Another new thing learned

An acute allergy attack looks a lot like skull fracture.

You'd think in the land of the Wolfmeisters that we'd be used to allergy issues, but it was "the wrong child" whose eyes swelled his face into bruised distortion last night. Mere seconds after he'd slipped on a wet bathroom floor so badly that his feet came to rest on the sink, his eyes started to swell shut. I know they weren't swelling before, because he was going into the bathroom to check out a scratch on his cheek that I'd just pointed out to him.

"It sure looks like an allergy attack, but to what???" We gave him benadryl, we held him all night and we made sure he wasn't sensitive to light, in pain, or incoherent.

"It sure looks like an allergy attack, but that was a hard fall... why on earth now? And why is it bruised???" He swore he didn't hit his eye on the way down, and he tells the story the same way each time we ask it. We thought... maybe Romulus? He'd been on ~N~'s lap just prior to the bathroom incident.... he got a haircut earlier..... maybe?

This morning, when 12 hours of sleep and an adult dose of benadryl hadn't reduced the swelling on ~N~'s left eye, we decided to take him in.

My last bit of cool, seasoned parental calm went out the window when I considered the consequences of "what if I am wrong?"

We called the Pede on her cell phone and she saw us the first hour the office opened. They checked his orbital bones, palpated his head and checked for any fluid building behind his eye.

Just a bad coincidence that it started just after his hard fall. After dissecting the situation here and with the pede, it was Romulus' haircut that caused the drama. Our poor poodle was so disgusting that every bit of the pollen from this spring was embedded in the dog's dreadlocked hair.

Yes. A bad coincidence. But it had me scared. It had me praying for something instead of my normal, private "thank you" pulses to God. For this 24 hours it was a cradled, sleeping head and a whispered "Please help my child." It's easy now, with the full knowledge that everything will be fine, to think that this is melodramatic. But when you're there, in the unknown, it's all you can do to steel yourself against dark waves of fear. As it stands, gratefully, he will be Just Fine. The swelling is going down incrementally.

Now I can go back to being thankful again.