Emergent, See?

E.R. Grey’s Anatomy. The Pitt.

I relish shows like these - the writing, the acting, the sets, the drama. It’s an alternate universe that I will never be involved in from a nursing/doctoring point of view, but I love listening to the dialogue and trying to decode the lingo. I enjoy the moments when I figure out what the patient has and I’m actually right. I think it’s cool when I hear real-life anecdotes and I can use my memory of some random episode to correctly diagnose someone else’s issue and they say, “Oh my gosh, that’s right, how did you know that!?” and I get to say, ‘From Season 4 of…”

Photo By Immo Wegmann

But you know what’s not cool?

When something’s wrong with my kid, and it’s not a TV show, it’s actually happening, and I’m not a nurse or doctor or NP or PA, I’m a frightened, helpless mother.

Friday morning, my son was in the other room minding his own business like any other day, I was crawling out of bed, and suddenly he was by my side, sobbing. He’s not usually a crier these days, so I knew something was very wrong. The last time this happened a few years back, he’d accidentally shattered his laptop screen, so I braced myself for whatever expensive item he’d dropped… but, no. He couldn’t talk. He pointed to his head. He finally got the story out: he’d sneezed very hard from his allergies, and immediately his entire head was in pain - front, back, sides, neck - and it wasn’t going away. As I threw on clothes to get him to his doctor, his pain was intensifying. We jumped in the car and I started driving to the office, and he began to feel nauseated on the way.

Google ‘sudden thunderclap headache and nausea’ and see what you get. But I’d had plenty of doc shows to tell me what I already needed to know. This could be a brain hemorrhage and he needed a CT. Now, usually I’m at least humble enough to know that not only am I not a doctor, I don’t even play one on TV, so I should leave this to the professionals, but when he began vomiting in the waiting room in the few minutes before the NP came in, I also wanted to vomit. I can’t remember ever having been quite this afraid before. And when the NP said, “We need to get him to CT, this could be a brain bleed,” I was pretty sure I might just fall over dead right there.

(It wasn’t a brain bleed.)

(I tell you that because, if your anxiety is anything like mine, even reading about this might make your stomach twinge with fear thinking about it happening to some kid you love.) But in those short-but-very-long minutes driving to CT and waiting for it to be read, every mistake I’ve ever made parenting passed before my eyes.

What is it about these horrifying moments of fear that make us re-think everything we’ve ever done? Was I losing him? If ten years were all I got with him, what could I have done differently? What could I have done better? Was this my fault? Was it too much screen time? Should I not have let him go on a new medication for his ADHD? Should I have gotten up earlier and made sure he had a Zyrtec in him so he didn’t have that big sneeze? Why didn’t I hug him longer last night before bed?

I know and am close to several people who have lost a child and I cannot truly fathom the pain this must cause. It’s a pain most of us never have to navigate, and I’ve seen more than one of them question themselves over and over about what they could have done differently, or how things might have changed ‘if only’. We tend immediately to blame ourselves, or blame someone else, or at least look for some way it could have been prevented or changed somehow. Not just with a death, but even something like this - I literally blamed myself for a sneeze. A headache. Vomiting. None of which I had any control over.

What even DO we have control over?

So, so little.

Our own actions and reactions, our tone of voice, our attitudes, our level of outreach - all these things are within our control, and we can use them to do the most important thing: build relationships. We can encourage a relationship to flourish or we can allow a relationship to wither. When it’s our own child or a child with whom we are very close, a child who we love enough to truly care about their ability to thrive, it’s within our power to help them to do just that.

We don’t have control over most emergent situations, but if the moment ever comes where we’re faced with this type of fear or even loss, at the very least we can know that we did everything in our power to love and empower and champion that child in every way for the entirety of their life.

It’s soooooo cliche to say ‘hold them a little tighter’ but, you know.

Do it.

SJS