Ears. Again.

While we were in Disney World in December 2014, I said a prayer while standing directly on Brennon's left side.  When the prayer ended, after everyone said their "Amen," with confusion, Brennon said, "Mom, I couldn't hear anything."  We knew there was a pretty severe problem.  When thinking back on it, we realized that he'd been asking for headache medicine multiple times daily for a while.  After much trial and error with different medications that never cleared up the infection, he was scheduled to get ear tubes February 2015.  Brennon had had a few ear infections as an infant, but never had enough of a problem to warrant tubes...until he was six years old.  After the procedure, the surgeon said that the substance in his ears was taffy like, and that it slurped out.  It had been slowly collecting in each ear, and that Brennon probably did have quite a bit of hearing loss because of it.  Things have been going great since.... or so we thought.

A couple of weeks ago, while sitting in Sacrament meeting, we saw something resting in the bottom of Brennon's ear.  It was one of his tubes.  Around Brennon's birthday, he started complaining about headaches.  A few days later he woke with ear pain, so we tried hydrogen peroxide for the pain/infection.  He said it had helped with the pain, so we sent him back to bed and stopped worrying about it.  March 20th, he woke in the early hours of the morning pretty much begging us to help him.  We knew it needed to be addressed by a doctor.  The Express Care doctor confirmed our suspicions-- he had a double ear infection.

Since then, Brennon's finished the allotted dose of his medication.  And he still complains about not being able to hear.  And the pain has slowly built to more than he can bear.  We knew that we were most likely dealing with the same thing that happened two years ago.  We went back in to the Express Care last night, happy that the doctor recognized Brennon, getting the expected diagnosis-- double ear infection that has not cleared with the medication they always prescribe for chronic ear infections.  He wrote him a prescription for a higher dose, taken for 10 days instead of 7, and urged us to get an appointment with the ENT.  We told him that before we had come to him on March 20th, we'd tried to get into see his same ENT, but they were booked out all the way to April 26th.  We made that appointment, knowing that we were probably dealing with the same situation as 2015, and went right in to the Express Care.  Because the doctor is within the Kadlec system, he'll be able to see that we have gone twice to Express Care without any relief.  We expect Brennon to need surgery soon after.

I think that I'm going to have Randy take Brennon to the surgery.  Two years ago, when they dressed Brennon in a green scrubs shirt and wheeled him away after telling him to kiss me and say goodbye, it spiraled me into the deepest depression I have ever known.  This all happened just one year after a similar green scrubs shirt was placed on Caden, during the scariest situation imaginable, where they took him back for surgery many times, each time telling him to kiss me and say goodbye.  With all that has happened since February 2015, I think anything could trigger my "flight" response, and I may very well run from that building, like I wanted to two years ago.  Who knows, maybe this time the medication will actually work.  Wouldn't that be wonderful.  I would love to actually be able to say, "I was wrong!"