2 1/4 Korean Family

Joe reminded me that I should post before February ended. As you may have noticed all four posts in January were done in one day.. Ha ha. The last month has been a pretty crazy one for us. Today is the day that Joe is taking the GMAT. He's at the testing center right now, and the test started 10 minutes ago. We've been studying for the last year for this test, but for the last month and a half, Joe's been studying full-time, about 8-10 hours a day. The test was originally scheduled for earlier in the month, but we decided to postpone the test to give ourselves more time to prepare. Turned out to be a good thing because the week that the test was supposed to be, we all got sick and have been sick since then.

Ellie also had an accident on Monday and had to go to the emergency room. At dinner time, we were making Korean style hotpot in an electronic skillet. The table was already set, and as I was getting milk out of the fridge, I saw, in slow motion, Joe yell out and reach out towards to the skillet as it dived towards the kitchen floor. I didn't know what to do as I stared at the floor at what was to be our dinner. I took two more steps over, and then that's when I saw Ellie, in shock, covered in soup that had been simmering just seconds ago. I immediately ran to the laundry room sink with her, stripped her down and started dowsing cold water on her. I was washing oily soup out of her hair when I noticed that her skin was starting to peel on her arm. I yelled out to Joe that we had to go to the hospital right then. Al agreed to stay at home with Dan, and we sped over to the emergency room.

Once we got there, however, the staff at the emergency room did not treaet her burns like an emergency at all. It took over all hour before they got anything on her, and they spent like half an hour just trying to get her oxygen saturation, which clearly was okay because she was pink and was crying very loudly. We were even more upset when the nurses fretted over her for 10 minutes trying to decide where to poke her to get her IV in. My mom, being a nurse, was even more frustrated by the inability to care for her grand daughter, and she was really panicking because Ellie's face had swollen up and started to blister. Eventually, when they were bandaging her up, my patience was wearing thin too as the RN tried to roll up her shoulder with bandages, ignoring the ER tech's very reasonable suggestions on how to properly bandage a shoulder. At the end of the visit, the ER doctor insisted that we came back in the morning for a follow-up and promised that we'd leave very detailed "notes" on what he saw that night for the staff in the morning.

Anyway, we didn't have a very good experience at all at the emergency room. We had Ellie sleep with us in our room that night, and she slept fairly well because she was on lortab. In the morning, we ended up going to see her pediatrician, who actually was a lot better with the bandaging than the ER staff (even though she had a nurse who was just as incapable of bandaging properly). Anyway, long story short, she was in pain for a couple of days, but she recovered pretty fast considering how severe her burns were. The only thing was that she had to go through that experience at the same time as a really bad cold and teething (she got 6 new teeth in the last 2 weeks, including three pre-molars). Al, Joe, and I were all sick with a cold as well, and I still haven't recovered from the cold yet. Having to carry Ellie around (because she was so miserable) gave me too much strain and I've been having back pain and lower abdominal pain (and today joint pain in the knee). I've had to take care of the kids full-time and when they're taking naps, I was helping Joe with studying, so I didn't have much time to rest at all and recover... Anyway, hopefully after today, we can have lots fun and sleep and rest.... Can't wait till Joe gets home from the test!

We still managed to do some fun things.

Ellie's watching her blankies being washed.