Pinkeye

The boy has pinkeye. Again.

He got it this July when we were on holiday in Sunriver. I have no idea how he contracted it or from whom, but he did. We were there a few hours, took the kiddos to the playground, and voila! the next morning the Chubber woke up with a green, goopy, crusty eye. And, of course, it was on a Sunday. After a trip to the urgent care center in Bend he had some nasty antibiotic eye drops, and 5 days later he was good as new.

Now, this go around he started to have a bit of redness in his left eye on Friday. I didn't think much about it--the poor kid is a walking allergy, and I figured it was nothing. Saturday his eye is a bit more red looking. I still wasn't concerned, again, I figured he's a little boy---they're destructive--and he likely poked himself or something. Sunday shows up and his eye is really red, and he's grumpy. I think to myself, "Oh, no. Not again. I bet he's got pinkeye."

So, being the semi-decent mother I can be, I phone the pediatrician and leave a message with the answering service. About an hour later I get a call back from the triage nurse saying the on-call doctor can see the boy. Yay!

I must say, I really like our pediatrician, and the clinic we go to. From this Sunday's events I found out that they are open from 9:30am-7:00pm, weekdays, 9:00am-4:00pm, Saturday, and 9:00am-12:00pm on Sunday. What amazing hours, huh? I'm fortunate in that my kids are rarely sick, and because of it I don't necessarily (before yesterday) have the clinic hours memorized. I remember the days when you only saw the pediatrician during 'banker hours' and you could forget about weekends--if you were sick over a weekend you had two choices: 1) lay around the house and 'die' waiting for Monday (and hope there's an appointment open), or, 2) go to urgent care downtown and have a better chance of dying of whatever illness you had while waiting, or worse, contract whatever other awful disease from the guy who passed out on the couch next to you after a week long alcoholic-bender (I'll never get the olfactory memory erased from my head: the smell of unwashed transient and booze puke that emanated from the urgent care center).

So, clearly, compared to the 'old days' we're living in the lap of luxury.

Today I'm home from work and have the Chublet with me since he's not quite out of the contagious (24 hours on antibiotics) period. Peanut is at the sitter. I felt kinda bad dropping her off, but I don't want to risk her catching pinkeye (though, if she were to get it she'd probably have it by now). To prevent the rest of us from getting it I am on a mission to sanitize...well, pretty much everything. Chublet touches everything, so I need to clean everything. Oh joy. But, I suppose the alternative is getting pink-eye. I've never had it before, and I don't really want to find out just how fun it is. So, I've got my work cut out for me.