What a week.
You know, I started out my motherhood with this amazing, incredible natural birth that left me glowing with power. I was a first-time mother, but I was pretty confident in my ability to know what was best for my son. For the first three months of his life I was totally in tune with him; I knew instinctively, as I had during the pregnancy and the birth, that everything was fine, that he was growing beautifully despite being born quite small, that he would nurse like a champion, that his development would be right on schedule. I knew because I was the mother, and that was that.
And then he was diagnosed with bilateral congenital cataracts. He had been totally blind for the first three months of his life.
Kind of pulls the rug out from under your feet, doesn’t it.
I don’t need to describe to you the struggles of the nine months that have since passed. No one can really tell you what it’s like to place your three-month-old baby on an operating table and watch him scream and struggle as a mask is placed over him, then just sort of fade away. Or to digest the fact that he will always be visually impaired, even if not too seriously. Or to understand that his nystagmus–jerky, involuntary eye movements–will probably never go away, only improve. Or to drag him to various specialists and therapists trying to intervene early, make up for lost time in his visual development and encourage his motor development which had fallen behind as a result. But if you are a mother, you will understand when I say the word guilt. That I should have known. That I deprived my son of three months of vision by not knowing, by letting the pediatrician’s recommendation to double check that red reflex get lost in the shuffle because we thought–and had been told by the nurses who had recently checked him at six weeks–that he was tracking.
Maybe I didn’t know best after all.
In the past week my son has been very ill–high, high fevers and severe discomfort. At the start of it all my husband took him to the emergency center, where a terse doctor ignored his recent history of ear infections and the antibiotics he had been taking, grudgingly confirmed our diagnosis that it was indeed another ear infection and prescribed the same antibiotics as last time. The first thing I asked upon this report was “And she knew he was just on it?” To me it seemed pretty clear that this infection was leftover from the one just two weeks ago, which in and of itself had been leftover from one a week and a half before it–and that what was needed was stronger antibiotics.
In the days that followed and the many pediatrician visits therein, I didn’t think to mention this because I figured that the pediatrician–who’d probably seen hundreds of ear infections–would know if the infection wasn’t clearing up. But just today when I called to let him know that my son’s fever had again spiked to 102.2, he said he wanted us to see the ENT to make sure the ear infection had really passed. Lo and behold, it hadn’t. “Get this kid some stronger antibiotics!”
Yeah. Sometimes we’re wrong. Sometimes we just lack the experience or medical knowledge to sense that something isn’t right. But most of the time we do anyway. It’s that same inner voice that tells us what to do during birth, leading our bodies to move and change positions exactly right to ease our babies’ passage into the world. It’s that same inner whisper that wakes us five seconds before our child starts crying, or sets off the let-down reflex when our babies are hungry even if they are miles away.
Mama knows best, and nothing will ever change that.