Have you checked the weather forecast, and are you prepared? ☔
This post is from The Friday Feels archives, and was written in December of 2019. If only I knew what 2020 had coming…
Sometimes when it rains, it really freaking pours.
And that downpour can be so relentless that you wonder whether or not you'll drown in it. Which then makes you feel guilty because really, it could be worse so like a hurricane or tsunami so hashtag gratitude, right?
Well grab an umbrella, friend.
Because this email is coming at you after a helluva week over here at Casa Sones.
Yeah yeah, it was Christmas which is always a bit of a crazy time, but I wasn't too worried heading into the weekend before the holiday blitz because I felt like I was ready this year.
Ha ha ha.
I mean, I hadn't quite wrapped all the work I wanted to by Friday PM, but I had a sitter coming on Saturday and felt confident that there was plenty of time to finish what I needed to.
Ha ha ha. I know.
I picked the kids up from daycare on Friday and thought that my youngest looked a little red around the eyes — nothing crazy, but he would probably come down with a cold. Typical for the festive season.
He was still in good spirits so off we went to a friend's house for dinner and drinks.
Then on Saturday morning, little man came crawling into our bed and he was definitely sick. Congested, a little warm, and oh-so-cuddly.
(It always sucks seeing them feel crappy, but there is nothing more delicious than those snugs.)
I cancelled the sitter because it would be a dick move to get her sick pre-Christmas, and my baby just wanted his mom. So we settled in, and he got worse.
There's this really annoying mental game that starts to play out when your kid is sick. No one wants to be "that mom" who "overreacts" and brings her kid in for every little sniffle...but also, you don't want to be the asshole who let her kid suffer when he clearly needed medical attention.
It feels like that should be a clear-cut line but it just never is.
What tipped the scales for me was:
He was crying a lot. It's normal for infants to scream for hours for no reason, but that's not usually the case for toddlers. And in this case, my little boo was crying and saying "Ow, it hurts" for over an hour.
His fever was getting worse and his chest was getting more congested. You get used to listening for different types of coughs when your kid is sick — if it's a barking cough, versus a dry shallow cough, versus a deep chesty cough...the list goes on. Also, you don't tend to see high fevers with harmless colds.
He was having difficulty breathing. That was a massive red flag for me. And the thing is, it wasn't just wheezing or what I would have expected...it was laboured breathing. He was working so hard to get each breath out, and his breathing pattern was so uneven. His heart was racing, and mine was breaking.
Joe came in from work, we talked about it, and agreed that it was time to take him to a doctor. I couldn't shake the feeling that this wasn't just a cold, and there had to be something they could do to make him more comfortable. If I was wrong, they would send him back home with an explanation for why this wasn't as big of a deal as we thought. Live and learn, right?
The walk-in clinics weren't taking anymore patients for the day so we agreed that Joe would take him to emerg (because I would just cry) and I stayed home with our oldest. I really thought that I would see them home by dinner.
But instead of sending them home, the doctors sent our little for x-rays and discovered the early onset of bacterial pneumonia.
My baby's right lung was blocked up by a mucous plug, and the harder he worked to clear it via coughing, the more inflamed his airways got. The cycle of unproductive coughing had triggered an asthmatic attack, and now he was trying to fight that alongside the pneumonia.
His heart rate was up to 185 bpm, his oxygen levels had dropped below 90 — which is the red flag problem zone — and he was miserable. They started him on antibiotics and a few rounds of steroids to try and bring the inflammation down and he started improving slowly, but not enough for the doctors to feel comfortable sending him home.
Honestly, I couldn't get over how quickly this all happened...in less than 12 hours we went from "it looks like he has a cold" to "it's a really good thing you brought him in when you did."
I feel like I still haven't processed that.
Anyway. Joe and I traded kids + places for the night, and I settled in for hourly doses of medication, monitoring vitals, and trying to co-sleep with a sick toddler who was completely hopped up on steroids.
We were up all night...my Fitbit literally registered no hours of sleep...and then Joe and I tag-teamed again on Sunday morning. And then again on Sunday afternoon.
We finally got sent home at 9:30PM on Sunday night, with scout's honour promises that we would keep up the rigid medication protocol that had been started. They wanted to keep us longer, but the peds ward wasn’t set up for stays longer than 48 hrs, and they would have had to transport my baby to another hospital by ambulance…to start the whole testing process over.
There was a lot of conversation with the medical team, and ultimately they agreed that he would get more quality rest at home, and that we could always bring him back.
...obviously there were a lot of details that happened in there, but dear lord I'm losing steam because after all of that, we survived Christmas, and then I got a stomach bug on Boxing Day.
WTAF, universe. That hardly seems fair.
My kid lands in the hospital and then I get to barf my guts out?! Give. Me. A. Break...one that doesn't include vomiting, in case that needed to be spelled out for you.
Anyway. I wanted to put together some sort of cleaned up "things I learned from the peds ward" stuff with this email, but what I want to do more than that is take a nap.
So. The short version it is.
Basically, when shit hits the fan, people want to help but don't always know how to be helpful. Here are things that were a-mah-zing:
Friends who took the kid who wasn't in the hospital
Friends who brought food for us to eat and coffee to drink
Help getting the house back in order when we were home
Messages of support that included "No need to respond, just letting you know..." and offers to talk and decompress after everything settled
All of that support was offered — we didn’t have to reach out and ask.
That was an absolute gift because we couldn’t even think straight.
I also routinely needed the reminder that even though things could be worse, because that’s what I kept saying for some reason. As an attempt to short circuit to gratitude or something? But the reality is that whatever I was feeling when things were hard were still very valid → Yes, it would have been "worse" if we were facing emergency surgery for a brain tumour or something. But that doesn't mean it isn't heartbreaking when your child is struggling to breathe and you can't make it better.
And here’s the other thing:
Your brain + body aren't great at distinguishing between actual danger and the fear of it.
So the perceived threat needs to be acknowledged so it can be put in its place and processed.
Or something.
I'm sure there's more to be uncovered in all of this, and more of it will come...but holy hannah right now I need some sleep. So I'm going to sign off and get my butt in bed (jokes — my butt's already in bed!)
Until next time,
Justine
PS. Want to get these emails in real-time and not 7 months later when they finally make their way onto the blog? Sign up for The Friday Feels!