growing pains

Me being me, the first time Lu started waking up screaming in the middle of the night that her leg hurt, I went into full panic mode.

When she kept it up on a regular basis, once every week or every few weeks, I panicked even more.

What was this mysterious pain in her legs, bad enough to grip her in her sleep, which would have her grabbing her shins in agony and which would suddenly go away as mysteriously as it came?

It always comes on at night. It can affect either leg. It seems to be in her shins. It lasts for a few minutes. It goes away and she goes back to sleep. Next morning it’s as if it never happened.

Then I start noticing that it mostly occurs after a day of intense physical activity. Like if she had been practicing cycling or skate-scootering.



Ah. What do I do? I Google, of course.

Turns out that there are such things as growing pains affecting kids between the ages of 3 and 10, such that they get pains in their legs either late in the day or in the middle of the night. No known cause. Neither Day or Jo had anything remotely like it.

I gather that if it were something more sinister, there would be other accompanying symptoms. I hope Dr Google is right.