I left the house this morning at 8:15 to take Brynja to town for her PKU blood test and a check-up with the pediatrician. Our appointment was for 8:45; you’d think that they wouldn’t have had time to get terribly behind schedule at that hour of the morning, but you’d be quite wrong. The doctor didn’t show up until 10:20, by which point I’d already nursed the baby twice, read every pamphlet in the place more than once, and been out to feed more money into the parking meter. Seriously, would it kill them to get a magazine or two?
And if all that waiting weren’t bad enough, once we got in to see the doctor it took them four sticks to get enough blood for the test, and I had to hold my four-day-old babe down for every single one. They don’t just poke in the needle, either … they poke it in, then move it back and forth and wiggle it around under the skin, trying–mostly in vain, ha!–to find a vein, then squeeze, hard to get their few measly drops of blood. Her poor little hands and arms are going to be black and blue tomorrow.
I would gladly have sent Olof in my place, or at least taken him along for moral support, but he was home waiting for the washing machine repairman, who had arranged to come at 9:30. Turns out he was late as well, but Olof was lucky enough to be somewhere with a well-stocked Nintendo Wii while he waited. And though it set us back a pretty öre, we did get an almost fully restored washer out of the deal (apparently the water pump may be on its way out, but that’s a worry for another day).
That was all sorted by the time Brynja and I got home, but when I pulled into the driveway I noticed the chimney sweep’s truck in the driveway. I’d known he was coming today, but he was scheduled for between noon and three o’clock; it was just past eleven when I arrived, and he’d already been here long enough to be all but finished with his sweeping and whatnot. “Timetables be damned!” was our theme for the day, apparently.
In any case, his early arrival and departure left us enough time to run to town for a quick lunch before Lydia came home from school, and I have to say that sitting down to a toasty Subway melt and a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips made all the earlier craziness of the day slip right away. Well, that and the two-hour nap I lay down to–all by myself (not counting two dogs and a cat, of course)–nearly as soon as we walked back in our own front door. Thank God for paternity leave.
PKUs here are done by heel-stick (we’d wrap a warm wet cloth around the foot to promote blood flow and then poke the heel with a lancet). Definitely a far sight easier than those little fingers or trying to find a vein on those little pudgy arms.
But I don’t care who you are or what the reason for the test is, when someone is stabbing a needle into your child’s body you have to resist the urge to punch them in the face.
I was just telling Olof (for the umpteenth time, since this is the third baby who’s had to endure the hand and arm sticks) about how much easier the heel-stick was. I remember it being somewhat traumatic when Lydia had it done, but it was not nearly so bad as the way they do it here.