Owen iv

It's probably a good idea to read the first three installments on Owen before this one if you haven't already:

Owen
Owen ii
Owen iii


The resilience of children to bounce back from adversity is amazing.

The small things or the large things, they all seem to create the same amount of trauma in a child's mind, and then they go back to normal. Cole, for example, spent all afternoon building a house out of Lego, and brought it upstairs to show us. I took pictures, and then as he was taking it downstairs it bumped on the wall and smashed. It was like a Lego waterfall down the stairs. He was devastated. Owen and I both hugged him as he had one of those genuine emotional meltings right there before us. He dissolved in wet gobby tears.

Can you feel the impending doom? lol

So we set to putting it back together again. Armed with the pictures we'd just taken, we rebuilt, and now you wouldn't even know it happened from how happy they are. Owen is running around playing Lego, and making cookies with Mommy, and laughing with his brother.

Two short days ago he was in a very different state. We went to Hotel Dieu in Kingston for the scope of his GI tract. This was just a week after he had to do a barium swallow that constipated him so bad for four days that he was up crying several nights until 1am ... but that's another story.

When they scheduled this, nobody had any way of knowing it would be 45'C with the humidity. For adults that's difficult, but for a little guy who overheats quickly, it's excruciating. Luckily, we cranked the air, and were into the hospital before the real heat of the day hit. Still, halfway there, he started to cry, and said to Jenn "I want to go home now, Mommy." He knew something was up, as he always does when we drive him somewhere without the other two. Jenn told him it would only take a little while, and that we could stop after for chocolate chip muffins, his favourite.

We were taken almost immediately in, and he was hooked up to IV and monitors, and I could just feel his anxiety building. He kept his Lego Owie with him, and had a good visit from our friends who were, ironically, there with their daughter for the very same test.


One thing Owen inherited from Jennifer was an ability to be awake and aware of everything around him at all times. In order to sleep, she has to cover her eyes, put in earplugs, draw the blinds, and basically build a cocoon. Owen, only 35 lbs, had to be given more sedative than normally would knock out a teen, and yet still fought to stay awake. He just didn't want to miss anything.

The test went well. Dr. Justinich did a scope of his upper GI tract, and then his small bowel, and then they took a biopsy. We won't find out about the biopsy until next week, looking for celiac's disease among other things, but the pictures looked normal. Dr. Justinich and his team were great, and as Owen woke we sang songs to him that he loves, and we told him how well he'd done. He liked the board that they taped to his wrist because he said it was his 'mouse', and then pointed it at the heartrate monitor machine, playing what he called 'alien invasion', which involved a lot of laser sounds and interpreting the numbers.

On the way home, as I carried him out to the car, he said a chipper "we had fun, didn't we Mommy?" and Jenn and I both nearly cried and laughed at the same time. Only at this age can driving to Kingston in the blistering heat, being poked and measured and prodded, stuck with a needle, sedated, given narcotics, plastered with sensors, and having something shoved down your throat, and then woken up in a strange room to have to wrestle with an iv bag be called fun.

He's certainly a brave little guy.

I think what I like most about the scope is that it's over. Now we can reintroduce the Neocate, and get him back off the milk products, and go back to whatever shred of normalcy we had before reintroducing milk.

Just in time for another visit to the beach!

The rebuild :)

 My wife, Jennifer's, blog can be found here:
Cleverly Disguised as Cake


And my first novel, squeakyclean, here:
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