“Mommy! Daddy!” 2AM last night we heard the familiar yell much to early. “I make a mess. It’s hot! I make a mess.” I had tried my best to let Erika know that she needed to get some much deserved sleep. I jumped up and ran down as soon as I heard Mira yelling. Little did I know that she had been yelling for 5 minutes, Erika’s mom would later tell me this. I suppose that there is a point as a parent which you ignore the first 5 minutes of late night wake ups in the hopes that it will be short lived and your child may actually go back to sleep.

One step in her room and I knew something was wrong. There is no mistaking the fresh smell of toddler vomit as it hits you in that half dazed sleep deprived moment at 2 AM. One flick of the light switch confirmed my fears. Yak, all over the bed and Mira’s head. Which sucks for a couple of reasons:

1. We are only a little over 48 hours past brain surgery. One of the main symptoms of brain problems is vomiting (I would later find out that one of the main symptoms of brain surgery is also vomiting).
2. Another of the lovely caveats after brain surgery is that you can not take a bath for 1 week. For those of you that don’t know, my daughter has curly hair that must be combed nearly every day. Not only have we not been able to comb/brush her hair in 5 days, we are now unable to wash the vomit out of her hair for another 5 days!
3. Who really wants to clean sheets at 2AM?
4. Did I mention that vomit stinks?

And so ended Erika’s blissful, uninterrupted night of sleep. “Erika! Erika! I need your help.”

We take Mira downstairs and get her temperature, 99.1 degrees. Which is good. We make a quick call to the on-call neurosergeon at University Hospital. Hey, those instruction sheets at the hospital are actually worth something. We quickly find out that no fever and only vomiting is not necessarily a bad thing. “Keep an eye on her and her temp. Call us if anything gets worse, but this is actually pretty normal following a craniotomy.” Is the advice we get from the Neurosurgeon.

We double team Mira, cleaning the room and her as much as we can. I decide to stay up with Mira for a bit longer while Erika heads back to bed (good luck getting back to sleep anyway). Mira and I work until 3AM trying to get the stink of vomit and bits of yak out of her matted down wig. We didn’t make a ton of progress and there was a considerable amount of screaming involved. But I put her back down to a clean bead and sheets at 3AM. I believe she was out as soon as she hit the mattress.

7AM we all get up at the same time. I tell Erika to go back to sleep, then I grab Mira and we head downstairs for our morning cereal and cartoons. We no sooner get into the living room and she starts dry heaving. Ugghh! We put her on the couch and shortly after that she starts to look pretty pale and gets lethargic. Another call to the on-call neurosurgeon and we’re instructed to head to the nearest ER. They are more concerned with the lethargy then the vomiting, either way we’re going back to a hospital.

However, we’ve learned our lesson about going to local ER’s. So we head downtown to the same place we had the surgery. Really, we’re not going to make Mira deal with another ambulance ride. We pack up enough stuff to stay several nights and expect the worse.

Pat