Thursday, May 12, 2005

Rachel's Finger, or: Holy Crap, California History is Boring! (2nd attempt)

Tuesday I wrote this long post about Rachel's show and and Rachel's finger and it wasn't really that funny so I'm kind of glad it ended up floating around somewhere in cyberspace instead of on my blog. In it, I went on and on about how boring the 4th grade show, "California Alive!" is and how this is the second year I've seen it and *snore* and all that. And really, you know, they're 9 and 10 years old, and through no fault of their own, they live in a state with a really boring history and attend a school where part of the 4th grade curriculum is immortalizing said boring history in song. And this year, violin solos. Whatever. They worked hard and did a good job, so kudos to the 4th grade at Montgomery. Another rite of passage fulfilled.

The thing that really sucked about the show was that Rachel lives for this kind of thing but she didn't enjoy performing in this one at all because she has this infected finger. She's been chewing on her fingers a lot lately and her left index finger ended up infected around the cuticle, and Sunday and Monday it got pretty painful. On Monday afternoon I took her to the doctor and she was put on antibiotics with instructions to soak it and bring her back Wednesday if it wasn't better. Tuesday morning, I kept her home from school because it was big and gross and painful, and I even took a picture of it, which became part of the blog entry that wasn't. Which was stupid because a) who wants to look at that?, b) it wasn't a good enough picture that you could really tell what it looked like, and c) by afternoon it looked about 10 times worse anyway. First thing Wednesday, I made an appointment to take her to see the doctor again.

We hadn't seen our regular ped on Monday, and when she saw Rachel's finger for the first time on Wednesday, she stared at it, frowning. She mentioned getting another ped in to slice it open, but then decided to just try poking it herself, which she did, and which opened it up just fine. She squeezed most of the stuff out of it and took a sample to send to the lab, and Rachel was great and calm and everything, even though the ped kept re-poking it to open it more and all. Then she totally freaked out and cried and cried when they gave her a shot of antibiotics in the butt, and I felt horrible and took her out to lunch and to the video store and then I ordered her some used Beatles cassettes off Amazon.

I wanted to send her to school today even though I knew I was going to have to pull her out for an hour or so to take her back to the doctor for a re-check, but this morning the finger was looking pus-filled again and it wasn't draining and she was insisting it hurt to much to hold a pencil, so I kept her home again (that's 9 days she's been out in the past few weeks :-/), and here we are. I don't know if the antibiotics she's taking are helping in the least, and I don't want it to be staph but at least if it is, that would explain why it doesn't seem to be getting better. I guess we'll find out around 11:20 this morning. I hope so, because right now, in addition to being home from school, she has a finger that looks like it belongs a corpse that's been pulled out of the water after 3 or 4 days :-P

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