It’s been a while since I’ve seen our friends with babies. My NCT friends have all gone back to work and their babies are all in nursery or with nannies. Our other friends with babies – they’re in the process of going back to work too. Which means that weeknight visits are tricky, because they eat into family time. As do weekends. Our catch ups are now scheduled weeks, months in advance. Gone are the casual, spontaneous semi-regular catch ups.
That’s tough. I miss them. Partly because they’re wonderful people, but partly because without them and their beautiful babies I forget.
When it’s just us, we’re in the Mikaere bubble. We can only see his path that he’s wandering down at his own pace. Smiles are frequent and his vision is getting better and his tone is improving. All positive positive things. At Mikaere pace this is all positively break-neck full speed ahead.
But then I see a child Mikaere’s age and their developmental milestones and I’m heartbroken. It’s hard not to compare, despite my attempts not to. But it’s hard not to grieve those what-could-have-beens with Mikaere. He’s not doing any of the things they are. He’s worlds away.
There was this little child the other day – in a café. Younger than Mikaere. And this child was so different – handing things back to her parents, shaking her head, pushing things away for no, smiles for yes. Standing on tip toes to peer over the back of a couch. Curious, and alert and aware. It was like Mikaere’s peers took several giant leaps forward while I wasn’t watching and I was blindsided. The grief is overwhelming.
The other thing is that with Mikaere’s current developmental level – it’s easier to manage emotionally when he was little and tiny. Babies don’t typically move about anyway. But as a long legged, skinny boy, I can see his body is made for running and moving and going. And Mikaere wants to wriggle and move. But he physically can’t do that. Not yet. Possibly not ever. And the bigger he gets the more difficult it is.
And it sounds selfish, but with seeing our NCT and baby friends regularly – I couldn’t be blindsided. We were constantly catching up, so small developmental leaps were easier to manage. It’s just how it was. It’s the space and the distance that make it difficult. The surprise.
I shake it off and love on my kid, knowing his path is his own and willing my mushy insides to get on board with the unconventional path we’re walking down.
I literally hate this time of year. Autumn back in September when school went back was hard enough, but now seems every child under the age of five has a snotty nose and a cough. And every parent, and every person that works with children. There are sick people everywhere.
There are so many NKH kids in hospital at the minute, fighting off what would be an everyday cold to anyone else. Their parents and medical staff working overtime to make sure they’re able to breathe, to prevent a snotty nose becoming a chest infection or even something more sinister.
For Mikaere… he’s on his third cold right now in as many weeks. Last week we were in A&E because I couldn’t wake him. He usually has a morning nap from 9:30 to around 10:30, 11.
It was a weird one. Mikaere had a snotty nose. Because of his low tone (or even possibly because of his medication) he’s not able to cough the mucus from his lungs up to his mouth, it gets about half way. Awkwardly it’s at the back of his throat and ends up dripping down over his airway.
His body, knowing this is a problem, gags. Mikaere has a super sensitive gag reflex, and this triggers a projectile vomit. Like, out his nose, completely emptying his stomach type of projectile vomit. Vomit shooting across the room kind of projectile vomit.
We suction the best we can, but we have to be careful not to over-suction least we damage his nose (going down his mouth causes a vomit every single time). For those who don’t know what suctioning is, it’s exactly like it sounds. We have a hospital grade suction machine. A bit like a tiny vacuum cleaner. We attach a flexible catheter (like a very very thin and flexible hose of a tiny vacuum cleaner) and have been trained to literally suction out the mucus Kai can’t shift himself. Usually we go down his nose. It’s traumatic for everyone, but is good for him in the long run, so we do our best.
Those other vomits? They happen at any time. Before feeds, during feeds, after feeds. It wasn’t that he couldn’t tolerate the feed. It’s that he couldn’t tolerate the mucus.
The worst thing was that it meant Mikaere wasn’t keeping meds down. If the vomit happened within fifteen minutes of meds, we could regive them and hope he’d keep them down. But he rarely did. We couldn’t regive meds if we didn’t know how much he’d have absorbed and how much he’d vomited.
However, because he was sleeping, he wasn’t vomiting. He was positioned so his mucus would drip down the back of this throat, to his stomach, keeping his airway clear. When he was lethargic like that, we could feed him and give him meds. Which would improve his levels, so he’d wake up again and we’d be back to the mucus vomiting.
It was weird and cyclic, and we were in and out of the a&e while we tried to figure out what was going on.
That’s what happens when my kid gets a snotty nose. That’s not a chest infection or anything serious, that’s just a snotty nose and a cough.
Which is why we’re so particular about illness. About people not visiting if they’re ill. About not visiting others if we know they’re ill. About people staying home from work if they’re ill, even if you “feel okay”. If you feel okay and you pass it on to Sam, there’s a good chance Sam will pass it to Kai.
(So sidenote: people of BV, stay away from Sam when you’re ill. Don’t go into work, work from home. Please).