S's Hospitalisation
I wrote this quite a while ago and thought I'd post it.
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I once read these frighteningly accurate words by Tony Parsons in his book “Man and Wife”: “Once you have had a child in hospital, once you know what it is like to love a sick child, you will never be free again, because you know it could happen again and that the next time it could be worse.” But that is really another story altogether – the fear and paranoia that enter the parent after a hospital ordeal and give new meaning to checking your baby’s breathing, which more innocent parents do without nearly the same level of terror.
(This picture of O, S and myself was taken against my wishes by my visiting friend/OBGYN. He emailed it to me later and I ended up keeping it. We're in the four-bed room we stayed in during our first week)
A lot of people ask “How did you cope?” And there is really only one answer – you cope because you don’t have any choice. A major factor in your ability to cope is if your baby is recovering ok. I dread to think of what goes on in the minds and hearts of those parents who face a different or uncertain path.
Is it our human nature that we look for the silver lining in every situation or does that depend on our personality and approach to life, or circumstances? Because in the midst of the self-hate and blaming that is what I found myself doing.
We were four mothers with four different stories who lived in the same sweltering room with four babies in varying degrees of illness – some very serious.
Pani Eva had spent over two months in the children’s hospital with her premature son David who weighed less than 4 kg at four months and had undergone open heart surgery for a defect not detected until after his birth. He had spent weeks at Cardiology and Cardiosurgery, and was now being treated at Ward XX, Children’s Neurology, for various ailments including what was most probably post-traumatic epilepsy – a condition brought on by a lack of oxygen during his heart surgery. The good news was that this was something he would probably grow out of.
Our son had been transferred to Ward XX because of his loss of consciousness and neurological side effects that required further investigation, as well as intravenous antibiotic treatment. My bed was a high-tech sun lounger bought by my caring husband, which I would use as a chair next to my son’s bed during the day, and recline to sleep on at night.
The bathroom we parents were lucky enough to be able to use on the ward (without paying and walking the several hundred metres to the hospital’s main building) was so filthy I refused to shower. My washing routine was borrowed from a friend who uses the same technique on long-haul flights: soaping my body standing up in thongs then wiping myself down with a washcloth. It was not necessary to dry myself as the late June sun scorching the ward all day long ensured quick evaporation. Ear plugs and eye mask were essential to block out the low night lighting and painful sobs of a seriously ill baby two beds away. Each night I got up at 12 am and moved my lounger so the nurse could access the infusion pump on my son’s bedside table and administer his midnight dose of Acyclovir. The horror of seeing IV needles in his neck and scalp faded somewhat once they were removed.
Did you know that IV needles tend to get blocked depending on the type of drug administered? And they can’t always be cleared by rinsing. That is when your child gets taken into a special room called the “zabiegówka” and held down by a nurse and yourself – if you’re up to it – screaming (often, they ask the mother to leave), while another nurse jabs a needle at his plump limbs attempting to pierce the vein. Kids' veins are thin and hard to find; if one bursts on account of the needle, the search starts all over again. The mother suffers physically and emotionally from this ordeal. As do the nurses and – no doubt – the child being jabbed. Screams could be heard resounding through the ward and our 7-week-old son was one of the loudest. “How many?” my fellow roommates would seethe as I returned ashen-faced with my little bundle. “Four!” “Shit.” That was about the maximum number of stabs possible. The worst were bigger, more mobile babies who squirmed and wriggled furiously.
How can you keep a tiny baby who is used to on-demand breastfeeding reasonably sane in your arms, where he can feel and smell your milk-filled breasts, when he cannot be fed for seven hours prior to his MRI? It is very difficult. The nurses weren’t too happy or willing to negotiate on the number of hours my son could go without a feeding and were visibly perplexed at the sight of my tear-stained face. Finally though, his screaming gave way to exhaustion and he fell asleep. Soon after, he was hooked up to an IV which curbed his hunger a little, and my husband got to wheel him in the Ward’s shallow 1970s’ perambulator, complete with its bandaged parts (from wear and tear) to the ultra-modern MRI unit, where we had to wait yet another hour while a serious priority case was first screened – a 6-week-old girl with a growth in her eye socket requiring an immediate operation. I saw her mother by chance a few days later wheeling her about in a slightly less ancient pram belonging to Ward XIX (Neurosurgery), and the operation had thankfully been successful.
After a week in Neurology Szymon and I got offered a paid single room and we moved in right away. What luxury it was to have a whole room to ourselves! A sink only Szymon bathed in, a table and chairs, an armchair – a sink for me to brush my teeth and do my sponge-bath type routine with the hope no-one caught me as I was unable to lock the door. Midnight antibiotics continued but I no longer had to move my lounger.
But I was becoming more and more agitated. Our own room meant being left alone with my thoughts and the overwhelming sadness and hopelessness of being stuck in the hospital with my baby while my two-year-old toddler daughter, who was only just beginning to speak, was at home with her nanny and part-time father asking about Mummy and Baby. Every morning I tried at the nurses’ station to find out when we would be released. The nurses were kind but there was nothing they could do. Then, a few nights into our solo stay, a mother with a 1.5-year-old boy moved in next door. I could hear them quite well through the thin dividing wall. At night the boy would shout “Mama” in a voice sounding exactly like my daughter’s. “Yes, Malinka,” I would reply, jerked awake and jumping from my lounger.
Our last test was something primeval called the EEG – Electro-encephalogram. It is a test carried out to detect the presence or absence of epilepsy. And I can report it looks like something out of the Hitler era (or so I presume). The child must fall asleep naturally, with a million and one electrodes hooked up to their scalp to monitor their brain waves during sleep. I doubted very much that we would be able to do it in peace and the technician wasn’t very helpful. Whilst I’d had to resort to draping a soaked cloth nappy over Szymon’s face and head to stop him drifting off before the test, the technician let him fall asleep before hooking up the electrodes. Naturally he woke up during the messy process and started screaming his protest. When she finished, the technician tied up his poor little arms so that he was unable to snatch the electrodes off his scalp. Needless to say he was fully awake and agitated to the maximum. I had to rock him in my arms to calm him (despite my warnings, the technician had tried to “soothe” him by roughly and impatiently rolling him about in a blanket on the stretcher he had been supposed to sleep on for the process). When he finally fell asleep on my shoulder, I had to sit stock still so that no movement of mine accidentally registered on the EEG reading. He slept for what felt like 5 min but was actually 15, and sufficed to get a good enough reading for us to be let out of hospital the next day, but not without hearing that he had been one of the most difficult EEG patients to date. His screams could be heard – as reported by our former roommates – a whole ward away! It was recommended that we do a repeat EEG by the time he turned one but God knows I would never put a child – or myself – through that again.
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