Happy No More...

See this smile? Yeah, we haven't. Not much and not recently anyway. She is not a happy girl right now. She got the mouth guard in and is so miserable. She can't talk and she can't swallow, which makes eating really difficult so she's hungry, and she can't swallow her saliva but she can't spit it out either so she didn't sleep well last night and it has brackets on the outside of her teeth to keep her from sucking her thumb that way and the brackets are digging into her cheeks so she's tired, hungry and in pain. She is one unhappy camper. I don't know if I've ever seen her this miserable. She has cried more in the past couple days than she has in years I think. The orthodontist says it gets easier but I think so far we're all having a hard time believing that. I didn't know it would be so tough to get this thumb sucking guard in, if I'd known it would be so hard I'm not sure I would have gone ahead with it. We're all praying that it is, in fact, going to actually get better.

I took Cosette back into the doctor today and it turns out that either the blockage never actually got better or it's back and bigger at that. So now we get to do gluten-free AND dairy-free. It's not the lactose they're worried about, it's the protein. And they did more blood tests today to rule out other problems. She's been so great every time they've had to draw her blood, I'm really impressed. She doesn't cry and she actually watches them put the needle in and watches the blood fill the vial. She still gets nervous but I think everyone gets nervous getting their blood drawn and she has just been really brave. And she's getting quite proactive about her dietary restrictions, she's always making sure she can eat something before she puts it in her mouth, "Is this gluten-free?" It's still a huge battle to get her to take her medicine, and today the doctor added 2 more laxatives, which means for the next couple days she's going to be getting FOUR different laxatives every day. How that girl is still plugged up on everything she's on is beyond me. But we soldier on and we will get this figured out, even if it kills me (which it has felt a little lately like it just might).