Why didn't you people tell me that hives knock you out?  I depend on this information from you, you know.

Man.  Ok, so I broke out in hives Tuesday (or sometime Monday night).  Went to the doctor.  She said, "Oh yeah, those are hives," and prescribed some antihistimine, followed by the ominous words, "If it's not better by Friday, call me."

Yeah, ok.

It wasn't better by Friday.  I tell you that I have not spent so much of the night awake since I was in graduate school and I sure wasn't scratching myself raw then.  This stuff is worse than poison ivy.  At least with poison ivy, you can use the blow dryer trick and make the itch stop for a time.  No heat treatment for hives, it makes them spread.  The pharmacist recommended a 1% lidocaine spray.  I asked him, "Does this really work or is this what you're recommending so I'll go away?"  He said that, no, it really works.

Not.

Neither did calamine lotion.  Nor did mad scratching.  ARGH!  I did, however, try varying combinations of calamine and lidocaine and benedryl (at night).  Nothing worked.  At last, Friday arrived and I called the doctor bright and early, even before taking the girls to play practice and David to the pediatrician to get his stitches out.  Did they call me back?  Of course not.  About 3 ½ hours later I got a call from the nurse saying that the doctor was going to call in something that I didn't catch.  Yeah, ok, whatever.  By that point, I was too sick to care what happened.

Somehow I managed to get all the children home and fed.  Then I put the twins down for a nap and tried to sleep, to no avail.  I did finish one book that I was reading and get halfway through another.  Once I realized that the twins weren't going to go to sleep, I cast about for something to do until Friend Husband got home.  Something that wouldn't trash the house or make me work too hard, because I wasn't up for that at all.  I decided to take them outside and let them (all) run around in the warmth and sunlight.  Inspired choice.  I huddled in the shade and attempted to stay conscious.  Friend Husband, who was driving all around Cincinnati trying to find us a van to buy, called in on occasion and asked for more time to do so and I just said, "Yeah, whatever."  Sounds like my approach to most of the day.  At one point he asked me when I'd feel well enough to go to the pharmacy and get my prescription.  Um, let's see...packing up 5 children, including 2 hyperactive toddlers and driving to a grocery store to unload them and go inside to get medication.  How about in my next lifetime?  He got the picture and told me he'd pick up my meds and bring them by when his travels brought him near the house.  Yeah, whatever.

The night proceeded:  dinner and a bath for the twins, attempting to stay conscious for me.  Friend Husband brought home my goodies, which turned out to be almost the exact steroids that David is on.  Fine and dandy.  He urged me to partake of the marvelous Chinese food he brought home and to take my pills.  By this point, I didn't even want to eat (and you know I have to be very very sick to not want to eat) but I ate something and took my pills like a good girl, feeling all the while that they wouldn't help anyway.  He went back out on the van search and I put the twins to bed, where they proceeded to dump stuff all over their floor and get to Abby's treasures on the top bunk.  If you're guessing I didn't care, you're right.  Because the plague was spreading.

My saving grace before was that the hives didn't reach the bottoms of my feet or inside my mouth.  I had them on the tops of my feet and a few on my face.  Now they hit the bottom of my feet (and you know how lovely that was...to have something intensely itchy on the most ticklish part of your foot) and my lips.  The lips thing really scared me.  The doctor had said that if my tongue started swelling, I needed to call immediately and I wondered if it was the next thing to go.  I took the precaution of reminding Sarah what to do in an emergency (like Mom passing out, for instance), and attempted to breathe through the pain.

Now I've said many times here that Lamaze breathing is no good for labor.  I had 3 9+ pounders and the last two I had without any drugs.  I've got amazing pain tolerance but to "breathe through the pain", pffft!  I have found it very useful for dealing with the children after they come out or dealing with other stressful situations.  But for labor pain relief, pffft.  It did help with the pain from the hives, though.  It was weird, the pain would come in waves (sort of like labor, actually) and I could stand there and breathe through it and it would go away for a while.  That was nasty.  I thought about it for a while and realized that I had not had enough compassion for people who have chronic pain.  I don't know how they do it and I understand now why it cripples your whole life.  I took the rest of my steroids for the day and went to bed.

Glorious glorious sleep!  But first, amazing hyperness!  Steroids do that to some people, including me.  I couldn't go to sleep for the life of me, so I went into the living room and knitted a few hundred rounds on my buttonhole bag (not really, but it seemed like it).  I was finally able to go to sleep around 1 AM...but it was so very worth it.  I slept through the night.  No scratching, no mad rush to throw on more lidocaine for the 30 seconds of relief it provided.  Ahhhh...This morning I woke up in a much better frame of mind, and was much less itchy.  I'm very very tired and very very loopy but at least I'm not doing St. Vitus' dance.

I still have Sean Astin's lips though.  If you find him, could you tell him to come get them.  I don't want them anymore.