Finally able to breathe again

*
"That bump is starting to look funny."
What bump?
"The bump on my hip."

A few months ago, Charlie had shown me what looked like a mosquito bite on his hip. Who gets bent out of shape about a mosquito bite? Not this mommy--I grew up covered in bug bites 'cause I didn't have the sense to go in when the sun went down. So I told him to keep it clean and it should go away in a couple of days, try not to scratch at it.

Never heard anything more about it. Until two weeks ago when the above conversation kicked things off.

I examined it, and decided we had cause for concern. It had grown to about the size of 2-3 peas clustered together, it was hard as a rock, and it had turned purple. And you could move it around in there. Time for professional help.

One small problem--I couldn't find a dermatologist at Hopkins (where I work) who could see him in a reasonable time frame. An adult dermatologist could have gotten him in, but because his legal age was only 16, he has to go to a pediatric dermatologist. (Remember, there is a discrepancy between his physical age and his legal adoption age.) The pediatric dermatologist was booked up into late September already. And they refused to let me schedule him with an adult dermatologist, even when I explained that physically he is already an adult.

Okay, phooey on Hopkins (maybe not in those exact words). I started looking outside the hallowed halls of Hopkins. And it seems like every dermatologic surgeon in Baltimore City and surrounding region was booked into September for new patient appointments.

I finally got the bright idea of going farther afield and found a dermatology practice in Frederick that could actually see him the coming week for the initial appointment.

The wonderful news was that when the doctor heard how far we had come and understood that we already knew it would have to be surgically removed, he actually agreed to do the surgery ON THE SPOT!!! That's practically unheard-of.

They excised the mass that same afternoon. The chunk of tissue he took out looked huge to me--he took really wide margins all around the mass just in case, so the incision was very long. Charlie went home feeling no pain. The local anesthetic they had given him lasted a long time. He didn't start feeling pain until just before bedtime. Once it hit, though, he wasn't real happy. It was reasonably well controlled with just ibuprofen, but it was a week before Charlie stopped asking for pain medicine.

And a week later, the pathology came back: Dermatofibroma. Benign.

Whew. I didn't realize that I'd been pretty much holding my breath for a week.

Charlie is doing great now, chafing a bit because he can't practice his karate for 2 weeks while the incision heals, but behaving himself for the most part and healing very well.

No more "mosquito bites," please!

Shredding his little heart out

Charlie likes taking things apart. Sometimes he takes apart things I really don't want taken apart. We finally came to a compromise. I would keep an eye out on my local freecycle list and when someone advertised a non-working appliance of some sort, I would go fetch it. Charlie could take those apart, and then once he figured out whatever he was trying to figure out, he could just toss them.

The problem is, Charlie is starting to fix things. I picked up a portable boom-box that the owner said the CD player was broken on. I have no idea what he did, but all it took was a screwdriver. The CD player on the boom box works.

Hmmm, this could get interesting.

I was tired of taking mail with my address on it to work to shred, but too cheap to buy a paper shredder. Yesterday someone put up a shredder on freecycle saying that it was working, but all of a sudden now it wasn't, didn't know why, not interested in trying to find a repairman, wasn't worth the cost to fix, and if anyone wanted it, come get it, maybe the trash can it sits on would still be of use.

So I answered the post and went out to get it today after church. I told Charlie that he could do whatever he wanted to it, but once he was done and ready to throw it out, don't throw out the trash can, I can use that.

We picked up groceries after picking up the shredder. When we got home, he was so eager to crack that thing open, he ran in the house and started looking for the screwdriver. Yo! China Boy!!!! Get your butt out here and help mama with the groceries!

After he finished helping out, he found the screwdriver and went to town. Next thing I know, there are little screws and pieces spread out all over the dining room table. I decide I'm going to just ignore the whole thing and let him have his fun. I started peeling and chopping veggies that I was putting into a pot of homemade chicken soup. After a few minutes, Charlie gets up and moves across the room. I figured he'd gotten bored with it....then I heard a button click and a loud whirrrr, and Charlie signs and shouts PAH!!! He had gotten it working. I pointed at the basket where the mail remains go to wait for transport to the office shredder, and he was overjoyed to have something to shred in his new toy. This is a nice shredder!

The boy is now 2 for 2.

Got any appliances you want fixed?

Busted Buses

For the past week, Charlie and I have been poring over bus schedules for the Howard County Transit System, learning which lines come near our development and where they go, how to read the schedule charts so he can figure out when they go and come back. Tonight it was time for our first field trip.

The whole idea is to make him more independent. He's home all day with nothing to do but talk to his friends on the videophone and watch TV or read (and his reading level is still somewhat limited), so I thought it would be nice if he could get out and about somewhat. Especially since the libraries are some of his favorite haunts.

Older brother Rick warned us the buses aren't always reliable, sometimes early, sometimes late, sometimes don't show up at all. He would know; after all, he used to depend on those buses to get to work. That makes him an expert.

So, when I got home from work tonight, Charlie met me at the front of the development and we went out to the bus stop. I showed him the correlation between the schedule printout and the different color lines shown on the sign for the bus stop. He gets it.

We get on the bus and pay the fare. He gets it.

We get off the bus at the library. He gets it.

Finished our business at the library, and go back outside to catch the return bus. He read the schedule correctly to figure out what time to be at the bus stop.

But the bus didn't come. And Charlie didn't get it.

There was a guy waiting there with us who had been waiting for the previous bus, as well, and THAT one never showed up, either. After waiting (and chatting) a while, I decided phooey on this, because the next (and last) bus wasn't due for another hour and a half. I called Rick, the expert, and asked him if he could come fetch us.

He had just finished cooking his dinner, and had to shove it in the fridge to heat up again once we got back. This made him none too happy. I braced myself for the inevitable "I-told-you-so's."

While we were waiting for Rick, the guy called the 1-800 number for customer service for the bus line, and they told him the bus had been in an accident. Yeah, sure--wonder how many times a day they use that excuse!

When he pulled up, I asked if he could give our new friend a ride to the MARC train station--it was only one exit out of our way and would take 3 minutes, tops. He was rather surly about it, which is unusual for him. Then as he peeled out of the parking lot, he made the comment, "...and don't say jack about my driving. I'm doing you a favor."

Really not like him to be so overtly rude, especially in front of other people like that, so I said, "You're in a really foul mood, aren't you?"

He complained, "Well, I had the fork halfway to my mouth. I'm starving!"

I merely nodded and said, "So are we...that's why we called. Next bus isn't due until after 9 pm and we haven't had dinner, either." He grumbled, but shut up and drove.

We got to the train station, and I directed him to the proper building and then turned around to the back seat, where the guy was sitting with Charlie, and I said (and signed, for Charlie's benefit) "Bye, I hope you get your car back!" (It had been towed.)

He said, "Me, too, and thank you so much for the ride to the train!"

Whereupon Rick turned around and yelled, "Holy crap, you can HEAR!!!!"

The whole time Rick was sitting there bitching about being hungry and having to come get us, he thought the guy was some deaf friend of Charlie's who couldn't hear him.

He laughed halfway home. Thank God it put him in a better mood. It improved his driving, too. :P

Am I Blue?

Tonight was Charlie's blue belt test. Needless to say.....

Stop, Thief!!!

More from the darker side series: One of the things I learned during my pre-adoption training is that if the child comes from a hard environment into what he perceives as a fantasy world where everything seems perfect, he (or she) will work very hard to be perfect so he can fit in. The child is deathly afraid of being sent back, and so becomes the perfect little angel. Always agreeable, always helpful, always...perfect.

But he can't stay perfect forever, and the point at which most kids break is six months. At that point, they start wondering whether we could possibly love them for their REAL selves, and they start pushing the envelope and acting up to test us. Their mental process at that point works something like this: "Well, they might not love me if they really knew who/what I am, and although I like it here, I just know they'll send me back someday if they knew how really bad I am--after all, my REAL parents did that. So if I show them now what I'm really like, at least I KNOW they'll send me back, and I'm the one in control of the situation, I won't be caught by surprise, 'cause I know what they'll do."

Heart-breaking, isn't it? Children actually believe that they did something bad to cause their birthparents to abandon them. What they don't realize is that WE ARE THE REAL PARENTS in this case, and we're onto them. We have to love them through this time and prove that they aren't going anywhere.

In Charlie's case this was, thankfully, short-lived.

On the dot of six months (right on schedule!) one day I had the sensation that some money was missing from my wallet. I never carry a great deal of cash, and honestly usually don't know down to the dollar what's in there, but I just felt like something was missing. So I decided to pay better attention. Sure enough, within a few more days, a $10 bill went missing, and this time I knew it was gone. I had last seen it the evening before, and shortly after that had stopped for gas. Charlie usually gets my card out of my wallet for me as we pull up to the pump, so I had a pretty good hunch when and where it had gone missing.

I was at my office, and I have videoconference ability to reach Charlie from there. Still, just for due diligence's sake, I called oldest son Rick to make sure he hadn't borrowed it, though he always lets me know if he needs to borrow anything. He hadn't. So, I called Charlie to ask if he knew anything about it. He said that he bet it fell out of my wallet and rolled under the seat of the car, and he'd be happy to check once I got home.

Yeah, right. My suspicion is that he would have gone to look for it while "palming" the bill so that he could miraculously produce it.

Well, I was headed to school after work that night and wouldn't be back until he was asleep.

When I got home from school, I did check under the seat of the car, just to be absolutely sure it wasn't there. Then I came in the house and talked to Rick to fill him in on the sitch, and said "Go get him up."

A sleepy, bleary-eyed Charlie comes down the stairs. I asked again about the $10, and got the same story as earlier--it must have fallen under the seat of the car, and if I would let him go change into his clothes, he'd go out and look for it.

Hmmm.....lemme 'splain somethin' here, kid. First, I looked under the car seat already, and guess what? It isn't there! Now let me demonstrate something. Here's my wallet. See how my cards are in the snap section, and the money is in the zip section? That means that the money was zippered into this section and couldn't get out because you only opened the snap section to get the card out for me. Oh, but let's just suppose I accidentally left the zipper section unzipped. Gosh, the darned paper money just won't fall out! (I'm shaking the wallet upside-down really hard at this point.) And gee, let's look at this--if somehow a bill did fall out (I pulled one free and let it fall), IT DOESN'T ROLL. So it isn't going under the car seat.

Okay, now I think we've established that the money did not fall out and roll under the car seat. I want to get to the bottom of this, and it's late, and I want to go to bed, too, so I will simply tell you that if you lied to me, yes, you will be punished. But if you CONTINUE to lie to me, the punishment will be even greater--you will not be going to deaf camp. So, I'm going to ask you one more time: What do you know about the $10 missing from my wallet?

I unzipped the wallet while you were pumping gas and saw the money in there and took it and put it in my pocket and I have it upstairs and if you let me get up I'll go get it right now and give it back.

He sang like a canary. Who needs waterboarding????

Yes, he was punished for the initial lie, so that he would know that misdeeds carry consequences. But he got to go to camp, and he was still entrusted to get the card out for me when we pulled into the gas station, although he knew I was keeping closer watch on the money in there.

Most importantly, we ended the night with a hug and "I love you" signs after the tears and threats were over, and he felt secure not only that the rules were in place and enforced, but that he wasn't being sent anywhere, ever. No matter what.

East Coast Tournament

Charlie competed today at the Eastern Regional Karate Championships. This is where martial artists from New York down to Florida converge on Rockville, Maryland to compete for bragging rights on being the best on the East Coast.

Last year was Charlie's first time there, and he left empty-handed after underestimating how hard it was to go up against the best. This year, he went in with a little more determination. I think he still underestimated it some, since he won all three first-place trophies at the state tournament a couple of weeks ago. He figured he'd just walk in and clean up again. Well, it didn't happen quite that way.

But he did win the third place trophy in kata! He's definitely making a name for himself. To win anything at all in this tournament is really a big deal. (I never won anything there.)

Here's a picture of the trophy and the trophy winner. If this is just the third-place trophy, can you imagine how big the first-place trophy is??? These are serious trophies! Charlie is thrilled to have one to adorn his mantel.

His next belt test is the second week of June. Hopefully he will get his blue belt then. Feel free to leave a blog comment to encourage him to study and practice hard--I'll be happy to interpret what he doesn't understand!

Here's a video of the third-best green belt kata performance on the East Coast:

Food Fight

Continuing with the series of posts about some of the challenges we came up against, I thought I'd mention an issue that we had that I wasn't prepared for despite all the "training" I went through. One of the things I learned during the prep period for the adoption was that orphans have food issues. Lots of food issues. It's not unusual for orphans to hoard food. The usual scenario in an orphanage is for the food to be set out, and the kids who are fastest get the most to eat, the others not so much. Since the kids aren't always confident that they'll get enough, they try to hide food when they can get away with it. So even when they get adopted, they aren't always sure what's going on, and even though they may get enough food at a meal to feel full, they still aren't confident that there will be more later, and they continue to hide or steal food to store up.

Charlie spent 11 years in that environment, and I found out from someone who knew him back then that yes, Charlie was fast. He got plenty of food--and promptly started passing it out to the little kids. Charlie has a soft spot for the young ones. Knowing all this, I expected him to have food issues. I was prepared for that. But they didn't surface the way we were expecting.

To start with, Charlie liked good, healthy foods and lots of them. But he never got into the junk food scene. He was utterly convinced that eating any sweets at all makes you fat. Cake? An invention of Satan. But fruits, vegetables, rice, noodles, meats, eggs? Bring 'em on!! He ate, and ate, and ate, and never seemed to really gain a spare ounce on his frame. That's when I realized how fast he was growing. For a Chinese kid, he was turning into a giant. They thought he was tall when I adopted him, but in the space of four months, he had grown three inches, and before his first year here was out, he was five inches taller. He is now taller than I.

He started coming home from school with headaches. I didn't make the connection to food right away--when my other son had started having chronic headaches in school, it was because he was dealing with a difficult social scene and didn't want to be there, so naturally I started trying to find out what about school was bothering Charlie. He said nothing was wrong. He just had headaches.

One day the school called me and said he had a fever and joint aches, I needed to come get him. So I went and picked him up. By the time I got there, the fever was gone, but he was still achy. The next day, he was still achy, but had no other symptoms whatsoever. But he was ravenous, and when he made a comment about breakfast and lunch at school being very light, something clicked in my brain.

Charlie was dorming just a couple of nights a week. On the days and nights he was home, no problem. He could eat as much as he wanted for breakfast, and then even though lunch was light, he got home from school early enough that he could eat another meal. Then he'd have yet another meal when I got home from work and made dinner. And THEN he'd eat something, usually fruit, before bed. But on the nights he was dorming, he didn't get that bedtime snack, he didn't get enough at breakfast, and lunch was light. By the time dinner came around, he had a headache because he wasn't getting enough calories to sustain the wild growth spurt his body started once he was getting enough food on a regular basis.

That explained the joint aches and constant injuries, too. His body was growing so fast that the growth plates at the ends of the long bones in the arms and legs were soft and weak. Playing hard was putting too much stress on them during this spurt, so they ached.

What really made sense once I realized all this was his hunger pains. Charlie had grown up under-nourished and growth-stunted, but because it was constant, what he lived with was an ongoing, gnawing sense of hunger. But once he started eating more and growing suddenly, when he got hungry, he was hungry RIGHT NOW and had to have food RIGHT NOW because he would start getting sharp stomach pains if he didn't.

He was literally in more pain from hunger now than he had ever been in the past.

Time for Mama Bear to take action. I promptly dashed off an e-mail to his social worker at the school and to his teacher, explained the situation and Charlie's past experiences (they were unaware of any of this), and they agreed that if I were to send in a bag of healthy foods in his luggage on dorm days, they would give him extra times throughout the day and evening to be able to eat some supplemental meals.

That solved the problem, and that situation lasted for several months. By the time Charlie started high school, his growth had leveled off some and he was eating much more normal-sized meals and not as many of them, so he has been managing just fine with dorming at the high school without having to take any supplemental food.

It just hurts to think of the constant sense of hunger he used to know, and to watch him back in the days when he would feel physical pain from sudden hunger. It hurts even more to remember the faces of all of his friends that I saw at the orphanage and know that they are still living with that and there's nothing I can do for them.

So if you're skeptical when someone tells you to clean your plate, that there are starving children in China, the answer is yes -- there really are.