July 20th Tuesday: The dragon rears its head

Tuesday night was my turn to stay at the hospital, Charlotte went to bed well and it seemed like it was going to be a fairly good night. HA. At midnight she woke up with her blood pressure check. That got her a bit upset. The first one conked out so we had to try taking it a second time. That got her a really upset. Then since she is on full hydration her diaper needed changed too... that got her really mad. Then she blew a full out tantrum, thrashing and bashing and screaming at the top of her lungs. Nothing I or any of the nurses could do would settle her down. She started throwing herself around in her crib, she bashed her head on the rails a few times and it did not even faze her. I was so worried that she would hurt herself! Then she started yanking on the IV lines, the whole pole was swaying and rattling away. Her syringe line came unhooked at the pole and was flipping around in the air. I was scared she would pull the line from her chest. So I took her back out of the crib and just clamped her to my chest as tightly as I could (but really how do you hold onto someone writhing and wrenching like that!?) Poor little girl, she was so mad that she started pulling her hair out and clawing her face... that wasn’t getting her anywhere so she turned on me. Yanking fistfuls of hair, she clawed away at my face and then discovered something that did make me flinch... she chomped down on my shoulder so hard her little head shook! I really pitied all the other kids in our wing that night for the screaming and yelling that came out of our room. I held on until my arms could not take any more and put her back in the crib while I finally phoned over and woke up Rob asking him to come and try to settle her. She was thrashing around again so I picked her up and clenched tight while she continued biting and scratching. Rob arrived to find us both standing in the middle of the room crying. Thankfully Charlotte had lost some steam by then and surrendered easily into her daddies arms and was quickly sound asleep. By 2am we were wondering what to do, what if she woke up like that again??... so we both stayed and slept at the hospital... needless to say all three of us were pretty short on sleep by the morning of her birthday. In the morning we assessed the damages. Charlotte had a huge scratch across her cheek with dried blood, her hair at the front was thinner, her eye was all scratched around and puffy. I had a blood blister on my upper arm from one bite, at least 4 good bruises on each arm-only one broke the skin though-I was so glad that I had been wearing a tee shirt and a sweatshirt! My glasses had a new scratch from when they hit the floor. All three of us looked like we had a pretty rough night. So where did that come from!?! I don’t know but we sure don’t want to see it again! She had been on a small dose of steroids as a preventative to help protect her lungs from one of the chemo drugs... maybe it was that. Maybe my poor little Charlotte just had enough. Thankfully that evil has not reared its head again... except for the biting. She only tries to bite mommy when she’s mad though, never daddy-I’m not sure what to think about that. I know that daddy is the favourite but this is a little extreme. I’m trying not to take it personally- it’s just the chemo talking I tell myself.