Cub Scouts to the Rescue!

Today was one of *those* days...you know the kind, more than you can deal with. It started when I woke up. (Maybe that was my first mistake.) I've struggled for months now with headaches that come from a "kink" in my neck. I've gone through umpteen pillows trying to find one that suits my neck. The one I have right now has given me the best results, but that just means I wake up with a headache 4-5 days a week instead of 6-7. Anyway, I woke up with a headache. I also had to work.

When I got to work, I made myself a bowl of grits with butter and salt...just how I like them. I keep a few things at work for meals since I can't leave the shop to purchase food. I had butter stashed in the fridge too. All was well. I even have a large bottle of water there so I can avoid the nasty nasty tap water that comes through the ancient pipes at the shop. All is good, right?

Maybe an hour later ( I lost track of time here ) I decided the headache was becoming intolerable. I've got a bottle of Excedrin Migraine I keep in my purse for headaches that take over. I hate taking them, but they work when the headache is so severe and I have nobody to rub my neck and try to get vertebrae to go back where they belong. This was one of those days, so I took some Excedrin. About an hour later, I was so sick that I was hanging my head over the cold porcelain sink in the kitchen wishing I could throw up or die. My head hurt so bad that I couldn't see clearly and Facebook was not enough of a distraction. Thankfully, customers were few and far between so I didn't have to do any real thinking and I had already written my newsletter and blog article the day before. I finally had Manti bring me some lunch thinking possibly it was from lack of sleep, or from sleeping funny....but it could also be that I just needed some protein in my system. He brought me a salad from chick fil a. I ate a couple bites of the chicken, but I nearly lost that. It took me most of the day to eat those 3 small pieces of chicken in my salad. I never did touch the lettuce. It was horrible! I called Tommy. He suggested the butter might have been a little old or exposed in the shop fridge, so I should take some charcoal caps. (That's what you do for food poison...they even do it at the hospital.) I took some, and for a short time, the nausea eased in intensity, but not totally.

Finally, it was 3:45pm and Tommy brought the kids to me. We had cub scouts today and he had a doctors appointment at the same time. So Mesa came in to the kitchen where i was and started massaging my neck and head. I got bits of relief here and there as things shifted under her fingers. THEN my boss walked in to relieve me so I could go to scouts. It was a bigger relief than she knows!

We get to scouts and the boys are being SUCH boys.....loud! I thought my head would explode. We had our opening and we separated into age groups. My boys were going learn some knot tying. I only have 2 boys officially (Luke and Morgan), but sometimes I also have Jared (my 5 year old) and Tristan (my friend's 6 year old) who are what we call "Honorary Cub Scouts". We include them so they find out that scouting is awesome fun and want to participate when they get old enough. We're successful with that so far.

We tie our knots, we tie neckties, we do all our "work" and are ready to play. The whole hour we were in our room though, we had no air conditioning. It got hotter and hotter and I decided we couldn't stay in that room any longer....it was 99 degrees today! I had the boys start picking things up under Mesa's supervision and I went to check to see if the other group of boys was ready to stop and play a game with us or not. Their room had A/C! They wanted to play our game too, so I went back to my room to collect my boys and join the others. Mesa was in the floor though! They boys told me that Mesa fell backwards and her head went "THUMP" on the floor. She kept laying there after that. I asked if she was playing and they said no, they didn't think it was a joke. They thought she passed out, but she wasn't bleeding. I leaned down to look closer. She was just laying on her back, eyes closed, breathing quite shallow. I nudged slightly and said "Mesa, are you playing? Don't play like this." She didn't move. Mesa can't help herself, she would have cracked a grin if she was playing around. She didn't this time. My alarms in my head went to shrieking. I touched her shoulder and moved it slightly, not wanting to shake her, but wanting to shake her to bits at the same time. I talked to her as calmly as possible and told her she needed to get up, that she was in the floor and we needed to go to the other room where it wasn't so hot.

Mesa is a sleep walker, always has been. When she walks in her sleep, she has a way about her that doesn't verbally respond, but she does make slight grunt noises and she moves very deliberately like she's trying to go back to doing what she was doing...but she wants to do it like she is doing it knowledgeably. That's how she was acting as she got up from the floor and her eyes very deliberately opened. She sat up, stood up, walked around as if she was picking things up and leaving the room. So I started asking her what happened. That's when she realized her head was hurting. She didn't talk a lot at first and she was quite pale. She had no idea what happened, and she vaguely remembered the floor hitting her head. Her skin felt very hot and clammy, so I got hold of her arm and carried the few things I needed to the other scout room. Together we all joined the older boys and they played a game with cookies. I'll have to blog about that game by itself...it was hilarious.

While the boys played, I collapsed in a chair and watched. That's when it dawned on me what all had happened. Two weeks ago, I had one of the doctors from church come in and teach some very basic first aid to the boys. They listened, but they were all show-offs at the time too and I figured they all knew how to put a band-aid on and that was likely all they retained from the class. I was so wrong! These little boys did not panic. They just went right to checking on Mesa to see if she was bleeding. They told me EXACTLY what they saw and they were willing to do what I needed them to so they could help her further. They got out of my way right off the bat without me having a chance to get flustered about it. That let me not panic and get right to the issue and take care of things.

They did exactly the right things!

Now that might not sound like extraordinary..... but then it again it might if you knew that these boys are quite young. Jared is 5, Luke is 8 and Morgan is 9.

And Mesa is just fine. She was overheated. She hit the back of her head on the tile floor, so she has a bump now and a headache, but she is otherwise just fine....

Thanks to my little first responders!