I'd like to thank my daughter for giving me about a hundred more gray hairs today and making me sound like an idiot to our ped's nurse. Alison threw a massive temper tantrum this morning, and got so worked up and out of control that she was actually sweating! It didn't last more than a few minutes (less than 5, actually), but when I finally got her calmed down, she was lethargic and rather out of it....very un-Alison like behavior. She tried to eat breakfast and several times she almost went to sleep sitting up. I gave up on breakfast and asked her if she wanted to go lay down on my bed while I got dressed. She wanted to lay down on the bed in her room, so I put her up there and covered her up with her blanket. And she just layed there. That is very unlike my daughter. After I got dressed, I called the ped because, even though I had a gut feeling we weren't dealing with a shunt problem, I still wanted to talk to someone about it. After I called, she threw up. That made me more concerned.....lethargy and vomitting often equals shunt failure. She did perk up a little bit more after that, and was able to keep water down, but still spent the rest of the morning just laying on the floor watching tv. This was still very unlike my daughter. She doesn't ever just lay around on the floor (unless she's watching Beauty and the Beast, and we weren't). I tried to get her to drink some water, and she would drink a little here and there, so I was happy. After her last program was over, she wanted to go in her room and rock, so we did. She also drank some more water and started to perk up a bit more and agreed to try and eat a little bit of toast. Then Kevin came home. He took her to make toast. By the time the ped's office called back, she was sitting on the kitchen counter next to him chattering away and helping him put the silverware away. After I got off the phone with the nurse, being reassured that it probably was nothing and the doc would call me back if he thought it was anything to be concerned about, Alison sat and ate a whole piece of toast, several bites of my cottage cheese (which she demanded to eat) and drank several ounces of water and Kool Aide. It just took Kevin almost half an hour to get her settled down for a nap.

I'm not the kind of mom who calls the ped for every little cough and sniffle. Prior to today, I have made 2 sick calls, once when she was about 3 months old and kept throwing up (worried about hydrocephalus getting worse, since she wasn't shunted yet), and last year when we were out of town she ended up with pneumonia. And now I really feel stupid because I called for something that was really nothing and if I had just waited it out, I would have known this.