This is rough.

M is having a lot of trouble. He woke up this morning in terrible pain, so I gave him 2 Lortabs. That finally worked, but then it made him sick to his stomach, and he threw up. I've spoken to the nurse at the surgeon's office twice now; she's phoned in a prescription for Phenergan suppositories (I heartily approve of phenergan; it's the best drug on the planet & will even make your really bad hangover go away, not that I would ever endorse using any drug for any such lighthearted purpose) but now he's asleep and I don't want to leave him, so I'm waiting for my mom to come over before I can go get it.

The nurse says, this is normal. The nurse says, there will be a lot of pain. The nurse says, it will take a week for the swelling to go down. I'm slowly coming to the realization that this was major, major surgery and it is going to take a long time for him to recover. A really long time. I'm so used to this kid bouncing back from anything in about 12 hours that it seems worse, I think. This is the kid who tore off his whole fingernail skateboarding and was fine after a couple stitches, back on his board 4 hours later. This is the kid who broke his arm 3 times and barely complained. This is the kid who routinely comes home bloody & scraped & completely unfazed. This is the kid who pretty much never gets sick, never throws up, never runs a fever - and having him weak and almost crying and on the couch is more than I can take.

So I asked Metafilter about it, and they have been very helpful, but still, oh gods, this is rough. I feel helpless; I wish I could just take the pain myself and leave him free, I hate seeing him like this, and there's nothing more that I can do other than what I am doing, but what I am doing - sitting on the computer, delivering saltines and coke, rubbing his feet, setting up a fan, running back & forth to the video store - doesn't seem like enough at all.

Also, you know I'm desperate when I actually invite my mom over. I love her to death and all but she freaks out about how disgustingly messy my house is (it really isn't that bad, just cluttered & you can't eat off every surface in my house the way you can in hers but christ on a crutch, I don't have the time, energy or desire to bleach my baseboards once a week) and that always bums me out, since she will then call me like 12 times over the next few days to tell me how horribly I live. This I do not, at this moment, need.

It's times like these I wish someone would hurry up & invent a suspended animation tank. I wish we could just check out for a few days and let time heal his arm with no pain & no misery & then we could wake up in a week or so & it would all be better. No grocery & drugstore bills for a week would be helpful too.