Of course bringing home a baby for the first time after just having him was terrifying enough. I was 20 years old, so BARELY older than he, when I gave birth to him in 1988. The responsibility of taking care of another human life can be a bit overwhelming at first, and then there's the worry about how I would possibly take care of the little guy if, Heaven forbid, he were to get an ear infection. But this story is not about that stage.
It's from almost two years later, when my son, Alan, was 20 months old. I was also five months pregnant with my second son, George, at the time. We had moved away from our home state of Colorado where our families were, to Houston, Texas several months earlier. The boys' father, my husband at the time, was in Louisiana doing field work for several weeks and wasn't due to be home again for a couple of weeks. Basically, the people I knew were the realtor that helped us find the rental house we were living in, and some new acquaintances in a prenatal exercise class I'd recently joined.
I took Alan in for a well-baby check, and almost forgot to mention what I thought was a little abnormal looking. The doctor verified that I needed to take Alan to an urologist to verify if he had an inguinal hernia. Sure enough, he did, and was scheduled for surgery the following week. The nurse told me that if Alan showed any signs of a cold before the surgery, I should call and let them know.
Soon after we got the surgery scheduled, the only car we had began to have some serious issues. The short story was that I took it into a nearby shop that we could walk home from. While getting into the shop's parking lot, I'd accidentally backed into a ditch (which were abundant in Houston, and I was unaccustomed to in Colorado), so the auto shop guys kindly towed the car out of the ditch in addition to rebuilding half our engine. I suddenly was car-less and had many errands to accomplish before the surgery since I had no idea what the recovery was going to be like. Somehow we made it to the laundromat, and to the grocery store, and arranged for our kind realtor to take us to the hospital early in the morning of the surgery.
Two days before the surgery was scheduled, Alan developed a slight cold. I called the doctor's office and was told that if it gets worse I should call them back. The next day, his slight cold turned into a slight croupy cough. Again I called the office, and was told that he will be fine for the surgery, to go ahead and bring him in the next day. By this time, my intuition was screaming (the message wasn't clear though), but my lack of experience and tendency to trust the doctor took over, and I did take him in early the next morning for surgery.
I was sitting amongst other families who were waiting for their children to come out of surgery, and I noted that each time one was complete, the doctor would come and tell the family that all went well, and right on his heels would be the nurse to take the family back to the patient. Eventually our urologist showed up and told me how great the surgery went, and then he left. No nurse showed up right after him. I waited, and waited, and just as I was getting up to check at the desk, I heard over the loudspeaker: "Would the family of Alan Emanuel please come to the check in desk?" What?? That wasn't the protocol I had been observing! I went to the desk and the nurse there informed me that Alan was ready to be admitted.
"Admitted for?", I asked, frightened. The nurse realized I had no idea and called for the anesthesiologist to talk with me. The anesthesiologist informed me that Alan had developed a life-threatening croup while in surgery, and he needed to be admitted and placed in an oxygen tent and on medications so his condition could stabilize. I was taken to his room to await his arrival. I was forewarned by one of the nurses that he had a deep red tinge to his skin (due to the medication), and was having serious difficulty breathing. Even with the warning, I was not ready for what came through the door, which was a little guy, using every possible muscle he had, it seemed, to inhale air into his lungs. His chest seemed to collapse with each inhale, and the noise he made was horrendously loud and grotesquely animal-like. I spent the night with him, in his oxygen tent, listening to him breathe. He was fine to go home by the next evening, which was also the time that the car was completely repaired, and my very new friends from the exercise class picked us up and drove us to pick up the car and accompanied us home to make sure we were settled and needs were met.
By the time my husband came home two days later, the car was repaired, and Alan was completely back to his regular energetic routine. Kids bounce back amazingly quickly!
I learned a lot about myself with this whole incident that stuck through the rest of parenting those three boys. I learned to trust my intuition and act on it, and stand up for my kids. I learned that I was stronger than I thought, that I could even handle a crisis larger than an ear infection.
Just to back up a little, twenty years ago our little family of four was told that we were to move from Houston, TX, to New Orleans, LA for my husband at the time's job with an oil company. At that time our boys we had were aged 3 1/2 and 1 1/2 year old. We settled in a little town on the east side of Lake Ponchartrain called Slidell. We were a mere 10 miles from the Mississippi state line. We'd only been in Houston for 2 years at that time. Almost immediately after our move I discovered I was pregnant. About a month after that the oil company that had transferred us to Louisiana announced that in 6 months major layoffs were to commence. We spent those six months scrimping and saving just in case the job was going to be gone. We spent very little time exploring Louisiana, although we did some low-price, close-by things like picking blueberries and checking out Mississippi and a very little bit of New Orleans. We did Mardi Gras small-town Slidell-style, which was fine, actually, with the small boys. During all of this time this third child grew inside me, and I wondered how we were going to manage with three children. It was definitely a time of high stress, and I didn't have the tools to deal with it.
