Well, here we are in sunny AZ...the weather is beautiful, 90+ degrees, no humidity and here is how our trip has gone so far....hold onto your socks....

Tuesday eve in CT: Chelsea comes into my room and says "Mommy I’m itchy right here (points to her thigh)"....I look and see just a red bump that looks like maybe a bug bite or even a pimple. I give her some allergy cream to put on it and off she goes to bed and I think nothing more about it.

Wednesday...flight day...I wake around 7 to get everything done and loaded and start waking Chelsea around 8. She is her usual stubborn self when you try to get her up before she really wants to, but rises within 15 minutes. I’m in the bathroom and she comes in and says "Mommy, look" I look closely at my daughter who is standing in front of me in the buff and COVERED FROM THE BREASTS DOWN IN HIVES. Our flight leaves in less than 4 hours.  Before panic sets in I take a deep breath, reach for the Benadryl, give her two teaspoonfuls and draw a bath with colloidal oatmeal in it. I try to calmly ask her if she ate or did anything unusual on Tuesday, she says no. The only thing out of whack in our schedule was this thrush that she had had and was taking Nystatin for...my immediate suspicion went there. I call her pediatrician and tell her whats going on. She says bring her in. I say I can’t we are heading for the airport. She says watch her, and give her more Benadryl on the plane...give her 3 teaspoons full, and call me. I say ok, and tell her by the way, I still don’t have the results from her blood sugar tests. She says Oh Really?  I thought I gave them to you, let me check my box, and I’ll let you know later. We proceed out for the plane...the hives are everywhere, Chelsea is itchy and uncomfortable, but tries to be a good sport...we’re talking a 5 hour flight here. We get to our connecing flight airport and I check my messages and there is one from her Pediatrician...I have Chelsea’s test results...you were right, she has hypoglycemia. When they did the 1 hour stress test (where they give the child a syrup to drink and then wait one hour and retest her blood sugar) her sugar level actually dropped, and it was on the low side to begin with.  It was 80 at their first test and after the syrup and the hour, it was 77 and going down.

Please bear in mind here I am a thousand miles away from home, with a kid covered with hives, who I have just found out now has yet another condition to contend with for the rest of her life. She took one look at my face when I got off the phone and started crying, so I had to drop everything and try to comfort her and assure her that this isn’t the end of the world, that it can be controlled with diet (we hope) and that we’ll address it when we get home.  The hives  take a major jump in numbers, so I call the pediatrician again. She tells me to take her to the ER when we get to Florida (yeah, she said FLORIDA...even though I had told her several times we were going to be on a plane for 5 hours traveling to Arizona).  I said FINE we will thank you very much. We boarded our second and most agonizing part of our trip...a flight that lasted 4 hours. Chelsea was in extreme discomfort and I kept spraying her with antihistamine spray and trying to keep her from tearing her skin off. We finally land and head for the nearest ER open at 8 pm AZ time (thats 11 PM CT time that we are used to so we are all EXHAUSTED). We arrive to find a less than high standard hospital in a city we don’t know filled with people speaking spanish and one unfortunate man strung out on heroin who was screaming obscenities and threatening hospital security. We had no choice but to sit it out as the poor child is still covered in hives....3 HOURS LATER we are finally seen by a doctor who had serious trouble looking me in the eyes when he spoke to me, but actually did seem to know what CAH was and also seemed to know what to do about the hives. He gave her 20mgs of prednisone, 25 mgs of vistaril, and a pepcid. 20 minutes later we were finally on our way to our hotel Midnight AZ time 3 AM CT time.  We all just crashed.

Thursday AM....rash is markedly better. Chelsea is much less itchy. I call her Ped back in CT to tell her what was done, she said to keep her on the prednisone for 3 days. I said ok...we happened to have some with us as my husband takes it for his asthma sometimes. Now that the rash is gone, Chelsea is considerably more concerned about the fact that at breakfast I said, no, you can’t have sugar on your oatmeal, you need to use honey. At lunch I said, no, you can’t have ice cream for desert, you’ll have to settle for fruit or frozen fruit. And then at dinner I said, no you can’t have that huge hunk of chocolate cake, you can have fruit or sorbet. When we got back to the hotel she let me have it....she said "so now I can’t ever eat sugar again?" I said, no honey, that’s not what this means, it means we have to be very careful with sugar. Your body overproduces insulin and that makes you sick..that’s why you’ve been feeling so poorly...all these times I thought I was doing you good by giving you sugary things for your headaches I was actually compounding the problem and we have to find new solutions such as fruit and eating a better diet that contains much less processed white sugar. I told her mommy will eat the same diet with you, sugar is no friend of mine either as my hips can attest.

So all in all this trip so far has just been ducky. And now to top it off I am running a temp of 102, and have a sore throat and aching neck and headache.

I know God doesn’t give us more than we can handle, but I am seriously wondering about His judgement right now!

Please say a prayer for us, that we have a safe, uneventful trip home (we leave Saturday) and that we find a way to incorporate a healthy diet into Chelsea’s life that is not too restrictive, that she comes to accept this added life style change, that I have the strenght to be strong for her, and that God reveals his path for us...I know He must have one!