Thursday, July 11, 2013

High/Low Week of July 4, 2013

Hi there! Welcome back! It's Thursday, so time to share our high/low for the past week. It's been an interesting week since I last checked in.  We decided to go to Ikea on Friday even though I was expecting the phone call from our Medtronic rep.  I figured anything we needed to talk about I could talk about anywhere, I do have a cell phone.  It's even smart sometimes, lol.  So I brought this pack of papers and training booklets with us, just in case we needed to go over anything in them while on the phone.  And then it came time for the call at 3pm so I started to head for the front door of Ikea, only to realize that my phone had 4% battery left!  So I stole borrowed David's phone.  When the rep called I told her I needed to call her back from a different phone because mine was dying.  I didn't have her contact information so I quickly dialed her number into David's phone along with her 5-digit extension.  Well, I got a lovely message that they were currently experiencing issues with their phone system and it disconnected.  So, here I am, sitting on the lip of a planter outside Ikea and I have no idea how to call her back!  The phone didn't show what extension I had dialed, only the toll-free number.  Luckily, my phone was still holding on so I quickly got into my e-mail and called the shipping rep I had spoken with when we first ordered the pump and asked if he could find out our local reps extension, all I had to go on was her first name though.  Of course, I didn't just simply ask, I went into a whole drawn out explanation of the events leading to me calling him.  I think he must have felt sorry for me so he said he would find out and call me back in 5 minutes.  Meanwhile, David and Angelina had come out of Ikea looking for me and we decided to head back to the car int he parking garage up the block.  We got in the car and I plugged my phone into my car charger just in case the rep decided to try to call me back when she didn't hear right back from me. Instead, David's phone rang and it was her.  Oh, happy day!  Apparently the shipping rep had IM'd her and gave her David's number to call me back at.  Things were fairly smooth from there, except I had mistakenly thought she said we would be scheduling our pump training during that phone call.  Instead, she was asking me a bunch of questions to see if we were ready for her to put us in contact with the pump trainer who would then schedule the training.  At that point she gave the impression that we would hear from the pump trainer at the beginning of this week, so on Wednesday when we still hadn't heard anything I was pretty ticked off.  Not only did we NOT do training this week, we hadn't even heard from the trainer to schedule it! To further aggravate my frustration level one of my fellow T1 moms from a local group I belong to posted about how her daughter had been to their endo that morning and had put in her order for her medtronic pump and they had training set up at their dr's office for next week.  I think I went a little crazy at that moment.  Not at the mom, who I consider a friend, but the fact that "WHY CAN'T OUR PROCESS GO SO SMOOTHLY AND QUICKLY!?!?!"  Did none of these people realize how absolutely terrible things have gotten in our house?  Did I not sound pathetic enough whining about all of the issues Angelina is having (and in turn I am having because I don't deal well with this kind of stress)?  Of course, the people at Medtronic know none of this.  And I haven't said as much because I'm sure they don't care, not really.  And it's not their fault that I am a little manic about everything and can't stand not being the one in control of everything.  Limbo is KILLING me.  Instead I have been stewing inside my head because I am powerless and I can't stand it! Meanwhile, Angelina has gotten worse this week.  The level of her meltdowns and shut downs over shots and D care have stayed about the same, but in a lovely (note sarcasm) twist her level of opposition and defiance is through the roof.  Did I mention she has oppositional defiant disorder?  Yeah, well , it's evident this week.  We have been fighting with her about cleaning her room.  We were anticipating the pump trainer doing in-home training which means my house needed a major cleaning.  I have been doing a lot of my own cleaning (my dining room table is currently pushed into the living room because I've been meaning to steam mop the floor for 2 days) and Angelina's only responsibility is picking up her room.  She has been doing every possible thing she can to NOT clean, even though she was pretty much on restriction until it got done.  So, she goes in her room and just sits or lays around and does absolutely nothing.  And every time I tell her she needs to be cleaning her response is "I don't want to" with a huge attitude, and one day she even did this hands-on-the-hips-sticking-her-tongue-out thing that really just pissed me off.  I'm supposed to have at least 3 more years before she is a teenager, where is this major attitude coming from!?!?  David finally had enough of it last night when she smarted off to him about it and he gave her a spanking.  Her room got cleaned (for the most part) within 2 hours, minus sweeping - which I helped her with this afternoon.  However, she has just been pushing the boundary line about everything she possibly can, and I'm not sure if it's D related and a control thing, or if it's hormones, or if it's just her being a little snot because she can and I'm totally effed in a couple years when she's actually a teenager. We went and ran some errands this afternoon and she had gotten this whistle toy thing in a Happy Meal (I know, fast food is bad) and we had to run into the bank and she insisted that she had to bring the toy in with her.  I wasn't terribly opposed to it coming inside but I told her she better not blow it while we were inside.  Then I decided to make a pit stop at the dollar tree next door and she pretty much had the toy in her mouth blowing on it every 2 minutes.  Finally, I told her that I had told her not to blow it inside.  To which she replied "No, you only said I couldn't blow it in the bank."  And I told her she can't blow it in the store either, and if she blew on it again I would take it away and throw it in the trash.  Not 30 seconds later she's got it in her mouth again. Of course, it was quieter, but still in her mouth and making noise.  I told her to give it to me and she refused and said "I'm doing it QUIETLY, Mom!"  Because, of course, it doesn't matter that I said NOT AT ALL, it only matters that Angelina is going to do what Angelina wants to do and everyone else be damned.  I took it away.  She pouted the rest of the time we were in the store.  When we left the bank she said "I hated that toy anyway."  Anyone want a kid? J/k. High?  After my near meltdown yesterday about not having heard from the pump trainer yet my friend who is getting trained next week passed along the trainers email address to me, so I was able to shoot her an email and tell her that we were ready and available and that I had done all the pre-training stuff and want to do training ASAP.  Like, last week.  Seriously, we could have done training last week and I would have been happy.  Well, after I sent the email my friend said that she talked to the person who is doing their training through their dr's office and she had mentioned that we were still waiting and wondered if we could do training with them next week.  The person training them said it would probably be fine and she would speak to the person who was supposed to be training us to let her know.  I got an email this morning from the person who was to be training us, and she pretty much made it sound like they had been trying to coordinate this all along.  Which I am pretty sure isnt' the case, since we go to a different dr's office and as far as I know neither of them even knew that my friend and I knew each other.  But, whatever, the end result was that we are doing training next Wednesday, and we're doing it with my friend and her daughter, who is 2 years younger than Angelina, which works out perfectly because Angelina's not usually on the same level as people her own age.  She's great with older kids because she is intellectually gifted, but she is socially immature so she gets along well with younger kids.  Most kids her own age don't get her at all, either because she seems younger than them, or isn't into the same things that they are.  Or because she's smarter than them so she gets picked on for being different (not to mention that she is different because of her medical issues) because they can be intimidated by her intelligence.   I'm not saying she's the smartest possible 9 year old, but her being smarter than her classmates  is something that was flat out told to us by her teacher at a previous parent-teacher conference when we were discussing issues Angelina was having at school.  There was a while there where I was worried that she might have Asperger's because of her level of social unawareness, but she just doesn't meet a lot of the diagnostic criteria, and she is super extroverted and uses sarcasm quite flawlessly (at times) which are some things I've learned you don't generally see with kids that have ASDs.  We'll just say she's eccentric. Anyway, tangent.  TL;DR - Frustrated, meltdown, craziness waiting around to set up training.  End result: frustrated, meltdown, crazy mom was a squeaky wheel and got the grease (aka: pump training scheduled). I'm thinking about writing a book about Angelina's life so far.  Would you read it?
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