Growing Snowflowers

The Princess and the Pea...part deux!

On Tuesday night the Princess was bitten by a rabid and unforgiving mosquito that happened to find it's way into her un-sleeping quarters. Actually...it turns out she was asleep at the time of the attack but awoke to over 30 large hot red welts all over her arms, legs and FACE! She was not just the 'hot mess' aforementioned in the prior post, but a double hot mess...

after 36 hours of monitoring and benadryl/claritin/calamine cocktails the heat of the welts and the severity of the swelling wasn't dissapating...so we took the ragged Princess to the doctor.

Conclusion...Dr said "yep, she's a hot mess"

prescribed THREE medications to reduce swelling, and since several bites were around the eye and had caused her to have a shiner any heavyweight boxer would be proud of, she even got steroid eye drops to help. Poor thing. By this afternoon she was still swollen but feeling much better.

The best side effect was the conversation I had with the Doctor about Piper's insomnia. After explaining how long this has been going on and how unlike her it is, we concluded that Piper is experiencing and episode of

'insomnia induced hysterical hyperactivity'

this can happen to children with PTSD, and to make a long story short...she is producing those 'fight or flight' hormones in overdrive and for some reason they aren't able to come back down to manageable levels(kids with ptsd almost always have higher levels of these hormones anyway, but this is crazytown levels)

So...if you can imagine a kid with ADHD drinks 12 cups of espresso, downs a 2lb bag of jelly bellys and 18 brighty colored popsicles...well thats what Piper has been like for the past month or so...except it gets a little worse every day. She is LITERALLY bouncing off the walls.

The Doc was clear to say she knows that Piper is not ADHD or ADD but is somehow caught in this 'cycle' and we need to break it before she crashes and burns...yep she said 'crashes and burns'!

We all know it wouldn't be pretty.

So...we are trying Melatonin. In a very small dose for a very limited time. It is afterall a 'hormone' that induces rest & sleep, and we want to limit her exposure to hormones at such a tender age but we need to try something. We gave Piper a very small dose tonight and she was asleep by 9pm. Lets hope she gets a good nights sleep...she only got 5.5 hours last night, half of her 'normal' amount.