My Own Thursday Night ER

What a night. We were sitting in the living room watching Good Eats (I absolutely adore Alton Brown, which probably explains why I married my husband, who is a physics teacher by day and an award-winning amateur cook by night), when my daughter leaped up from the floor with a mouth full of blood, along with a decent amount on the hard wood floor (how she managed to miss the carpet still astounds me).

We had been told to take her to the Emergency Room if something like this happened, so we packed Mabel up at 7:15 and took the 10-mile trip to our hospital. It seemed like the bleeding stopped, and the ER people didn't seem horribly concerned that she was going to hemorrhage in front of us, so I was actually pretty cool and collected as we waited in the ER lounge. The ER doctor took a look at her, then we were told Mabel's ENT doctor was on his way to see her (I had called him on the cell phone on our way to the ER, so he was already aware what was going on). So we waited another hour until he got there, and when he did he checked Mabel out, suctioned something he called a "bloody booger" from the back of her throat/tonsil area, then told us to keep her home from school Friday and force her to lay low for the weekend. While he didn't think the bleeding was serious enough to perform another cauterization, he wanted to make sure she wasn't popping any more blood vessels loose as that area heals.

We didn't get home until 10 p.m., and I realized I never got my evening snack, which I had planned on because I ate a very light lunch and dinner. I had been a little hungry during our wait at the ER, but by the time we got home my need to sleep overtook my need to eat. So I respected my feelings and went straight to bed. The old me would have stopped at the convenience store on the way home and loaded up on doughnuts or some other junk to soothe myself from the stressful evening. But the new me instinctively knew that food would not have made the situation better, and since things didn't turn out that badly, there was really no reason to turn to food.

I don't know if it was because of this very light food day, or a reward from the AFG Fairy for listening to my body instead of the old binge-prone voices in my head, but my scale reading was greatly improved this morning. It gives me a slight sliver of hope that I might see a small loss for tomorrow's weigh-in. But I still don't expect any dramatic drops. Maybe half a pound. But I'm more than willing to accept that. My new mantra, "It's better than gaining," applies here.

So now I'm wondering what the weekend will bring. I've got two things to my advantage -- Hubby's back on his diet and doesn't go off again until the weekend of the 10th, and Mabel's got doctor's orders to stay put. So that should help a lot with keeping junk food out of the house and going out for extravagant meals. However, this is Sooper Bowl weekend, and our friends are fond of coming up with last-minute get-togethers. Plus, I think I might have ordered a pizza and/or sub from the church youth for their yearly SB weekend fundraiser, and they get delivered tomorrow. The pizza I can freeze for later, but the sub pretty much needs to be eaten that day. If I did actually get one (I told someone I would but she didn't have her order form with her and she may have forgotten about me), maybe I can get my mom to take half of it and spare me from trying to eat the whole thing.

So, as usual the weekend's an unknown. I do plan to work out at least one day, hopefully both, and I'll do my best to eat sensibly. I sound like a broken record, but hey, I keep trying.

Just one last note. For a while I've been trying to figure out who Mabel's ENT doctor reminded of. He's got a very dry sense of humor which is reminiscent of one of my cousins, but there was still something about his appearance that seemed familiar. Then, last night in the ER, I figured it out -- he looks like Jonathan! It was nice to have something to smirk about in the middle of all that waiting and wondering in my own Thursday night episode of ER.