Lyme and other maladies

Nic is now officially on antibiotics and is once again running a temp. He spat up the meds last night and got most of his dosage this am. One dose down, 29 to go. I keep telling him that the alternative is getting an intravenous drip, but the perils haven't fully sunk in.

I think getting this kid to take meds is the 8th circle of hell.

We get his titres done tomorrow, and of course they stand a 20-40% chance of coming back negative even though the symptoms are there. And his (somewhat mulish) ped is not convinced it's Lyme.

Whatever. He's going to need longer than a 10 day run with amoxacillin, which is all she's given him.

So I went to 7 am to lector to (over)hear another lector trashing me. When I confronted him, he just gave me a stupid little smile (busted, jerk). He kept his mouth shut because if he kept going, I would have simply smiled sweetly and conferred my responsibilities on him going forward. He knew it.

Fr. M presided, and I set up a date for him to come over and meet my friends, have dinner and the whole nine. Also apologized for any stuff he had to hear because of me and he quickly said no apologies were needed and everything was fine.

I wanted to treat him to breakfast, but he's sick--again. He's heading out for a three week retreat ("I'm peopled out") starting Friday.

I'm glad I got to check in, though. He keeps me going.

(edited to add) One part of our conversation sticks out in my mind--he was telling me how much he needs the time off. "And you know what, even though the grass is always greener no matter where you are, the single life sucks. There, I said it. If I get to the end of this, and there's no heaven, I am going to be awfully annoyed."

I would have hugged him if he weren't sick.

So we met my friend J and her son R at the camp yesterday, and the boys all had a blast. And DH grilled me, why is R so much higher functioning, he can't possibly have autism, shouldn't we get a TSS? I finally left the room, because he has a unique way of making me feel like I am not doing nearly enough for my boys.

It's hard sometimes, to get him to understand that this is the luck of the genetic draw. Our kids are reasonably high functioning, but there are kids who are STILL even less impacted than ours--not because their parents are doing or not doing one therapy or other, but because that's just the nature of this disorder. And it affects everyone differently.

That's one reason I hate getting together with people with higher functioning kids with DH in tow--the post mortems are brutal.

I hate that everything is such a struggle. It's no wonder the divorce and suicide rates of parents on the spectrum are so damned high.

Right now, Lyme disease and medicating it are the LAST things I want to be fretting about...but the nature of it makes it front and center. How am I going to get this kid to take 29 more doses? He doesn't get that if we don't do it this way, it's the hospital and through the veins. If we can't do it easy, it'll have to be done the hard way.

He is just not getting it.