Self Recriminations

As a teacher, it is incredibly easy to feel like a hypocrite quite often. On one hand I'm trying to teach students the importance of meeting deadlines and on the other I cannot for the life of me seem to get through this last period of lab write ups - an assignment they turned in like over a month ago. I'm trying to teach them healthy ways to manage their frustration and stress, and simultaneously I feel on edge and like I'm snapping unfairly at students.

The last week and a half or so has been especially hard, though I don't have anything in particular to point to as the source of all my woe. I guess the little things just add up. A few nights with not quite enough sleep because of teething and birthday parties. Students are also stressed and sleep deprived as they head into the finals and the end of the semester. I had an apparently overly ambitious lesson that mostly flopped and they did not handle it well. Suddenly I'm being bombarded by frustration and anxiety from students panicked that they don't understand something that they are going to be tested on to the point where I cracked.

"Keep your stress to yourself! Don't you know that stuff is contagious?! I certainly don't need it!" I wanted to scream at them. But I didn't - instead, I just absorbed it all talking to one strung out kid after another, reassuring them that I know most everyone did not understand - that we clearly need to go over it again. More slowly and broken down into more steps. It's fine - don't worry about it!! Cross out this whole section on the study guide if that is cathartic for you!

Seriously, won't you please calm down?

Many of them did and more than a few did not. And I just took it all on. For better or worse, that's what I do!

Terrible plan really.

But it's a new week. I'm going to get through this god damn set of labs if it kills me! Only then the online grade book stops working for hours so I can't enter in any scores. And just when I finally feel like I'm making some progress the medicine alarm goes off.

So irritating! I hit snooze once to finish the one assignment I'm looking at. Then I get up to make the medicine - it's a pretty easy task.

And while the vigabatrin is dissolving I brush my teeth. Then I brush Cyrus's and we go through our nightly routine and I eventually get him settled and follow him to dreamland shortly after.

Only he wakes up at like one thirty in the morning. And I just want to burst into tears - this is not the night little dude for you to be so completely wide awake. I'm grateful that at least he's not crying. I look into his bright eyes and pray that this is not a new pattern.

I trick him into accepting a pacifier and try to go back to sleep, but I can't knowing he's awake and rolling around - knowing that I should be on seizure watch.

By three o'clock he's making a funny breathing noise. Like there's a click in the back of his throat. We're supposed to be receiving some medical equipment in the mail I don't know when so we can do a limited sleep study at home to evaluate him for sleep apnea. But for the moment he seems okay. I give him the pacifier again - he accepts it gratefully and I wonder if he's been asleep at all in the last 90 minutes. I know I have, though it doesn't feel like it.

At five he's got the worst hiccups in the world - he must be stressed about something. We recover the pacifier one more time and he finally goes back to sleep - like instantly!

I am not far behind, but then my alarm goes off and it feels far too soon.

Kyle gets up after I'm ready and just about to leave. He's making Cyrus's medicine and he seems confused.

"Did we not give him medicine last night?" he asks. (Bless his heart for saying 'we' instead of 'you'!)

My response is automatic. "What? Of course we gave him his medicine!" Anything else is completely unthinkable.

But he's holding up the glass that has just the right amount of liquid to be dissolved vigabatrin.

And the other oral syringes are there - laid out with clobazam, keppra, and fish oil - full and measured, all lined up ready to be administered.

It still didn't feel real - even with the evidence staring me in the face - we have never missed a dose. Not in fifteen months. Not even when we were ordered to give him steroids every six hours around the clock!

Suddenly the dread and the panic is all my own.

Cyrus didn't sleep well - he was awake off and on for at least four hours last night. (Maybe because he didn't get all his sedating medicine!) And I wonder how many seizures he might have had where I didn't check - that click in his breathing? Did I check him fast enough? Did I sleep through his struggling through the night when he needed me or needed medicinal intervention?

I am so angry with myself for being wrapped up in the minutiae of the day that I lost track of the routine. Angry for feeling sorry for myself for being so overwhelmed with everyone else's needs. Angry for being irritated that the medicine alarm had gone off in the middle of my task. That alarm literally keeps my son alive!

And despite how well he has been doing, Cyrus suddenly seems so fragile to me all over again. His situation so precarious.

Instead of leaving for work, I march into the bedroom knowing he's supposed to get up for his morning class any minute anyway.

I pick him up and his face immediately crumples in objection. Of course it does - he didn't get any sleep.

But I'm just grateful that I didn't walk in to catch him in the middle of a status event. We were quick to stuff him full of meds and he was quick to fall back to sleep.

According to dad's report, Cyrus did have a rough day, though I'm grateful to report it was not in terms of seizures and was more to do with seeming sleep deprivation, though he did throw up once. I have no evidence that this had anything to do with the missed dose.

And when my medicine alarm went off this evening I was only too glad to drop everything to focus on that task. That task that is keeping my son out of a perpetual state of chronic seizing, that is keeping him out of the hospital, that is keeping him alive to share all his joyous smiles and sleepless nights with us. For today at least, I did not feel the least bit irritated by it - only grateful.