Just Rewards

The night my sister was born, my whole family was already in the hospital. Not with my mother though; they were all in the emergency room with little 2-year-old me, who had had a febrile seizure. (Oh, fun. I just read that link, and kids are much more likely to get febrile seizures if their parents had them. Since I had them AND my mom had them, my kids don't stand a chance. I can't wait. 'Cause, you know, seizures aren't scary or anything.) My mother apparently went into labor while all the doctors were working with me, but was so focused on her two-year-old, she wouldn't admit she was in labor until one of the nurses asked her if she was. They rushed her to a different hospital, where my sister was born while my grandparents stayed with me. It all worked out in the end, but I've always gotten the sense that I kind of ruined Dewey's original birthday with my seizure-spinal tap-hospital attention-grabbing ways.
Early early early on Wednesday morning, we awoke to Dewey screaming in excruciating pain. Unsure of what it was or if it was related to the (relatively minor) bike accident she'd been in on Tuesday afternoon or the tylenol with codeine they'd given her after the cleaned out the nasty gash she got, my mother called the ambulance to come and take her to the hospital.
And thus my entire family plus Manoli spent the wee hours of my birthday in the hospital with my sister, who turned out to have a bruised pancreas.
Only fair? I think so. Twenty years in the making? Definitely.
Dewey got to have a badass bruised pancreas, though, and all I got was a spinal tap I was too young to remember.