don’t have (or no longer have) at Alderwood Mall, like the LEGO store and Sanrio Place (aka the Hello Kitty store) and The Children’s Place. We actually walked back out without having purchased anything but the caramel mocha, two chocolate milks and one large cookie from Seattle’s Best Coffee. I absolutely LOVE their caramel mocha. It’s much better than Starbucks’ caramel macchiato. Honest.

So ends the saga of Tad’s broken femur. A couple of weeks ago at dinner with Friend, Doc, the Brain, Head and Best-Babysitter, Best-Babysitter turned to Tad and said, “So, Tad, which bone are you going to break next summer?”

“Shut UP, Best-Babysitter!” I exclaimed.

“You had that coming,” Doc told her.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 1:42 am and is filed under Children, Shopping Stories.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed and Both comments and pings are currently closed.