Ben Details: Wednesday.

Again, I ask that you bear with me as I process last week and write out the details. Part of my reasoning is that I can do it hear once rather than over and over in conversations and emails. = ) I promise by the end of the week I'll have other new and exciting thoughts.

Wednesday morning started off for me around 6 AM. Have I mentioned I don't do mornings? At. All. Added to that I only got about 2 hours of sleep with a t.v. blasting on the other side of the room and cushions on the chair-bed that kept sliding apart right about where my tush hit. So the headache I woke up with was no surprise.

First came the nurses to take blood pressure and temperature. They also wanted more blood from Ben because his second blood work (taken when we settled into the patient room) showed his hemoglobin had dropped and he was a little anemic. A concern given the bleeding he had on Tuesday.

I should mention that Hasbro Children's Hospital is also a teaching hospital so in addition to the regular doctors, regular specialists, regular RNs, and regular CNAs you also have all of those as students. All that to say we had a male student nurse, under 25 years old, but really fun and still excited about his chosen profession and being around children.

Ben doesn't take long to wake up - he's my morning bird. So he quickly hopped out of bed and took in his surroundings. Thankfully we had the bed by the window. A HUGE floor to ceiling window overlooking the street and ER entrance. Watching the cars drive by and the ambulances pull up provided a lasting source of entertainment during our stay.

Around 8 AM Daddy arrived. Our sweet friend, Andy, picked up Joel and the other two kids from our house. He dropped Joel off and kept Will & Ellie for the day. More accurately, his wife, Amy kept them. I've been told Will didn't want to go home and Micah also hoped they would stay the night. = ) Needless to say, they had a fun day!

Around 8 AM our on-call pediatrician, Dr. Noel, stopped by. She was on fire, let me tell ya! She could not believe they had tried to send us home from the ER the night before. She explained some of the possibilities for Ben's bleeding and stated that she wanted us to stay so we could get testing done. A little later I heard her talking with the hospital doctors in the hallway letting them know in no uncertain terms that they were to run tests and figure out why my healthy three-year-old boy was pooping blood. I couldn't help thinking she dealt with them just as passionately as if Ben were her own little guy!

The doctors decided that Ben should have nothing to eat by mouth, so there was no breakfast for us. But they wanted him to poop again. Apparently hospital doctors don't understand that in order to poop you need to EAT SOMETHING! Given that he hadn't eaten a full meal since lunch the day before I didn't expect him to poop. So I began campaigning for him to at least get a soft meal (jello, popsicle, juice) cause the poor boy was hungry.

While the doctors twiddled their thumbs over what to do with us Ben noticed something very fun from our window. The outside of the building is all angles so our window actually looked into another room around the corner from us. And guess what he could see lining the window. TOYS! Yep. Hasbro has a playroom. I'm guessing there is one on each floor but I don't know that for sure. As soon as it opened Ben and Daddy walked around the corner and played and played and played.

If you ask him about the hospital right now he'll tell you all about the playroom. Not the scary tests or getting poked with a needle or watching t.v. or the bed. Nope. The playroom had blocks! Added to all the fun toys he had Daddy's undivided attention. He was a happy little boy!

I tried to rest while the boys played. Ha! Our roommate's mom went home at 6 AM and returned mid-morning with an entourage. I'm not exaggerating! She showed up with her 19 year-old daughter, her sister, the sister's boyfriend, the sister's ONE WEEK OLD NEWBORN!!, and the sister's 4 or 5 year-old daughter. Who in their right mind takes a newborn to a hospital during flu season when you don't have to?!

Around noon my campaigning for food brought success. Ben received an extra tray with pizza, chips and a brownie. I promise I don't understand hospital thinking. First nothing to eat. Now pizza?! Needless to say he woofed it down. And not long after that he pooped. Without blood.

We hung out for the rest of the day waiting for a GI doctor to come look at Ben. When he finally came he mainly wanted to talk about constipation and straining during a bowl movement. It was so frustrating for them to keep coming back to that!! Part of the problem was the whole time Ben never had pain or looked sick. He literally ran around the room and climbed all over the place. He didn't LOOK sick. The end result of the GI consultation was that we would have a Meckel Scan on Thursday and a colonoscopy on Friday.

The Meckel Scan put a tiny amount of radioactive stuff in him and checked his intestines for an extra piece of tissue. It was explained as being sort of like an appendix only left over from being an embryo.

Daddy hung out with us for supper - gross chicken with rice pilaf. For a 3 year-old?! Ben ate jello and Daddy ate his supper. Around 7 PM I kicked Daddy out. He didn't want to leave us but the other two needed to be picked up. For the first time Ben really cried and threw a fit. He wanted to go home, also. It took super-human strength for me not to have a good crying fit along with him.

We watched t.v. while Ben calmed down. During this time I watched my very first episode of Hannah Montana. I don't understand that show at all. I also watched American Idol. Ben didn't like the girl with the striped hair. He said it looked like a skunk. = ) He also didn't like the way most of them sang and couldn't understand why the songs weren't about God or Jesus. = )

We took a quick walk around the floor and then got ready for bed. Ben wanted me to sleep with him, which I was o.k. with! As we settled in, JayQwan (our roommate) woke up. His mom & entourage had left around supper. He woke of crying, wailing, asking for his mom. I went and got a nurse who I truly believe should not be a pediatric nurse. Her empathy was greatly lacking.

I lay in bed snuggling my sleeping little guy and JayQwan cried, "Momma, where are you!? Momma, come back! I want my momma. I wanna go home." For over half an hour. You can understand that I cried right along with that poor little boy! The nurse just stood over him patting his back, telling him "don't cry she'll be back." Eventually a CNA came in and watched t.v. with him.

Finally his mom showed up. LIVID that the nurses had the audacity to call her back to the hospital. "This is their job. That's what they get paid to do. I don't get paid to do this. I haven't had any sleep or rest. I just got home for 5 minutes and here they are calling me back up to the hospital." On and on she ranted into her cell phone for another hour. While the t.v. blasted and that sweet little boy sat beside her in his hospital bed.

And so ended another exciting night in the hospital. Exhausted does not even begin to describe my physical, mental and emotional state.