Doctor, Doctor, Doctor...

Luke and Pekoe both injured their left "arms" this past week.  One of them is feeling very very sorry for himself!  Can you guess which one?  Man or Man's Best Friend?

So many DOCTOR appointments lately!!  Even the PET DOCTOR!  Ugh...

I just can not get away from medicine...

The first doctor visit was a standard follow up for Steven at the diabetes clinic.  His numbers look much better than last time, so of course now his doctors are concerned that he is running too low.  Well, ok then.  It's amazing the effect of swimming on his A1C (basically a Blood Glucose average level over a period of 3 months).  The last time he had his A1C read, he wasn't swimming quite as regularly due to various vacations and camps over the summer months.  For this current A1C reading, he's been swimming 5-6 days a week since mid-August, and his A1C value was 2.2 lower than the previous reading.  Now he is on the low end of the target for his age, and so we have to be concerned with running low...  Such is it with diabetes.  You never can get a formula that "works" because physiology is far more complicated and dynamic than that.  Too bad!  Anyway, that was Doctor Appointment number 1, which took up an entire afternoon.

The next series of doctor appointments were not on the master plan...

Luke, in his quest to actually FLY for REAL, had a series of hard falls on his left wrist.  The first one happened about two weeks ago, on the playground at school.  He told me about the fall, after a failed attempt at flipping off of the monkey bars, and that his wrist hurt, but he had full range of motion and no swelling.  And the injury didn't slow him down, so we just decided to watch it.  I also told him to NOT try to do flips off of the swings and monkey bars at school...  but, you know, Luke really needs to defy gravity...  So, a week after that he injured himself AGAIN.  Same spot.  Same lack of dramatic evidence of injury.  Then a couple of nights ago, he decided to try to take flight off of the furniture in our house.  I was able to hear the cries of agony with my very own ears...  So I decided to take him to the doctor the next day.  Five hours later he was given a nice, fresh-smelling, indigo cast.  He is thrilled, full of images of collecting signatures.  For a fourth grade boy, a cast is "way cool".  He can't swim or do taekwondo until he's all patched up...  He thinks he's going to have SO MUCH TIME to play video games...  Maybe not, Luke.  But maybe, just maybe, he will give up his quest to fly...  I'm not really holding out hope on this one, seeing as he dislocated his shoulder (or something) almost a year ago trying to fly off of the bathroom sink...  Ouch.

At the same time as Luke was busy doing his thing, our dog Pekoe has been up to all sorts of puppyish antics.  Pekoe is almost 15 months old...  Shouldn't he be a little bit...  calmer?  We can't be sure how he injured himself, but one morning, the same morning as Luke's Last Big Fall, Mac took Pekoe on the morning run and all was well.  When they came home, Pekoe did his usual routine of trying to capture the light reflection that hits the fence in the morning whenever we open the back door.  This is his absolute favorite game in the world.  One of these days, he's going to catch the light reflection.  He just KNOWS it.  And then he will chew that light reflection up and it will tease him no longer.  Anyway, he was busy slamming into the fence trying to catch the light, and I noticed that he had a bloody leg...  Mac, who had JUST left for work, came back to look at his leg and "didn't see any laceration" so we just tried to clean it.  Good old Pekoe kept on running after the light, albeit with slightly less enthusiasm.  We tried to apply some ointment to his wounded leg, but over the course of a couple of days, he became more and more hostile towards our healing attempts.  So, finally, I took him to the vet.

Of course, I ended up taking Luke to the doctor for his hijinks on the same day as I took Pekoe to the vet for his hijinks.  This made for a very busy day.  But it was the one day in the week that I had a few spare hours...

The final diagnoses:  Luke has a buckle fracture and is in a cast for 4 weeks; and Pekoe tore his dew claw from the base and had to have it removed, and he needs to be in the Cone of Shame for 4 days.  Of course, the vet said that if I think he won't mess with the bandage on his foot, he doesn't need the cone...  Ummmmm, that would be a "not a chance."  Pekoe is the dog that managed to USE his cone when he was neutered to mess with his laceration, causing a secondary infection.  Why do people get dogs?  I ask myself this A LOT.

Last weekend, before all the doctor visits, we were all feeling pretty healthy and so we took the opportunity of a weekend free from a swim meet or other obligation to do something "fun".  Pekoe went to the doggie daycare to hang out with the Big Dog Pack, which is just about his favorite thing to do.  The rest of us headed to San Francisco.  I even made Katie join The Family for our visit to the California Academy of Sciences.  This is so rare for her to come to a museum with us...  But she did, largely because she did not have a choice!

These huge toads were pretty interesting.  

The kids looking at the Living Roof of the Academy.  Grass, weeds, and some wildflowers actually grow on the roof.  The kids were all pretty interested in this.

We arrived early for the "members only" access.  We found many years ago that it is more economical for a family of our size to just buy a membership for places like this, since individual tickets usually are about the same price as a family membership.  So we have LOTS of memberships.  We are such a CULTURAL family.  We have memberships to the Monterrey Aquarium, the California Academy of Sciences, the San Jose Children's Museum, the Oakland Zoo, and soon we will add the Exploratorium.  We are just so very cultural I can barely stand it...

We saw a very cool show in the Planetarium about earthquakes, which Josie loved.  Planetarium people are always nervous about young kids in the theater, but she's a pro.  We also went to the earthquake simulator, the rainforest, and we even dragged Kate to the aquarium exhibits.

Before we left, we decided to try the 3D show about the last coral reef.  We all found this one a bit confusing.  The premise of the show was that humans are destroying the coral reefs due to carbon emissions, but the show led with a description of how a coral reef rebuilt itself into a vibrant ecosystem after being destroyed by nuclear bomb testing in the 1940s.  The ending scenes of the movie showed a coral reef growing around a shipwreck site with all sorts of statues on the bottom of the ocean.  The reefs were growing off of the statues, which made for some very interesting images.  Again, the resiliency of coral reefs was highlighted. Steven surmised that the way to save the coral reefs is "to throw statues in the bottom of the ocean." The carbon emissions link to coral reef destruction was not explained at all...  This was a strange movie if it's purpose was to motivate some type of lifestyle change.  Cool 3D pictures of fish in the coral reefs though.

So, that's pretty much what has occupied us for the last week.  Steven and Isabel are off to a youth group retreat this weekend, which should be interesting.  Hopefully they will have a good time, and Steven will "be good" with managing his sugars...