Cross your fingers and count your blessings.

With everything else going on this weekend, I don’t think I told you that I snuck in a follow-up appointment for Miss Bee with her pretty, pretty allergist. It was kinda nutsy, keeping the appointment when I had missed work for two appointments and a stomach bug already that week, and the invading army of feral ants waiting for me at home, and a party to get ready for, and and and…. But I kinda sorta needed to find out if Bee’s hivies had given up their secrets: was there a cure? Or was she just plain cursed?

I don’t know if driving through horrid rush hour traffic across and then south of the city took the romance out of it, but this time I found it a lot easy to pay attention to the words coming out of Dr. Hivey’s mouth. Maybe it was the fact that Bee kept shifting on the paper table liner, creating a deafening thunder of crinkle, or maybe it was because Gracie had decided to drape herself all over my lap and be inappropriately lovey-dovey when I was trying to pay attention. (Kids – can you ever win?!) In any case, I think I aced the part where the little cartoon hearts above my head weren’t noticeable. Thank you, children, for dashing the five minutes of fun I could have had in my head. (Insert mock heavy sigh here.)

So, the long and short of our 10 minute conversation was that they have no idea what’s going on. Bee didn’t have any of the multitude of rare diseases they tested for. Neither did she have any allergies that were off the chart. She did pop for year-long molds and also for dogs, but since she’s not noticeably worse when she comes back from her dad’s house with their three dogs, Dr. Hivey doesn’t think the dogs are what’s causing the hives. After finishing our way through the maze of tests they ran, I asked what our next step was. You know, since nothing we’ve done so far has given us any sort of clue.

“Well, I’d wait until she’s been rock solid on her meds without a break-out for three or four weeks and then just stop them and see what happens.”

Well. That was worth an hour of rush hour traffic and $27.

“I know I wouldn’t want to hear this if it was my kid, but you really have it easier than most. I see people who come in on four or five medications and they’re still covered with hives. At least Bee’s are under control.”

And he’s right. At least we can keep the hivies away. If it turns out that we can’t – well, there goes the only hope left: that this is a virus that is just taking its sweet time running its course. If Bee can keep stretching out the number of days she can go med-free between breakouts (she improved from 3 days to 5 days hive-free last time we went cold turkey), then we’ll know she’s slowly getting over her neverending hives. And, well, there’s the chance they won’t ever go away. So it really is like he said – we just gotta cross our fingers and count our blessings. And maybe buy mama some stock in zyrtec.

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Tags: health, hives