We snuck out of town on Sunday afternoon to get ready for scans that started at 7:15 on Monday morning. How did we get ready? By heading to the Kemah Boardwalk, otherwise known as The Family Spend-o-matic, for the evening, we guaranteed that we would all be tired enough to sleep through the alarm on Monday morning. For a low, one time price of a couple of jillion dollar, each person in your group earns the right to wear a stylish wrist band. Wait there's more. Proud displayers of wristbands, FOR NO ADDITIONAL PAYMENT, earn the right to stand in line at every attraction.
Some, like the train, required the heart of a lion to actually ride. Note the white-knuckled grip and brave, but terrified looks on these young passengers faces:
Others proved more sedate, as demonstrated in this short video of the Inverter. The blurs in the front two seats are Nico and Erin. I call this video, "Famous Last Words: Mom, What Does Inverter Mean?"Adam didn't actually trust any of the rides that Erin and Nico wanted to ride, but eventually agreed to go on the Aviator. . .once:
He would not ride Pharoah's Fury with them, and who can blame him? We ended the evening, after a tasty meal at Joe's Crab Shack and more opportunities to have their guts shaken and stirred, with Erin, Nico, and Adam prancing and cavorting like water sprites in the dancing fountain.
On Monday, the children traded their blue outfits for green ones, and (at least for Erin) their amusement park wrist bands for hospital ID tags and a contrasting-colored, take-home-overnight IV.
Their reward for patience through, the IV placement/blood lab, the five-hour GFR test and the echocardigram (9 hours total)?
Well, an apple and a movie. Just after we paid (the outrageous) parking fee and pulled out of the parking garage to head to the theater, my cell phone rang with news that Erin's potassium (you remember, it was dangerously low in December?) was now dangerously high. "It was probably an error, but could you just drop back by the clinic for a re-check?" With dragging feet (remember it was 4:00 now, and we had been hanging around the hospital since 7:05 a.m., which begs the question of why someone had not tracked us down some time in the previous nine hours when we were just hanging out having blood draws every hour or two. Must have been late breaking, hot-off-the-press news.), we returned to clinic. . .where believe it or not, the nurse couldn't get the IV to work and told us to go home that we we try again tomorrow (I guess Erin wasn't in that much danger, after all). That's when we made a break for it, just in case someone with more authority rescinded the order. We made it to Ratatouille just in time (not that big of a stretch since it was playing on four screens with a new showing starting about every other minute or so).
The decision to bail turned out sound. As I mentioned in the last post, the re-done blood chemistries on Tuesday showed everything, including potassium as normal! After another long day at the hospital on Tuesday, we headed back to Bryan, arriving just in time for Erin to change into soccer cleats for practice and pickup games against boys teams. She had just enough energy on Wednesday to go to piano lessons, visit her third grade teacher (Jennifer Steen) and her very cute one-year-old Matthew, and swim at the Burchills on Wednesday. What did she do today? Headed out to Carpenter's Kids for an all-day excursion. Go figure. She had been in training for a long day all week.
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