Bad Parent: The Sickest Baby on the Block
After months of "wait and see," I finally embraced modern medicine.
by Kim Brooks
March 12, 2009
A few weeks before our son was born, my husband and I made a wager. I asked him how many times he thought we'd bring our little bundle to the doctor's office in his first year of life (not counting check-ups or wellness visits). After a series of complex algorithms involving our own mutually-reinforcing anxiety disorders, our childhood histories of real and imagined ailments, and the vet bill we'd accumulated over the course of our married life — Dr. Tyler knows our terrier by name — we set the over-under at ten.
"Ten," we sometimes say now, a year later, and smile, the same way we might smile at an expecting couple who says something like, "I guess we'll have less 'us' time once the baby arrives."
When we made this wager, we didn't realize that I'd be delivering what our pediatrician called one of the sickest healthy babies she'd ever seen. Right from the beginning his physical condition was a mixed bag that kept us constantly wavering between gratefulness that he was "basically healthy" and despair at all the problems that fell outside of this label.
The worrying began when, at some point during his thirty-two hour sojourn down the birth canal, he grew a bit impatient and let his dry-land digestive track kick in too early. "There's definitely meconium here," the midwife said as he was crowning. A few minutes later, after they'd suctioned the goop out of his lungs, we could still hear it, a faint, wheezy rattling in his breath, just enough to make them want to watch him awhile in the nursery while my blood pressure went into high gear.
Instead of going on vacation, we hunkered down for a twelve-day extravaganza of hacking and coughing.
Over the next couple days, his meconium problems resolved themselves, and we entered what I would later come to think of as the baby's medical honeymoon, a three-month period when, except for acid reflux and the resulting fussiness, everything seemed to be going smoothly.
Then came Christmas week, along with his three-month birthday and his first and most formidable respiratory bug. This was the week we were supposed to spend on a family vacation in Mexico, slathering Roscoe's little white body in 80 spf sunscreen and dipping his feet in the surf. Instead, we hunkered down in arctic Chicago for a twelve-day extravaganza of hacking and coughing and snot, of bulb suctioning our little guy's nasal passages and administering Albuterol breathing treatments with a nebulizer and giving him a medicinal cocktail of antibiotics, oral steroids, and Tylenol, rushing him back and forth to the doctor's office, where they listened to his wheezing lungs, monitored his infected ears, and on two separate occasions, sent us to the hospital emergency room for further observation.
©2009 Kim Brooks and Babble
About the Author
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Kim Brooks has written for Glimmer Train, One Story, Epoch
and the Missouri Review. She also writes non-fiction for
The Crier. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son. |
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