The time, it is upon us.

trachea travel
the newest rage with toddlers
Cincy here we come

Tomorrow morning, my husband and I head
out with Ike-a-saurus on an epic journey across five states (which has absolutely ruined any potentiality of downloading the
Roadside America app, because they charge $3 per chunk of US for their
maps and we are crossing three of those chunks and I am cheap).

With some extra
help from my brother-in-law as a third driver, we're hoping to make
good time on our way to Cincinnati.

90 suction catheters
150 HMEs
54 boxes of Boost Kids Essential 1.5 (vanilla flavor, mmm)
air compressor
humidifier
lots and lots of tubing
o2 tanks
extra trachs
200 saline bullets (will that be enough?)
piles of gauze
trach ties
pulse ox
suction machine
suction machine canisters
more tubing
neb tanks
gloves
masks
clothes
mountain dew
one million billion other things
xanax

All of it goes in the car in the morning. For most of the week, we thought we were taking all of that stuff on an airplane, but then Texas Medicaid booked us on a carrier with no oxygen service for passengers (even though I told Texas Medicaid about 100,000 times Ike might need his Os on the plane), and then we weren't able to find anyone who could get us a pediatric portable oxygen concentrator in time for the flight, or under $800. SO. Flights were canceled and now we're driving. We're grateful that Medicaid helps out with these trips, but they sure don't make it easy.

I'm trying to shake off all the onhold misery of this week and focus on everything to come….

Next week is filled with tests and evaluations. And by next Friday
(or possibly the Monday after that) we will know whether the doctors
can perform a laryngotracheoplasty with an anterior graft on our sweet
Ike-a-saurus. If they can, it could mean a true repair of his airway
and no more trach. This has been a hard fought trip – keeping Ike
well, trying to get him fat, keeping appointments scheduled, making
the appropriate ritual sacrifices to appease Texas Medicaid….

So I am asking you – begging you, really – to send out whatever
light you can towards Isaac next week. Good wishes, prayers, mantras,
love, unicorn farts, whatever you can do. The most critical times are 8
am on Tuesday when he will go under general anesthesia for a chest CT,
and on Wednesday at 9:15 when he will again go under general anesthesia
for a flexible and rigid bronchcoscopy, endoscopy and
microlaryngoscopy. These procedures are critical for showing the
doctors what they need to see in order to know if they can repair
Isaac's airway. Please say a little something that his lungs are
healthy and show no signs of bronchiectasis or chronic lung disease.
And while we're making a list of things, please add to your little
something that please, please everything in Ike's airway looks healthy,
normal (or as normal as we can get), non-swollen, non-irritated, and less stenos-i-fied than last time.

Thank you so much for always being there for me to gripe to, whine to, beg, and bother. We have a very long week ahead of us….

Love and rainbows and candy bars and shiny new tracheas,
Kari

A photo diary of my week! (Including the elusive Riggenscorn!)

So here's the thing: I can't concentrate on a single damn thing anymore. I can't sit still. I can't work on my book. Ironically, I can't clean the house (because I can't set myself on one task without wandering off to do something else). All I can do is worry and fret and chew my fingernails and wish that an adorable fairy would alight on my arm and tell me that she will cook me dinner, entertain the kids, clean the house, buy me new clothes, and repair a trachea.

While I await the fairy, I've been watching a helluva lot of television. In between phone calls to Medicaid. And in between helping our doctors write letters of medical necessity to Medicaid for various equipment/supplies/etc.

Would you like to know how the letters start off? Like this:

Ike-a-saurus Superstar has been a patient of mine since his birth. He was born at 28 weeks gestation, spent eight weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and has a history of severe GERD, aspiration of thin liquids, laryngomalacia, grade III subglottic stenosis and respiratory failure, requiring a tracheostomy.

Because of Ike-a-saurus' continued high-risk health status, critical airway (over 75% occluded), and issues with gastroesophageal reflux, dysphagia and failure to thrive, it is medically necessary for…

You can see how working on these things all day would weigh on a mama. Not to mention having to talk to 65 different Medicaid staffers on the phone, each of whom tell you something different, none of whom call you back when they say they will, and some of whom are rude for no reason other than because they seem to think I must be a moron, out to scam the system, or personally out to get them. The latter may be true if they don't start being nicer to me.

So… long week. But I did my best to make it not suck quite so hard. Here's how everything went down:

MONDAY:

Medicaid Shenanigans

Then some Veronica Mars:

TUESDAY:

Medicaid Shenanigans:

Then some Friday Night Lights:

WEDNESDAY:

Medicaid Shenanigans

Then some X-Files:

THURSDAY:

Major Medicaid shenanigans:

And then some 30 Rock:

FRIDAY:

No one from Medicaid ever called me back, so I took the kids out for drinks

And then out to walk it off (I don't know why this is sideways, I can't turn it around. Booo.):

And then my author copies of BRAINS FOR LUNCH came (again, WTF, sideways?):

So Friday was a bit better.

And now it's the weekend. I remain on my quest to track down as many Riggenscorns and Logancorns and Muldercorns and LizLemoncorns as I can. They are surely not as elusive as the tiny fairy who will solve all my woes, and they work quite nicely at distracting me.

Hooray for television!

And hooray this week is over!

Caution: moving sidewalk ahead

it is propellant
some days a hidden rip tide
Time keeps us current

Some nights I find myself amazed at simple things. When I admit to being amazed by them, it makes me sound like a
real weirdo.

Like tonight I am amazed that time just
moves forward. You can't stop it. You can't hurry it. It's just a
steadfast march. Sometimes it seems like it's carrying you forward in a flash flood, sometimes it feels like you're in a tar pit. And yet, there is always forward progress.

Want to stop time? Too bad. Want to pause it for a while? No go. Want to speed it up? Can't do it. Want to close your eyes and ignore it? Impossible.

Gravity, sugar ants and Time. Omnipresent.

Tonight I feel like I'm on a moving sidewalk. It's not going fast, it's not going slow, it's just going. Going going going. Taking me to a future that's clouded over in some kind of movie set mist. What's behind the mist? Won't know til I get right in it. But I'm getting close to it because I feel the spray on my face.

The Spray of Things to Come.

The Spray of the Future.

The Aquanet of Fate.

This post is beginning to sound like a conversation between a pothead and himself while he eats pancakes at Denny's at 3 am. That's usually a sign I need to stop contemplating Things and start thinking about watching a TV show. Time might not actually pass faster that way, but it will seem like it.

Veronica Mars, Season One, I command you to make me stop talking like an idiot!

I feel like it’s time to blog something

a busy few days
made zombies in my kitchen
not counting the food

I spent the last week making a book trailer, having nightmares about missiles trying to blow me up, chasing kids, not sleeping well, drinking way too much tea (wishing it was coffee), watching this show, Kidnapped, on Netflix (and wishing that in my constant angst I could at least have apparently clean, scoop necked, comfortable-looking clothes like Dana Delaney), arm wrestling with iMovie '08, not eating salted praline polvorones because I forgot to order some (dammit), and constructing wildly complicated plans for a very small amount of fresh figs I have.

Here's a link to the book trailer.

Here's a link to the TV show.

Here is the tea. (And sometimes this.)

Here are some scoop neck shirts I do not own, but would like to. (Some of those might be v-necks.)

Here are the polvorones. (Oh, MAN these cookies are good)

And the fig plans.

Super tired. Tomorrow is Friday. Maybe I'll be awake enough at some point to write in complete sentences again.

I dare you to try this

A similar trick
could make a college freshman
very popular

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=13214304&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Ike de-diapering from Kari Anne Roy on Vimeo.

Say Cheese Nipples!

mobile phone lockdown
should start looking into it
to protect my friends

I was getting out of the shower this morning, blind without my glasses, and I hear the wee-er one shout, "Say 'Cheese Nipples'!" And I immediately think, "cheese nipples? What the heck is she talking about?"

Once out of the shower, though, I squint and see she has my phone. Pointed directly at my naked self.

Click.

What ensues reminds me of a scene in a movie, where I slap the phone out of her hand (not in a mean way, but in an OH SHIT way) and it clatters across the bathroom floor. There's a mad scramble, 4-year-old vs. naked mommy, clamoring for the phone. Luckily, in my post-shower-i-ness I'm slippery and can skid across the floor like a seal. A naked, dripping, blind seal. There were boobies everywhere.

I grab the phone and my glasses.

Not only is there a picture of my nipples saying cheese, there is a picture of my nipples saying cheese IN THE TYPEPAD APP. That's right. She somehow opened the Typepad shortcut on my phone, took the incriminating photo and was seconds from publishing my nipples saying cheese to the whole wide world (with a direct link to Facebook and Twitter, of course, because social media leaves no one out).

You guys.

That was a narrow escape.

A narrow, horrifying escape.

And the story of how the children's book author published photos of her boobs online is NOT a story you'll see on the news tonight. But only by sheer luck. And the ability to not think twice about flinging an iPhone across the room like it is on fire.

Say cheese!

This is the picture she took as I slapped the phone from her hand.

Trach Tube Ho

We got an itemized bill in the mail the other day for "trach tube ho". Now, I know I get testy with the medical supply company, but there's no need for name calling.

Of course the idea of a Trach Tube Ho is as appealing as it is, you know, unappealing. Lots of unsavory jokes have been floating around here because of this, most of them dealing with suction machines. But I digress.

When one receives a bill in the mail for a Trach Tube Ho, one immediately thinks, "Hey, Self? This calls for a rap." So I've been busily trying to devise something that is at least Natalie Portman-worthy.

Here you go, my friends, the Trach Tube Ho rap. If someone brings me a Blackberry Smash or two, there is a high likelihood I might even make a video (and/or soil myself at some point).

Trach Tube Ho (what?)