life is good

I had a lot of time to spend thinking about what to title this blog post. I had (and was given) quite a few good ideas and I must admit that "life is good" was nowhere near the top of my list when we were lost and driving around some of the less nice areas of Cancun at 2:30 in the morning with a very sick baby looking for an ER. It wasn't even on my list during the nearly 3 days we spent in a Mexican hospital in a perpetual state of what can only be described as a mixture of boredom and fear. Nor was I thinking it'd be a good tag line when the nurse was poking and prodding poor baby LT trying to find a vein to insert the IV in to his severely dehydrated little body. Life didn't seem all that good when I was paying the outrageous medical bills or talking with my credit card company and assuring their fraud department that the large and unusual charges from Mexico had in fact been made by me. Even on the flight home as LT puked all over Kari and then all over me several other titles might have seemed more appropriate.

However, when I got home and looked though the pictures the one with the "life is good" beach ball (at left) just kind of stuck out at me. Apparently the guy who coined the cute little marketing slogan was onto something (it made him filthy rich anyway) because it sort of inspired me to try and put a positive spin on our downward spiral of a vacation. Thanks to a lot of help from family, friends, and Dr. Kono (our great pediatrician) we're home now and LT is recovering well (no pukies today!).






Here are a few pictures from the amazing villa in Puerto Morelo where we had planned on spending a relaxing week hanging out with Z and family.









I had gotten very sick on Wednesday night before our trip but recovered quickly and we all seemed healthy enough on Friday morning when we went to the airport. With all the luggage and baby gear we didn't notice that we weren't sitting next to each other on the plane and by the time we realized it was too late and the flight was too full to change. So Kar sat with LT in the front of the plane and I was in the back completely unaware that not long after takeoff Landon had started vomiting. By the time I went up to check on them LT was looking pretty bad and Kari was covered in baby puke and starting to feel sick herself.

We spent Friday night and Saturday at the villa but weren't able to enjoy it much. Kar was sick most of the time and LT just never got better - they slept a lot of the time (when not vomiting anyway) and hanging out on the porch was about as adventurous as it got. None of us even made it to the beach which was only a few steps down from the villa courtyard.


Hospitals were fresh on my mind due to my recent trips to the ER in Denver so I printed out directions to the hospitals in Cancun along with our flight into and all that other junk. Late Saturday night Landon was getting worse and Kari's mommy instincts kicked in and we headed out thankful to have the hospital directions I'd brought. They seemed simple enough - the "American style" hospitals were about half an hour away not far off the main highway. All we had to do was take a right at the Home Depot and we'd run right into them.

In the daylight the next day I could see the sun faded paint around where Home Depot signs were not too long ago. But the Home Depot had closed a few months ago and in the middle of the night the building looked no different than any of the other buildings along the highway and we drove right past it. It's hard to describe what it feels like to be lost in a foreign city looking for medical help for your little baby. I can't describe how it felt and won't even try but I will say it's a feeling that I'd be more than happy never to have again in my life.

I'm not sure how long we drove but I think we left the villa around 1 AM (maybe later?) and I know LT officially checked into the hospital at 4 AM. I'm still not sure exactly how we found it but at this point I'm attributing it to the sheer will of a mother caring for her child - we just sort of happened on the hospital once I stopped trying to follow my faulty directions and listened to Kari's "guesses" about where to go.


LT was sick with the same thing that I had gotten but it hit him much harder. He was dangerously dehydrated because he couldn't take in any food or liquid. They took blood for tests and put him on an IV to rehydrate him. Kari remembers him crying a lot when they stuck him with the IV (many times) but I don't - I must have just been so relieved that he was getting taken care of.
On Sunday LT got a cute little baby hospital gown.

In the hospital Landon mostly just slept. He'd be up for 10 or 15 minutes at a time at the most and then fall back asleep.

When he was awake we did our best to entertain him with the few baby toys we had. It was a challenge to keep him from playing with the IV tubes hooked up to his foot.


We tried to give him some Pedialyte (Peach Pedialyte for Peanut) but he was more intersted in playing with the bottle top.


Books were a good distraction. And I don't have pictures but all of the nurses were really sweet with Landon.

But mostly he slept.

After about 60 hours of the IV and other treatment we were discharged from the hospital. We paid the hospital with a credit card but the doctor is a different bill and apparently it's "common practice" to pay them in cash. I'm still a little uncomfortable about that transaction but what's done is done - regardless, the doctor was friendly and seemed to genuinely care about LT's well being. It should be interesting to see what my health insurance says about all this - I'm hopeful that I can recover at least some of the cost of the most expensive vacation I've ever taken.


Perhaps the most relaxing part of our trip was lunch at "Margaritaville" in the airport on the way home.

So our dream vacation turned into a nightmare but it's not all bad. We flew home early and Frontier airlines waived our ticket change fee. On Wednesday we took LT to his home doctor and he checked out OK - still recovering but doing very well. The Dr. also assured us we'd done the right thing for LT in Mexico. And, because we're home early, we get a few days head start on moving into our great new house.

The dogs got to see the new house for the first time yesterday and Bowen immediately found himself a window at the perfect height for to keep watch. So for Bowen, at the very least...

life is good