Will it ever get "Normal"?

Last night G-Girl was begging not to have to do her shot. "Can't I just go to sleep and we can start again tomorrow?"

Sometimes it feels like an effortless part of our routine. Other times it doesn't. Poor kid.

Sigh. I know it doesn't feel good (although it usually doesn't hurt THAT much). I wish we could stop doing it, too. I suppose we can--no one is forcing us to do these shots. But we made the decision to do them in her best interest.

2 weeks from today we have our first appointment with the endocrinologist since we started the shots. We can always re-evaluate based on her progress.

Hurting

Last night G-girl's shot hurt so much that she was willing to take Motrin to make it feel better. She's the kind of kid who would usually rather writhe in agony than take any form of pain killer. I'm not sure what I did differently. But I sure felt a lot worse afterwards.

Forgot the shot... again

We were in lovely Aspen CO this weekend. To make a long story short, I slept really poorly Friday night. Was supposed to do a duathlon on Saturday morning but it got cancelled because of the weather. Did a really punishing workout at the Aspen Rec center instead. Had a lovely glass or two or three of sake on Saturday night-- who can count with those silly thimbles. Came back to the hotel, watched some Olympics (USA! USA!) and then gave in to my exhaustion. At some point in the middle of the night I remembered we hadn't given G-Girl her geno shot.

Sigh. It wasn't the first time and it probably won't be the last. Whaddaya gonna do. Try better to remember, I suppose.

Changing the stupid cartridge

About every 2 weeks the meds in G-Girl's Genotropin pen run out and I need to change the cartridge. I have done this a handful of times already so you'd think I know what I'm doing. Well, I don't.

It's not as easy as it seems. Well, it is easy but there are a bunch of steps and I am still not familiar with them all. This must be a common problem because the company includes a step-by-step cartridge changing "placemat." It's pretty helpful-- if you have it. We no longer have ours because it didn't make it home from the infirmary at summer camp. I called our Pfizer Bridge representative, who was pleasant as always (no sarcasm at all, she really is nice) and a new placemat should be in the mail. In the meantime...

I botched it. Again. I got it to work reasonably well but something feels kind of off. I hate injecting my kid with a pen that I may have loaded incorrectly, but I am pretty sure that I mixed it correctly and she's still getting the correct dose. It looks like there's a lot more air in there than there should be, even though I did the remove air tap tap maneuver. Sigh. It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another. (Credit to Roseanne Roseannadanna).

Which kind of hormones?

My daughter is 10 1/2 years old. That means she is a pre-teen. A tween. A young lady. Whatever you want to call it, lately she's been being obnoxious. Which leads me to wonder... which kind of hormones raging around in her body are to be thanked for this? Is it the Genotropin? Is in sex hormones or puberty hormones or whatever you call them? Maybe a little of both?

Maybe she's just acting this way because she is still tired from camp and missing the freedom she had there. Who knows. In either case, I'm glad she's back but could use to lose the attitude that seems to have accompanied her home.

We were shopping for new underwear the other day and I asked her if she thought she needed a bra. She asked whether I thought she needed a bra. I answered honestly, which is no, she doesn't need one at all. But if she wanted one I'd get her one. It wouldn't surprise me if sometime this year we make that leap.

She's ba-aack

Yeah, so G-girl is home and our house is back to its normal state of chaos. This means there is more mess everywhere (and I do mean everywhere), the kids are alternately fighting tooth and nail and then getting along great, there is more singing in the house (which sounds nice but Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus are not my top picks) and yes, I am back to giving daily shots.

Overall, much less traumatic/dramatic than it might be. I think the major trauma/drama was limited to the very first time. I know G-girl was nervous about having the nurse inject her at camp, but I think after the first time that became no big deal as well.

Two things that helped:
1. one of her counselors had to take meds, so they went to the infirmary together after dinner

2. (and this is a biggie) a boy 2 bunks ahead of her also got Genotropin injections. When her cartridge needed changing and the nurse was unsure of how to do it, they called him in. He helped, they did their shots together. (oy vey. That sounds like group shooting up. Anyway...) Where I was going with that is that on many levels the experience was normalized. Didn't become more pleasant, but definitely became more normal.

It still makes me sad that giving my kid shots on a daily basis is becoming normal. But I won't go there today.

Genogirl is coming home

G-Girl has been at sleepover camp for the last two weeks. For the first few days I almost missed doing the shots. Not in the classic sense of missing something, but I felt their absense. It had become something so imortant in our every day that I forced myself to always remember to do. So when she went to camp I still thought about it every day... "don't forget to do the shot."

Then I realized how much I didn't miss it. I miss my kid, but the time surrounding giving her shots is always surrounded by some level of tension and some level of fear that I am going to hurt her. Neither of those things is fun.

Then I kind of forgot about giving her shots. It was neither something I missed nor something the absence of which I welcomed. It just went back to normal.

And now she comes back today. I wonder how things will change now that she has been getting them for 2 weeks from someone else. Someone who was trained in doing things like giving shots.