Like, Whoa.

I'm taking a deep breath because the last couple of days have been a doozy (spell check does not recognize doozy as being a legitimate word; trust me, it is, and I know exactly what it means). First, I had something funny going on with my email. Several emails had apparently been sent from my email and bounced back as spam, but the emails did not show up in my sent folder. Stephen and I tried to figure out if my email account had actually been breached or if the information had been obtained through some other means. I changed my password. Then the new password didn't work. It was a mess. Finally, we seemed to get it all straightened out, although I was left feeling violated by some nameless force in cyberspace.

My kitchen sink has been draining (or not draining) in an increasingly sluggish manner, which has had the effect of making me even less motivated to wash dishes. It has also burped nasty food bit laden spurts of water whenever the dishwasher has been running. I've tried pouring several large pots of boiling water down the sink with no effect, and tried the baking soda and vinegar mix followed by boiling water. Time to move on to some hardcore Drano, I guess, although I hate using any kind of caustic chemical.

Fortunately, Nanny volunteered to babysit Saturday night, so I was able to postpone cleaning the wreck that is my kitchen until another day. Stephen and I headed out to the Village Cafe for a wonderful, delicious dinner. We talked, we ate, we ate some more. Then we paid with our credit card. Or thought we paid. When Stephen checked the ticket to add the tip, he noticed that the receipt said "Sale forced." Hmm. We remembered that we had received new cards in the mail about a week ago and they were still sitting in the envelope under the loveseat. Stephen said he thought the new cards had new numbers. We called the waitress back over to the table. She went back to verify the sale went through. Stephen used the internet on his phone to check if the number had, in fact, changed. I sat at the table and tried not to stress over the increasingly complicated transaction. Once the waitress came back to the table, she said it hadn't gone through, so we provided another card, and, having finally paid for our meal, left the restaurant.

This paragraph will probably contain too much information for some of you, so if you're one of those TMI kind of people, skip immediately to the next paragraph. For all of you who want to know every single gory detail, later that night as we were coming home from our date, I started feeling my bladder spasm, and instantly felt paranoia gripping me. I knew it was a bladder infection coming on. If you have had a bladder infection, you know that it is a horribly painful condition that can have a surprisingly rapid onset. We went by the grocery store where I picked up some 100% cranberry juice. I've never had alcohol, but I have a feeling 100% cranberry juice is about on par with straight vodka, in other words, something you resort to only for the purposes of getting drunk fast, or a desperate attempt to knock out a bladder infection that's brewing. I chugged a few ounces of cranberry juice. We started watching Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I spasmed. I chugged some more. I put a glass of cranberry juice on the bathroom sink which I chugged in the middle of the night. I chugged a glass of cranberry juice the next morning. Still spasming, but without developing further symptoms, I decided, cautiously, that I may have escaped my potential fate this time. I decided to make a chicken broccoli casserole.

We sat down to the table and started eating. I picked out the chicken, broccoli, and rice for Daniel, who can't have milk or wheat products because of his eczema. He ate hungrily, but after a few minutes he started scratching at his head and face. Scratching while eating is not that unusual for Daniel, so I didn't think much of it and continued feeding him. A few minutes later I looked at him and his eyes looked red and swollen. Then I noticed that his bottom lip had puffed out. I went straightaway to the cabinet and gave him a large dose of an antihistamine. Stephen and I tried to decide if we needed to take Daniel somewhere. I called Walgreens to see how long it should take before the medicine kicked in and the pharmacist said it could take up to half an hour for the medicine to be metabolized. Daniel continued to swell. We decided we needed to head to the urgent care down in Griffin. Stephen put Nathan in his seat while I frantically grabbed a diaper and a passy. We arranged for someone to meet us at urgent care and pick up Nathan. I monitored Daniel to make sure he was still breathing okay as his lips and eyes swelled up to epic proportions. We arrived at the Urgent Care only to find that they had changed their hours a month before without bothering to update their website. We passed Nathan on, and jumped back in the van to head down to the hospital. As soon as I walked in the emergency room door, the nurse at the desk saw Daniel's face and rushed us back to a room. Someone started checking his lungs, which thankfully sounded fine. They tried to put in an IV line to get medication in his bloodstream. Tried the elbow, couldn't get a vein. Tried a foot, no luck. Tried his hand. By this time, Daniel was screaming, and I was feeling increasingly desperate. Finally they decided to do an intramuscular injection in his leg, a steroid shot in one and a shot of benadryl in the other. After that, every time someone tried to touch Daniel, or I even tried to shift in the chair, he would start to cry. He feel into an exhausted sleep on my shoulder. Meanwhile, we anxiously watched his face for signs that the swelling was going down. Two hours later, the lip had finally deflated, and we headed home.

Today, Daniel is much better, although I am left wondering exactly what triggered such a reaction. I set up an appointment with an allergist, and we will probably need to do some testing. I really hope we can pinpoint what caused the reaction, so I don't feel like there's an unknown menace always waiting to pounce.

Oh, and I never did get a bladder infection. Chalk it up to the cranberry juice, or maybe it was all just mental to begin with.

Like I said, doozy. Take that, computer spell check!