Category Archives: instinct

What to Bring

bagIf you are ever the person I was, packing a car to drive to the hospital for your daughter’s seventeenth time under general anesthesia (this time, to move her aorta away from her esophagus), you will need to bring many things with you. Take notes. I know exactly what you will need, if you are ever the person I was.

First of all, you need clothes for you. You need soft pants and a roomy shirt to sleep in on an uncomfortable set of cushions by the window, cushions whose ill-suitedness for restful sleep you will not notice as you sink, delirious with exhaustion, in and out of a black slumber twenty times a night. You need thick socks and slip-on shoes so that you can perch on the edge of the bed and then jump off quickly to skitter across the room and grab the emesis basin, the phone, the nurse’s call button. You need more hooded sweatshirts than you would have predicted. You will be far colder than one would expect.

You do not need clothes for your daughter. Though you may have thought ahead to the incisions and the need for button-down as opposed to pull-over pajamas, you have somehow forgotten the snaking tubes and lines and leads and wires that would need to be disconnected in order to manage something as complicated as sleeves. She will only need hospital gowns. The pajama bottoms, while a nice touch, are only an impediment to quick bathroom trips, of which there will be many.

Perhaps, just bring her some socks. Continue Reading…

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The Second Time Is Different

Sending a baby into cardiac surgery is hard.

I brought Sammi to the hospital that morning in 2006, and she was wearing fleece pajamas covered in frogs. She was 13 months old and had a light layer of soft duck-fluff hair that stuck to my face when I cried, but she had perhaps a word or two in her vocabulary, neither appropriate for anything approaching real communication. She was beautiful and soft, and she smelled wonderful, and I could trace the shape her body made on my torso as she laid there, but had I lost her that day, far more of what I would lose of her was in the future and amorphous. Our experiences together until then were primal still — nursing and holding, touch and smell, fear and love.

It was all uncertain then: who would she be? what was she like when she was not sick? how would her voice sound when she learned to sing? 

She was a mystery, yet, and grieving a mystery is still grieving, but it’s fuzzy and intangible. I would never know quite what to miss. Continue Reading…

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Terrible Conversation, Part II

conversationGiving a child bad news hurts on every level. Integrity tells us to be honest, realistic, straightforward. Nurturing tells us to soften the blow. Getting the combination right means compromising both.

When we had to tell our daughter Sammi just before her fourth birthday that she had been diagnosed with an inflammatory disorder called eosinophilic esophagitis, we did it in an age-appropriate way that, thankfully, also forced us to simplify the problem for ourselves. The new diagnosis meant a host of food restrictions that would change over time, but we focused on the first six weeks that would exclude dairy, eggs, soy, nuts, and wheat. I wrote about that conversation in a previous post:

We explained that we had good news; we now knew why Sammi’s food kept coming back into her mouth. Her esophagus was sick! We drew a body on paper, showed them where the esophagus was, drew a frown on it. We talked about allergies, about our friend’s daughter with celiac disease, about feeling crummy and then feeling better. We brought out the list of allowed foods and cheered along as favorites were listed.

At that young age, she was hardly able to comprehend it. Sammi ate what we gave her, followed the rules, and over the course of the next three-and-a-half years, endured more than a dozen endoscopies. She did everything we asked. She even participated in a barium swallow study and a strange and very uncomfortable CT scan without ever asking us why.

Sometimes, I feel horribly guilty that she never asked why. Continue Reading…

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Checking In With You

snowDear Reader,

I am writing to you from the window of a coffeeshop. I sip from my hot mocha, listen to my headphones, and look out at the cars going by. Where I live, there has just been snowfall, and the pedestrians are like me on my walk here: bundled, hunched against the cold, hurrying. Inside, people surround me, but I’m trying not to engage with them.

I’m thinking about you. Who are you? Why have you come?

For years, I spent countless intent hours searching for information that would help me solve the mystery of my daughter’s health issues. Even when we thought we had a solid diagnosis — laryngomalacia when she was an infant, repaired double aortic arch when she was a baby, reflux when she was a toddler, eosinophilic esophagitis when she was a little girl — I wanted to know how to handle it. I wanted to know how other parents made their children’s lives easier despite the diagnoses. I wanted to know how other parents made their own lives easier despite the diagnosis.

I was hungry for connection and knowledge. I was desperate for validation, advice, and other parents to either assuage my fears or tell me how they made their peace with the same ones. Continue Reading…

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The Tools of Resilience

“It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty – and said ‘do the best you can with these, they will have to do’. And mostly, against all odds, they do.”  -Anne Lamott

Between December of 2013 and April of tools2014, my husband and I method-acted our way through parenting. As we waited for what we hoped would be life-changing surgery for our eight-year-old daughter, Sammi, we knew that no good could come of either her or her eleven-year-old sister knowing what was ahead. We told our adult friends and our adult family members, but we let nothing slip through the age barriers we’d set.

For our children, those five months passed with an innocence we protected only slightly harder than we coveted it. Continue Reading…

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