Poor baby boy

We are not having a lucky winter season at our house. Calvin is in the hospital with a bronchial infection that has turned to pneumonia. We’ve been here since Monday night—Calvin and I—and are likely to be here another day or two while the antibiotics and other treatments take their effect on our poor boy.

Besides the birth of my kids, I’ve never been a patient myself but now both Audrey and Calvin have spent time here on the pediatric unit and I spend most of my hours with them trying to imagine what it is like to be so tiny, and in such strange circumstances feeling as bad as they do. How I wish that I could make this happen to me instead, so that they didn’t have to take it.

I hate the bleeping machinery. More than once I have wanted to page a nurse just to ask if I could borrow a hammer. Nothing like waking up in the middle of the night-- a night in which you have slept a total of 30 minutes-- to a blaring machine telling you your child is low on oxygen, except that he isn’t because the machine is never giving an accurate read but doctor’s orders are that he remain on the bleeping machinery all night. Enough to make a sleep-deprived person lose her bleeping mind.

Here’s what was running through my mind in the wee hours of the morning while I lay in my fold-out-chair-bed on the floor next to Calvin’s crib, listening to him wheeze and the machines around him buzz and hum and occasionally blare out alarmingly. First, I just felt incredibly sorry for him, and for me, and for Scott and Audrey who are at home missing us. And then I thought, Hang on a minute! We’re so much luckier than everyone in Haiti and a hundred other places in the world where you can’t get medical care like this, or medical care at all. The differences between Calvin, right now, and sick babies in Haiti? Well, four walls and a ceiling for starters. And round-the-clock care and medicines, plus staff who are here at the press of a button to get us whatever we need. It’s easy to see why children die so commonly of very simply respiratory illness; a child who is congested becomes tired and can’t breathe or feed well. A child who can’t breathe or feed becomes dehydrated and low on oxygen, making it even harder to breathe and feed. Plus congestion in a child who can’t clear their airways well can easily turn to pneumonia, so a cold can turn into life-threatening illness in a matter of days. All of this is to say, I am going back to the UNICEF website to donate. The amount of money that Calvin’s hospital stay will cost me, and my insurance company, would probably save the lives of a hundred children who just need IV fluids for a few measly hours. Which is just absurdly unfair, and cruel.

And since this is already the longest blog posting ever, I have a word or two to say about my new dairy-free, wheat-free diet to help soothe Calvin’s apparent allergies, and that word is “BLECH.” I hate things that pretend to be other things. Like soy that pretends to be dairy. I don’t care if I only eat fruits and veggies and rice products for a year—soy cheese is just pointless, and disgusting. And if you’ve never had gluten-free toast before, let me help you imagine it. Think buttered kitchen sponge. Wait. I mean, a non-dairy buttery spread pretending to be butter. On a kitchen sponge. Double blech.

Calvin is sleeping peacefully now, as I imagine all of my readers are now after this long ramble, so I will sign off with just one more thing: thank you to the angelic nurse who placed Calvin’s IV last night so quickly and accurately. I cried more than he did. And the IV is bringing him all the medicine and water that will make him well. Now I really am going to the UNICEF site. Please follow me there.