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The doctor who made my heart stop beating (and the one who started it again)

Tatiana — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:17:01 +0000

At some point during this hazy, undocumented second summer of Maia’s life, she went in for a routine check-up and round of immunizations. During this, our family doctor decided that Maia had “breast buds” and needed to go for an ultrasound to determine whether or not they were made of normal breast tissue or if there was some underlying cause to their existence that we needed to be worried about.

During the ultrasound, we had two barbarian technicians who snapped at me as Maia screamed and squirmed and shrieked in my arms. ”Just hold her still,” they growled, and I, with frustration enough to put theirs to shame, told them to get away for long enough for me to try and calm our beautiful daughter down. It was an exercise in patience for us all, and when we left, I don’t know if any of us thought anything had actually been accomplished other than pissing Maia right off.

A week passed without word on ultrasound results. Everyone told me don’t worry, no news is good news. And I, being scared, not wanting to do anything to jeopardize the fragile certainty of if there were something wrong, they’d call me immediately, didn’t call to follow up either.

Time passed. I forgot about it. Until one Friday afternoon in mid-July when a simple envelope from our family doctor’s practice arrived in the mail, holding a single-sided business card. It listed the name and address of some other doctor at some other practice we’d never heard of, followed by an appointment time and date — Dr C, August 19 @ 2:30pm.

I freaked out. Chris tried to keep me calm. We called the doctor listed to see what this was all about, but they knew nothing other than that our family doctor had made a referral after some ultrasound results came in. We called our family doctor, desperate for information, but she doesn’t work on Fridays and all the secretary could tell us was “If anything were wrong, you wouldn’t be waiting until the middle of August to find out.”

I lost my shit.

Lost.

My.

Shit.

I screamed and cried and hugged Maia until she started screaming and crying and shoving me away. Chris tried to calm me down, and we ended up in a massive fight over the fact that he wouldn’t validate my fury, my fear, my overwhelming how-could-i-be-such-a-bad-mother guilt. We waited out the weekend in terse silence and anger, and first thing Monday morning I was on the phone to my family doctor, demanding answers.

The only answer she could give, via her secretary? ”It’s about ultrasound results. We can’t discuss them. If there were anything seriously wrong, we would have told you right away.”

Fuck.

More time passed. BlogHer passed. Nagging at the back of my mind was the knowledge that we were in limbo with our daughter’s health and well-being. I let it slip away; sometimes, I forgot. Maia’s perfect and healthy and active, breast buds are normal, and nothing will happen to my child, things only happen to other people’s kids, but everyone thinks that until it comes for them, children act normal until their very last days when a sickness suddenly and dramatically leaves them an empty shell of who they were, when the monster that’s been lurking within them suddenly takes control of that perfect little person and steals them away and all we can do is scream why isn’t it me suffering, why does this happen, why her, why why why why…

And then last night, before Chris went to bed, he reminded me: Maia has her appointment tomorrow.

I slept like shit.

I woke up sick.

I drank two cups of coffee, too thick and too sweet and too syrupy with too much of my favourite hazelnut creamer.

I forced myself to eat a quarter of a bagel, then gave the rest to Maia.

I looked up the bus route to the pediatrician, reminding myself the entire time that Maia simply had to be fine. If she weren’t, we would know. My friends reassured me. My mother reassured me. Chris reassured me. DMs started arriving on Twitter with suggestions for dealing with my anxiety.

The fear we feel for our children is a suffocating force. I’ve been scared in my life, but before Maia I’ve never felt such abject terror, never had a pit in my stomach so deep I could spend decades tumbling down it head-over-heels and still not reach the bottom, yet expect that bone-crushing, life-ending impact to come each and every second.

We arrived at the pediatrician’s office ten minutes late. Dr C saw us almost immediately. ”You’re here because you’re worried about your daughter’s breast buds?” she asked.

Words began spilling from my mouth: “No, our family doctor, Dr S, was, I wasn’t worried until she told me I should be, I thought it was normal for a baby to have breast buds. I mean, a breastfed baby. I had them when I was little, and I’m fine, and everything I read said that Maia should be fine too, but Dr S wanted us to take her in for an ultrasound just in case.”

“Well, there’s certainly nothing wrong with you developmentally,” Dr C cooed at Maia, who smiled like she’d just found her soulmate. ”You’re perfect! Look at you!” Dr C swept my daughter up in her arms, and although Maia’s certainty wavered for a moment, I smiled at them both. Dr C looked at me seriously. ”Your doctor sent Maia in for an ultrasound?”

Yeah.

“Does Maia have hair in her armpits?”

No.

“Down there?”

No.

“Vaginal bleeding?”

No.

“Lots of acne?”

No. Probably will when she’s a teenager, judging by her parents’ skin, hahaha ohmigod why did I ever pass on these genes…

“If she’s not showing any of those symptoms, I don’t understand why Dr S would refer her for an ultrasound. I don’t even have any ultrasound results.”

The words that had come so easily earlier were hard to find now. I helped the Dr undress Maia so she could have a look for herself. Maia decided they were no longer friends with one another, but I was rapidly falling in love with the woman myself. I didn’t stay quiet, I just wasn’t sure how to put words to my anger. As Maia screamed and squirmed and shrieked, and we both tried to soothe her with words and playful touches and distractions, I managed explained the whole situation — ultrasound, silence, mysterious business card, lack of answers — to Dr C. She was aghast. ”I always call the patient when I get test results. Even when it’s good. That’s your child. I always — we always, everyone here — call. We don’t want you to be worried.” Finally, she pulled away from us. ”She looks fine. I’m going to call Dr S’s office right now and get them to fax over the ultrasound results. But you shouldn’t be worried, because I’m not worried.”

I smiled. I wasn’t worried, and I felt that calm because she genuinely wasn’t worried either.

Two minutes later, she peeked into the office. ”They’re faxing over the results right now. Do you want to wait here or in the lobby?”

“We’ll wait here,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later, she peeked in again. ”They have an odd idea of ‘right now’,” she said. “Do you want to keep waiting?”

“Yeah, might as well,” I said.

Fifteen minutes after that, she walked into the office. “Well,” she growled, “apparently they have a very different idea of what ‘right now’ means than I do. If you two want to go home, I’ll call you as soon as the results are here and we’ll talk about them then.”

I could have asked her to marry me (hey, it’s perfectly legal in Ontario). Instead I said: “Sounds good. Um, are you or anyone else here accepting new patients? Even just a pediatrician, for Maia.”

Dr C told me she only handles referrals and doesn’t do primary care for families, but, she’d find someone in the office to take us on. So as I got Maia ready to leave, she left. A moment later, she ducked back into the office with a piece of paper in hand. ”Normal breast tissue,” she read. ”See, everything’s fine! Oh, and Dr D is accepting new patients. She’s a family doctor.”

When we walked out into the lobby, Dr D introduced herself to Maia and I both.

I’m so in love.

Month Fifteen

Tatiana — Sat, 22 May 2010 03:10:42 +0000

Dear Maia,

I have a deep flaw that I hope you don’t inherit. It’s something I struggle with daily — hourly — and I honestly work on it. I’m trying to get past it. I don’t want to be like this. I’m a serial procrastinator, almost to the point where I think I’m mentally incapable of NOT procrastinating. And hence, why your fifteen month letter wasn’t written on time. Then, once I procrastinate something past the point of being ridiculous, I decide I just won’t do it, because it would be stupid to do it late. You see? Like this. It’s May 21st, over a week since your fifteen month birthday, and I’m finally writing this. I almost didn’t write it; I almost decided I should just skip this month because hey, screw it, I’m already so late, what’s the point? And I’m sorry. Because you deserve better than this.

But this letter shouldn’t be about me. It should be about you.

This month, I’ve begun to call you “my baby” out of sheer stubbornness, because you’re clearly a kid now. You are independent, very capable of expressing your likes and dislikes, and you like to do things on your own schedule. You’ve begun sleeping through the night most nights as well, which is amazing, although you’re still nursing (which is also, in its own way, amazing, although I won’t lie, I’m looking forward to having my boobs back to myself eventually). You’ve become more verbal, making sounds like “yiyiyi” and “bwah” and sometimes even multi-syllable sounds, and although Mama & Dada are still the only words we really hear from you, you have said “girl” (while pointing at one in a book!) and “dog”. Usually, though, you like to point at dogs and exclaim, “Ah!”

after you “helped’ us with potting plants

You love Yo Gabba Gabba. Even the mention of that phrase makes you giggly and giddy. When the television’s off, you’ll sometimes grab the remote and wave it around while pointing at the screen, babbling very seriously. You want to watch your show. If I turn the television on and it’s NOT your show, you babble even more seriously at me. It’s pretty hilarious. I just distract you by taking you outside!

Sometimes those jaunts outside end up at Starbucks, which is a place you dearly love. The blended strawberry lemonade basically makes your day. I can’t even carry it when we buy it, because YOU want to, and whatever, who am I to deny you the simple pleasure of holding a cool drink on a hot day?

We’ve been able to spend a nice amount of time outdoors, particularly in the last week or so. You love to take the dogs’ leashes in hand and wander around the area, laughing and exploring your world. The dogs were pretty bad at letting you handle them at first, but they’ve fortunately gotten to be a lot better about it and the three of you have a blast now.

When we’re inside together, though (as we have been a lot this month — the weather’s been unseasonably cold), you like to show off your climbing skills. You get on top of the couch and prance back and forth along the top of it, although fortunately — for now at least — you listen when we tell you to sit down. You use a laundry basket as a stepping stool to climb up into my computer chair, and if the chair isn’t facing so you can sit down in it, then you just grab the back of it and hang there until you let yourself go. SERIOUSLY, MAIA. You monkey.

On a less stressful note, however, you also like to play with your blocks, read books, and draw.

You’re the center of my world; you keep me grounded. Your beautiful smile is the first thing I think of every morning when I hear you calling out for me from your room. I will never forget when we sat on the couch together, you in my lap, and dipped a chocolate chip-studded granola bar into peanut butter to share with one another, or how you spin yourself in circles until you get “ditzy” then laugh and laugh when you fall on your bum, or how you start to dance at the merest hint of a sing-song tone in my voice. I will never forget when you climbed up onto the chair beside me on the balcony and we both read our own books, or the way your eyes grew huge and wet when you tasted the bit of Nutella I smeared on a cherry for you. You are forever making some little sort of mischief, whether it’s opening the cereal cabinet and helping yourself to handfuls, chasing the dogs around with a plastic spoon in hand, or pulling out your hair clips.

I want you to know, Maia, that despite my procrastination on things like writing, I never procrastinate on you. You are my number one priority. Always.

We love you desperately,
Mama & Dada.

Thanks for teaching her THAT lesson, daddy!

Tatiana — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 04:19:06 +0000

On New Year’s Eve, we had chicken cacciatore for dinner. So Chris and I are sitting on the couch, Maia’s in her high chair, we’re watching The Office like usual, and during a commercial break we’re watching her eat. She’s picking up strands of spaghetti and tossing them casually aside. Then she picks up a chunk of chicken and shoves it into her mouth, before digging through the spaghetti again. She’s been doing stuff like this a lot lately, where she eats her favourite part of a meal first before going for the rest — for example, we had roast chicken, crescent rolls, and brussel sprouts with bacon tonight, and her order of eating was the crescent roll first, the roast chicken second, the bacon third, and the sprouts last. She ate everything, though!

The dogs circle below her as she eats, and every once in awhile they get excited. They begin whimpering and prancing around on their hind legs, and sometimes they’ll even yelp/bark in anticipation. Joss did this when a strand of spaghetti dangled from Maia’s tray, just out of his reach, and Chris hollered, “JOSS!” It scared the dog, and it scared Maia too.

She startled so hard that she shook the tray, then she stared at Chris in amazement. He apologized for frightening her, looked back at the tv — and she yelled at him! I laughed and laughed and laughed. What an attitude!

Angry

Tatiana — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:00:49 +0000

I haven’t been blogging lately because I’ve been angry.

Angry at Chris. Maia. My family. Myself.

I’ve just felt so utterly low-spirited that coming here and writing about it seems stupid.

Every day — in fact, maybe even every hour — I find myself angry at Chris. It’s gotten to the point where I just don’t respond when he talks to me, because I’m afraid I’m going to say whatever bitchy thing is going through my head. I won’t say he’s perfect, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t deserve me being uber-bitch to him.

Every night, I’m angry at Maia. Ever since her goddamn nursing strike ended, getting her to sleep is miserable. We’re lucky if she’s in bed within an hour of starting her bedtime routine — which we’ve had to move back to 8pm because getting her to sleep anytime earlier than that is apparently impossible now. It’s frustrating. Then she’s up four or five times a night, nursing and refusing to lay back down. I don’t know what’s changed, I don’t know if it has something to do with the fact that Chris had to put her to bed without me around twice last week or that the fingers she self-soothes on are burnt (pic here) but now every time I lay her down in her crib she starts to cry. Eventually, I can rub her back and soothe her back to sleep, but that’s usually after she stands up and cries for me to hold her a few times.

Which, of course, means Chris can’t put her to sleep. He’s tried. He ends up just leaving her crying. He comes stomping out here: “Fuck it, she can learn to cry herself to sleep,” which of course is not an option, and I have to go in there, calm her down, and help her go to sleep.

I’m angry at my family, because they don’t live close enough to see my daughter growing up. It’s not their fault; it’s mine, I moved away. But here I am, here we are, alone. I’m angry at the goddamn USA for not being good enough for me to raise my daughter in, because if it were, there would be some chance of us moving there, closer to my family. It takes a village. IT TAKES A VILLAGE and I never understood the abiding truth of those words until I became a mother. I’m angry when I hear people rant and lie about Obama’s agenda, because he would take the shambles of the USA and make it into a country I could live in. I’m angry at the sensationalist pundits who have, since last November, nurtured and encouraged fear and fury in an uneducated, reactionary population.

And yet I’m angry at some “educated” people I follow on Twitter. I’m so fucking tired of all the self-righteous indignation going around. Every time these people declare their opinions and mock others who do not hold the same ones, I hover over the Unfollow button. Their crusades have become so meaningless to me because these people seem like caricatures in an editorial cartoon.

I’m mad at myself for feeling everything I do. As if life is really so horrible? I have a healthy, beautiful family. We’re keeping our heads above water financially. The next few years should really see life looking up for us, and yet I sit here and think about all the things that frustrate me. I hate our apartment. I have no education. I’m working retail. My fucking video camera still isn’t here after four and a half weeks. We’re uninvited to a wedding this weekend, one I didn’t even want to go to in the first place, because we can’t bring Maia.

I’m so tired of WAITING for things to get better. The last six years of my life have been about waiting. I feel like I’m wasting away. Whenever I tell Chris this, he says get out, go find clubs and groups to join, but he doesn’t seem to understand that I’m angry about the wasted years. I am usually more zen than this. I usually take a very “what will be will be” attitude, and consider the past to be a learning experience that has shaped who I am today.

The past.

Maria recently posted about her therapist asking about the most significant moment in her life.

I can think of two, and I’m not sure which is more powerful, which is more meaningful, and that indecisiveness infuriates me.

One: A man who had hurt me, intentionally and regularly over the course of four years, said “I love you” over the phone… and when I didn’t reply, asked “Don’t you love me?” I said “No, I don’t.” I knew that finally, after all those years, all the manipulation and all the mistakes, I had escaped him.

Two: Giving birth.

Shouldn’t bringing my daughter into this world be more significant?

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I was a victim. I hate typing those four words. I don’t feel liberated or empowered by claiming that title; I feel dirty, weak, and embarrassed. I’ve erased them and re-typed them more times than I can count, and every time, the little knot of nausea in my stomach has tightened.

Someday I’ll share my story. Not today.

Today, I am going to be angry.

Tomorrow, I will try not to be.

» life

The doctor who made my heart stop beating (and the one who started it again)

Month Fifteen

Thanks for teaching her THAT lesson, daddy!

Top Stories of the Parenting Blogosphere in 2009

Angry