What a night!

As of late I haven’t been sleeping…at all! So last night I forced myself to go to bed around midnight, I must have drifted off because the next thing I knew it was 12:15 and Max was running around the kitchen with one of his epic nosebleeds, argh!

Here we go. We all know the drill: one of us holds his nose while the other goes to get dressed, we then switch places until we’re all dressed, except for Max who is wearing a pair of PJs that look like he works in a butcher shop. We fiddle with everything we have in our bag of tricks: holding his nose until it turns blue, using a clothespin looking device to hold it shut, and finally we pack it with the same stuff boxers use sometime in the 3rd round of the championship fight. We know when all of this is failing because Max starts to spit up copious amounts of blood and, not to gross you all out, it starts to come out his eyes. The first time this happened we were in the ICU at Hopkins and I completely LOST IT! That was until I realized it’s all the same plumbing system, if you close off one pipe another will spring a leak, so now none of it freaks me out. It is what it is, and unfortunately “it” is ours.

As we came to realize that we were failing miserably at getting the bleeding to stop, we start to get everything together for a midnight run to PCH (thankfully we were already dressed). By this time Max is hysterical, not due to the blood but he just doesn’t want to go. He was absolutely inconsolable which is difficult to watch but when he came to realize that he wouldn’t be able to play football tonight he really lost it. Of course crying makes it all worse so now we are trying to hold his nose, hold his spit up bucket, pack bags, take the dog out, wake Ellie with the news and most importantly calm Max down. Certainly any spectator of this scene would not have believed the unbridled chaos that was our kitchen.

We decided to try packing it one last time, this was attempt number three and evidently three really is the magic number, it seemed to work! So we all proceed to the sofa and stare at Max’s nose, waiting to see if Mt Vesuvius would blow again, it was sort of a cute scene, Max with his clothespin on his nose lying up against his dad, heading bobbing from sleep but refusing to give into it. Finally around 5 am we all went to bed….for 45 minutes when it was time for Ellie to get up for school! Max, of course, was already playing baseball on his PSP looking a bit like Rocky after he lost the fight to Apollo Creed but otherwise happy.

I swear this kid will kill me yet!