Pain

When Rachel gets undressed at night the first thing she does is sit down to pull her shoes off. It was a little sad this morning to watch her sit down on her bed and keep touching her feet. I know she got a little confused and was trying to take off shoes that aren't there, but she didn't seem able to move past the mistake on her own. At dinner last night she kept picking up her food with her right hand and placing it on the spoon she held with her left hand, and then putting it in her mouth. She used to be such a meticulous eater and couldn't stand to have her hands get food on them, and she almost never spilled anything. Lately she's been eating completely with her hands or a combination of her hand and spoon. I'm not at all sure why. I got her to color in her coloring book the other day. Sort of, anyway. She colored in the book and traded colors of crayons when I asked her if she wanted another color. Mostly she moved her hand with the crayon in it while she stared off into space. Sometimes the crayon connected with the book, and sometimes it didn't.

This morning when she walked out the door to go to school she was talking about falling down and hurting and blood. I'm wondering if this is a memory or a dream or just something she was thinking about on her own. When her youngest brother was in elementary school he came home one day and his eye looked a little red and swollen. I asked him about it and he told me someone had accidentally hit him in the eye, but it was okay and it didn't hurt, it just itched a little, so I didn't worry about it. About a half hour later his eye looked even worse, and when I asked him to tell me again what happened and how long ago, he couldn't tell me much. I kept trying to get answers from him, because it was obviously more than just a small tap on the eyebrow, and it couldn't have happened earlier in the day since it was still getting worse. He kept trying to come up with a story that would make me happy, but he couldn't. When the other eye started turning red, I realized that it must be allergies. By the time we talked to the Doctor and got some medicine for him, both eyes were swollen shut and the whites of his eyes were all swollen, too. He looked like something from a horror movie. It was no wonder he couldn't explain to me what had happened to make his eye turn red. My initial insistence that something that would make his eye that red would have made enough of an impact that he would certainly remember, and that I wasn't going to get whoever hit him in trouble, I just wanted to know what happened, was totally off base. It was interesting to see him try and explain to me something that he didn't understand. I wonder if that is what Rachel is doing. She talks about blood a lot, and talks about falling down and things hurting. I wonder if she hurts somewhere and doesn't know why, or possibly can't even pinpoint where it hurts, so she's trying to come up with a scenario that would explain the pain. I know that when I've hurt myself badly, I dream about being hurt. She talks a lot about pain and blood in the morning. I don't know if it's a result of a dream or not being a morning person. I wish I could communicate with her better.

This morning I was going to go run my four miles, clean my kitchen and living room, and sort through some books. But I have a little bit of a headache that I'm hoping will go away. It's not bad enough that I can't function, but it hurts enough that I don't want to do anything that makes me move too much, so instead I've done a little reading and some thinking, sitting and looking out the window.

I really wonder if Rachel hurts all the time, and that's why she wants to just sit and doesn't engage in activities or with people like she used to. I don't know how to find the answer to that. I feel like all I can do is make up a story that might explain what the facts are, but I don't have the information I need to get it right.