Yesterday I spent a good portion of my day sitting in a room on the sixth floor of the Wood Building, at CHOP’s Department of Neurology. Ever since Baboo was born, right up to the present, in so many ways, I’ve been told–he’s a little you. And right up until now I’ve always found that to be a pretty cool thing, but now my kid has migraines, and they’re getting worse.
He’d been taking too much ibuprofen, I mean too frequently. I called his doctor. In her office I told her that I was afraid he was setting himself up for rebound headaches, but that he actually was having headaches as often as three, sometimes four times a week. Because of his age she wanted him to see a pediatric neurologist, and she told me she’d request an exigent appointment at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Neurology. She would try for one of the satellites in the suburbs, but she wasn’t sure how soon we would get seen there. We weren’t home from the doctor an hour before CHOP called, could we be in the city on Tuesday? You bet your ass, we can. My kid is in pain, this can’t continue.
He was nervous, who wouldn’t be? That complex is huge. We had to park two floors underground, and that also freaked him out a little. He doesn’t like parking garages, apparently he likes underground ones a great deal less. I told him, look, don’t be nervous, you’ll see. Once you get up there it’s just a waiting room and exam rooms like any other doctor’s office. And it was.
We got checked in and through the preliminaries, height, weight, blood pressure, and were sitting in an exam room by 12:20. Ten minutes before appointment time. At 1:20 we were told the doctor was hung up in her procedure, and would be there just as soon as she could. Another 20 minutes and she appeared.
She took a thorough history, did a full exam, and then we talked treatment. And here is one thing I’m grateful for: he’s a little me, yeah, he inherited these heinous headaches from me, but he doesn’t have to go through what I did. She asked me what prophylactic I take, and I told her what the deal with me is. She said that we’ll assume that he’s similar and will tolerate well what I tolerate well. No years of hell taking meds that make him feel worse, or being doubted, or any of that mess. My little me is getting to skip a good portion of hell because I already been there, done that. I was nervous over whether we would get a doctor who would make us jump through hoops, I am feeling really grateful we did better than that.
2 comments
Author
It just kills me.