Ivy is different.
I know that.
Dave sees it too.
She doesn’t play like an almost four year old.
She is wise beyond her years.
On Monday, when she was being canulated for the IVIG, we happened upon a doctor who asked her lots of questions and spoke to her like she was, well, a four year old.
Ivy looked this poor doctor up and down as if she were something from a deep, dark hole.
Ivy likes to be informed of what is happening and appreciates someone who speaks to her like she is, well, a 40 year old.
The doctor was not quite sure what to make of Ivy either.
When she asked the nurse to distract Ivy from the needle stick, I almost heard the nurse laugh out loud.
“Ivy doesn’t need distracting”, was her response.
Ivy sat as still as a rock while the doctor located and pierced another vein and proceeded to extract 10 mls of blood.
That’s alot of blood from a small person.
Once her arm was all boarded up, she hopped off the table and made her way to her room after thanking the doctor for her time.
I’m sure I saw the resident bang the side of her head with her hand a couple of times, in swift, hard claps.
It was kind of funny, except that she’s only (almost) four and most preschoolers don’t cope well with canulation.
I had to laugh though when the nurse skipped down the corridor and Ivy looked at me with a ‘that chick is cah – razy’ expression on her small upturned face.
She watched a DVD and then slept and the nurses came and went and commented on her being particularly run down this month.
When her most ‘favourite paediatrician in the whole wide world’ arrived to see her, her response was minimal, until the end, when she held his hand for just a little longer than friends do and a small whisp of a smile played at the corners of her mouth.
I was a little sad that she had learned to curb her infatuation with her green eyed doctor.
Her crush smothered by the constant and continuous hospitalisations.
As we were walking out of the hospital, her little hand slipped into mine, “Mummy,” she said, “when I am the big girl Ivy I will have to come to the hospital too, won’t I?”
Oh my heart!
How could she know?
We had never discussed how life long this would be.
I watched her into the night, worried that Ivy was, in some ways, not processing things the way she needed to and that her experiences were stealing her sweet girlhood away from her before my very eyes.
On Tuesday, though, she was up bright and early.
She canulated her toy dog because he needed IVIG. She put a band aid on his little paw and told him it would all be okay (he then proceeded to be mauled by the small sausage dog, so I am unsure of his status as I type this. We are still trying to locate the body).
*Edited to add puppy found buried in sausage dog bedding. Photo obtained*
She got a syringe and gave “Relayna” the fairy doll ear drops. I asked her if she wanted Ivy to stop the ear drops, if they were hurting her.
She told me “No, they were tickling”
and that afternoon I watched, my tears caught in my throat, as an ‘Ivy – Barbie’ and a bear – paed made their way down the isle to get married.
She may be barren, while she is in the hospital. She may not behave as an almost four year old should
but she is coping,
just
in her own way.
Originally posted at Three Ring Circus