Maybe a Personal Essay? Ramblings and Reflections on my First Crisis as a Dad
By: Gabe Feingold
Tags: Covid 19, Hospital, Baby, Parenting, Fatherhood

I’m fairly private when it comes to serious things and my feelings (even with those I love). The never-ending thoughts that swirl through my brain as someone with ADD, anxiety, and OCD tendencies is where my self-reflection is done — not in writing.

So, writing this isn’t me. I’m not 100% sure what “inspired” me to do so or if this is for anyone other than myself (not knowing your target audience is a key trait of a great marketer). Maybe this is a sign of personal growth that’s come with becoming a dad. Or maybe I just needed something to do during my 5-month-old son’s second and third days in the hospital.

I struggle to live in the moment. I spend a lot of time in my head, running through scenarios, thinking about what’s next vs. what’s now. In crisis, I’m the opposite: hyper-focused on immediately what’s in front of me.

On my honeymoon, my wife and I were on a kayak in Maui when an Apple alert told us a missile was hitting Hawaii. I feel guilty for not calling loved ones to say goodbye; it didn’t cross my mind. It was: get to land, get in our car, drive as fast as possible, and seek shelter. (like cowering in a bathtub at the Marriot Wailea Beach was going to save us from a nuke).

That’s what my first eight hours at the ER with my son were like: What can I do right now to help. I didn’t eat, drink or use the bathroom for eight hours and didn’t even notice. COVID forced me to go home at night so my wife (and her magical breasts) could spend the night with our son. That started my endless cycle of ruminating to myself about what’s next for my little guy, was he going to be OK, yada yada yada. That’s how I process.

Writing this as he naps, I’m unsure if this is me living in the moment or not. It’s certainly a version of retreating into myself to process. But I am alone in a small hospital room.

So, what exactly is going on?

It started when my son did his best exorcist impression and shot out what looked like enough breast milk to fill a small pool. As my wife freaked out, I failed to convince the dog to clean up for us. My son then starting diarrhea’ing in a way that should only be appropriate after eating Halal Guys. Side note — Halal Guys is the absolute best and please don’t let this stop you from patronizing them, should they have a location in your city.

This went on for a couple days, and he got super dehydrated. Whenever he peed, it was like a mini celebration in our house. One time when he had gone seven and a half hours without peeing (eight is apparently the danger zone), he suddenly peed and pooped all over himself on his changing table. My wife gleefully yelled, “He’s covered in piss and shit!”

After a couple days and a half dozen calls with on-call nurses, things didn’t get better. We took him to see his pediatrician (thank you Dr. Sarah for your amazing care through this ordeal). Besides the dehydration, everything looked good. Diagnosis: bad stomach bug. How does a baby in quarantine with parents going nowhere, seeing no one, get a bug? That’s my boy, I guess. You can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it.

He was refusing to eat breast milk from boob and bottle, so we were feeding him Pedialyte from a syringe, a few milliliters at a time. We went through 1.5 liters. So, imagine how many individual feeds that was (basic math says about 500). And, he hated every single one of them.

He was closing his mouth and spitting out what he could. He even figured out that by grabbing and pulling the top of the syringe, we’d spill all the liquid. A very effective short-term strategy and wonderful sign that his eye-hand coordination will fuel him to becoming the next great 5’3” baseball player. I’d say the next Jose Altuve but fuck the Astros.

The most effective method was when he was crying with his mouth was open, we’d shoot the Pedialyte down his throat. At one point it was too much, or it went down the wrong pipe and he started to choke; I felt like I was water boarding him. His mom made me readjust my syringing style.

He started to seem like he turned a corner. He was still having his Halal Guys poops (seriously though, Halal Guys is amazing and worth it), but he hadn’t vomited, was eating a little more, and perking up a bit. We felt over the hump, as our Pediatrician predicted.

And then his lethargy came back. He restarted his hunger strike that would have made Gandhi proud (how much he refused to eat, not that he stopped and then restarted). Vomiting reintroduced itself. Our pediatrician told us it was ER time. My wife was working and felt she may not be able to emotionally handle seeing him in the ER after so many trying days.

I masked up and went on my way. We got a private 3’ by 8’ windowless ER room with a doctor’s table and chair and not much else. They did all their intake exams. He was dehydrated. They took him to a separate room to draw blood for analysis and get the IV set up. They also stuck a catheter up his penis to make sure he didn’t have a UTI. As someone with a penis, it looked like the worst thing ever. His crying confirmed it.

When something shitty is happening and you can’t do squat, it’s defeating. It’s on steroids when it’s your kid. Watching him lose his shit so many times with no clue what was going on made me feel like a bad parent. I just said, “It’s okay; they’re helping you. Penises are meant to have tubes 5x longer than your actual penis jammed up them.” Unfortunately, he didn’t understand. His vocabulary is limited to the contents of Moo Baa La La La and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. Those moments were the hardest for me.

I was good at convincing myself this was just a really bad stomach virus and not something serious. Babies usually come in and they’re one and done with fluids, like top NBA prospects. But he wasn’t staying hydrated. Whenever he started to look better, he’d get worse. So, they kept giving him more bags of fluid. Hours of this necessitated more and more tests because a stomach virus lasting this long and fighting hydration so valiantly was strange.

Eight hours to be exact. Stuck in a windowless small room. Baby crying non-stop. Minus a few stretches, I couldn’t sit-down or put him down because he needed me to hold him, standing up, to have any level of relief. I’ve never felt like more of an old man. I had already strained my bicep from holding him so much over the week, but I got another kink in my wrist. My back hurt. My neck hurt. And of course, the bicep was barking.

Unhappy camper

This sounds whiny compared to the pain my son was going through. Especially his COVID test. He may win “Worst COVID Test Experience” at the NIAID’s annual gala — fingers crossed Fauci is this year’s host. He had finally fallen asleep on my chest in a nose-out position. The opportunistic nurse decided it was the perfect time to do a nasal COVID test. He woke up with a swab up his brain. He lost it. His heart rate climbed to like 170 or something. The monitor had red blinking text on the screen: Get that fucking thing out of his nose. He screamed for an hour. He tested negative.

Fuck COVID.

When we go through difficult things, we want to be close to our loved ones. I’m a little different and prefer retreating into myself to process (as you should know from reading so far). COVID prevented my wife and I from being at the hospital together. It also prevented our parents from getting to be at the hospital when my wife gave birth to their first grandchild five months earlier.

It added unnecessary stress to the hospital stay. You’re stuck in double-masks for hours (medical professionals are heroes and tough as nails). I guess the double mask was a personal choice but aren’t N95s better than the surgical masks they make you wear? You can’t really leave your room to limit exposure. No visitors. I couldn’t console my son with funny faces and fart noises when others were around.

The doctors decided to admit him overnight. If they sent him home, they said, he’d be back in 12 hours when dehydration came knocking. I also got the sense that they wanted either a better explanation for why he wasn’t getting better or to rule every possible thing out. With zero medical knowledge, this seemed like good medical practice, particularly for a 5-month-old.

I’d been there for eight hours without food or water or any pee breaks. In the eighth hour, the nurse gave me a mini carton of milk, clearly meant for little kids. We decided my wife would come swap with me at the ER. We thought my son would do better with motherly comfort, and she was upset not being with him. Her taking the night shift also allowed for midnight booby snacks if he was up for it (he was!).

The bond between a mother and a baby is incredible, and my son and I are lucky that my wife is a fantastic mom. In five months, she hasn’t put herself first once without someone (usually me) forcing her to. When she was finally able to get to our son, after eight long hours of screaming without her, just seeing her, smelling her, touching her, calmed him down. We were allowed 30 minutes of overlap time. It was beautiful.

She had to go pee shortly after getting there. One of my worst husband traits is I’m very critical of my wife’s small bladder, and she peed at the hospital before I did! But it didn’t feel like the right time to be critical. She jokingly hopes I get prostate issues to know what it’s like to have to pee constantly. As soon as she left to pee and I grabbed him, he started bawling again.

That was by far the hardest part of my day, though. Seeing my wife come in, seeing her baby so upset, in so much pain. She was bawling. I don’t cry very often anymore. I used to cry and throw temper tantrums all the time about important things like why the Mexican restaurant forgot to put sour cream on my nachos. But seeing her pain and then seeing the two of them bring peace and comfort to each other was heart-wrenching and then heart-warming.

I had to leave the ER at that point but was kept up to date via text, and I relayed this information back to the grandparents. My son is incredibly lucky to have four loving grandparents and some aunts and uncles who showed support throughout this ordeal. They were constantly checking in, providing loving encouragement, and asking if we needed anything.

This may make me sound like a dick, but while I am so grateful for their love and how much we can depend on them, I didn’t want to get their texts and calls. This is a flaw of mine and something I know is selfish. But I wanted to provide updates on my time, when I felt ready.

They made me have to think more about all the potentially horrible things this could’ve been at a time. I didn’t want to. I have plenty of time to internalize things and reflect, but for me, it’s not in those moments. It’s on my time, when I’m ready, and probably why I’m writing this.

At this point, my son had become the ER’s longest patient of the day. Eventually all the test results came in, surgical looked at him for a concern of appendicitis, and nothing was noticeably off besides high white blood cell counts. This could be a sign of infection or stress, but they did give him a dose of antibiotics. He moved from the ER to a hospital room to spend the night.

I was home, lying in bed after eating a pretty gross amount of carnitas (comfort eaters, raise your hands!) But that’s when I started processing. My wife doesn’t process internally and confides in me. I was getting texts like, “Just being here is def making him worse.” I kept telling my wife he would be okay, to comfort her, but I was worried and slept like shit. I spent a lot of time thinking about him dying and how that would just completely tear our world apart (rationally, I knew he wasn’t going to). I even questioned if I should order the baby wipes we needed.

I woke up early to swap with my wife so she could get some rest. I stayed with our son from eight to five, but this time in a much more comforting room than at the ER. It was a good day, relatively speaking. Surgery cleared him and his bloodwork showed improvement with respect to his hydration. His appetite started to come back, which was amazing. He was letting me feed him an ounce or so from the bottle every few hours. He napped on a normal cycle.

Something that made upset me during this ordeal was that he refused to eat anything from me, so I felt like I couldn’t help. It put a huge burden on my wife, so I felt like I was failing her, too. I thought he didn’t trust me anymore after the syringe/water-boarding incident, which happened again at the ER when they unwisely had me give him is liquid Tylenol.

We hoped he could come home because he was eating, keeping milk down, and pooping a little closer to a normal amount. But the doctors wanted him to stay overnight again, and my wife came back to relieve me. I went home feeling confident that he’d come home the next day. Living on the edge, I ordered Halal Guys for dinner. I made myself a margarita and went to bed.

Getting transported

Because surgery cleared him, he was moved to a facility a few blocks away for their non-surgical patients. The boy got his first ambulance ride. We had stupidly taken his car seat home, so the paramedics strapped him up in a full-size gurney. I felt badly for laughing, but the photo my wife took was hysterical.

I returned the next morning and swapped with my wife. I was starting to extend my immediate thoughts beyond my son and his health and was proud to save a few bucks by finding street parking. This hospital room was a lot nicer, with more space, better shades to get the room dark for naps, and a more comfortable crib. His personality was coming back and his IV was coming out. Seeing tubes being taken out of him throughout the day — instead of being jammed in — had me shedding stress.

It became a waiting game of what his vitals and fluids looked like without the IV. He was eating just enough from the bottle and the doctors said that he could go home if we continued on the same trajectory. And he did. After all of this — at this point 10 days of misery for everyone — it was just a really bad bug, likely the rotavirus. This is not to be confused with the norovirus which I had a few years ago, coincidentally the day after I ate Halal Guys.

At this point, it’s the day after and he’s home. I told my surprised wife that I wrote in the hospital but “it doesn’t really have an ending because he woke up from his nap and then we got discharged.” She felt that was an ending in and of itself.

I will say leaving the hospital was an incredible feeling. He did it! His smile was back, he was babbling again. Hospital workers on our way out said how cute he was — something we were hearing less frequently than normal during his pale ghoul phase.

His feeding smile

We got home and did some sanitation and my wife breastfed him. When he’s in a good mood, mid-feed he’ll rotate his head upward and get this ear-to-ear grin on his face and stare up at his mom or over at me. Sitting there as a family watching him cheesing was perfect.

We’re now in the final stages of healing and returning to normalcy. This includes undoing all the horrible nap and sleeping habits he picked up as we tried to get him to sleep in the hospital (of course right after we had completed sleep training a week earlier). But a day later, things are going well. More importantly, things finally feel normal.

As a parent, it’s easy to second guess yourself and be hyper-critical of everything you do or don’t do. I’m sure we made some mistakes during this ordeal, but we did good enough. And that’s the big thing. You don’t have to be the perfect parent; I doubt there is one. You just have to be present, loving and generally, good enough.

First day back from hospital

One last parting thought: do nurses get enough love? I don’t know. But I certainly didn’t realize just how much we depend on them in the hospital before this year. Maybe nurses get overshadowed by the prestige of doctors (don’t get me wrong, they’re great too). But after spending four days in the hospital when my wife gave birth and now spending these past three days, my appreciation and admiration for nurses is off the chart. They’re practitioners, therapists and caregivers. They’re comforting and caring for you the entire time. Based on my two experiences, I see them as the heart of the hospital; the people that get shit done. So, thank you, nurses! And, a special shoutout to Consuela from Children’s Hospital in Oakland — I couldn’t find you online or on LinkedIn, but you’re a hero to me.