Bah.

I have a cold.  I know on the scale of Things That Could Really Be Wrong, this rates somewhere down by having to wait an extra 2 minutes at Starbucks for them to brew more coffee.  But I'm feeling rather whiny about this cold. Every time I talk to someone in this town, they or someone they know has a cold, stomach virus, or influenza. Life on an island is looking better every day.

Sophia is talking more! Not a lot, but enough to make me feel better.  She can point to her own nose and say, "no", point to Elmo and say "Mo or Elmo", says boo for book, ball, go, bye, hi, and cup.  It's a start.  Her receptive language is far better than her expressive.  She follows two part commands perfectly and can point to various objects if you say, "Where is the ______?".

The bad news is she needs orthopedic brace things.  Her right foot turns out too much when she walks (it actually starts up at her hip, and causes her to roll the right foot inward.  She trips about every 10 steps as a result because it comes to a point where she rolls in so much she's rolling her ankle and foot over her big toe.  We were quoted about $2300. Not covered by MSP, of course.  I'll just whip the magic money tree out of my ass and have it covered in no time. She'll need them for both legs.  Our physical therapist taped up her right leg to see how she would do and she just started doing it on the left side.  It's all part of her preemie issues.  Hypertonia in her legs and the desire to extend versus flex.

It's things like this that make me remember I have a preemie.  I have tried for over a year to forget that. I don't look at growth charts or development charts.  I ignore what other people say their kids are doing (Robert could recite all of E.E. Cummings work by 14 months!). But when something is not going the way it should be, it's like a flood of memory. The delivery.  The resuscitation. The ventilators. The daily chest xrays, blood tests, tpn, feeding tubes, the course of dexamethasone, the morphine, the high frequency ventilator, the specialists, the meeting where we were told they were nearing their highest level of support.  It makes me dizzy. It makes me cry.  Anyone who asks always hears that I am over it and that it's in the past.  It's not.  It's still in there, beating away in my head and sometimes it comes to the forefront and I fall apart.

Right now it's not my cold keeping me awake.  It's the flood that is and I cannot stop it.