Back on January 29, my wife and my daughter went down to Saugerties, about an hour south of Albany, to go to the birthday party of her ten-year-old twin cousins, my brother-in-law’s daughters. Carol and Lydia left late and so got to the party about a half-hour after its 2:30 start time.
On the return trip, Lydia complained of a raging headache, which she described as “sharks sawing into my head” and “like I’m dying”. When she got home, she curled up in my arms, not wanting to eat.
The Urgent Care place, unfortunately, closed at 6 pm, so after consulting with her pediatrician, we took his suggestion and ended up going to the emergency room at Albany Med. I can tell Lydia was not faking when she asked me to sit in the back seat of the car with her, which I’ve only done a handful of times since she was three, usually when she’s been sick or injured.
Of course, since there were people in much more obvious distress at the hospital, we ended being there about 2.5 hours. And as she got to watch the Disney Channel at a point when she should have been in bed, she started feeling better, beginning to get her appetite back. A $50 co-pay later, we went home.
In retrospect, I developed two theories about what happened to Lydia, which are not mutually exclusive. One is that she got stressed out at the party, playing with over a dozen kids she did not know, all of whom are older than she is. The other possibility is that she overheard conversations about my mother’s stroke the day before, and developed sympathetic pains. In any case, it made for a long day, between talking to my sisters on the phone, worrying about our mother, and concerned enough about our daughter that we took her to the ER.
Pictures (c)2009, Alexandria Green-House
