Jan
04

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times.

I have mixed feelings about 2008. I started several end-of-the-year type posts, but as you may have noticed, none of them made it online. It’s complicated. Part of me, understandably, was standing at the door ready to give 2008 a solid kick on its way out. But the other part—well, like I said. Complicated.

On paper, 2008 looks terrible. Ames’ death alone should have been enough to ruin the year, not to mention the fact that I spent a full third of it in the hospital: first as a patient, and then hunched next to an isolette. But 2008 was the happiest year of my life. It feels traitorous to say so, but as I keep explaining, it is not because the bad was insufficient, but because there was so much good. Plop the events of January 2008 into any other year, and said year would surely qualify as the worst I have ever had, but besides January, 2008 had March, and May, and July.

But I fully expect 2009 to be better, though I admit it got off to a rocky start. Saturday we put Simone to bed at six, as usual, and she kept waking up, screaming in what was obviously agony. Actually, that sentence was misleading: SCOTT put Simone to bed at six, while I ran off to have a sidecar and eat truffle chips, and I returned at 11 to find the both of them awake and miserable. Scott then went to bed and I tried everything to soothe our fractious baby: I nursed, I shushed, I swaddled and rocked. She would be fine for ten minutes or so, and then start writhing and panting and screaming in a way I had never, ever heard before. Simone is a very easygoing baby. I don’t say this often, because I know some of you have Difficult Babies, and if I had a Difficult Baby I would hate to hear about a baby who is cheerful and easily soothed, but Simone really is. Sure, sometimes when she’s teething she demands to be walked around and cajoled, but Saturday, nothing was working, and her screams were unlike any she has made before. Because of the writhing and panty/grunty noises she was making, I thought she might be constipated, and naturally decided some well-intentioned buggery was in order. In the NICU, they taught us the ol’ lubed-thermometer-up-the-bottom trick, so I tried it, and while the *ahem* desired result was *ahurrumph* achieved, it didn’t seem to make her any more comfortable.

To abridge what is becoming a very tedious story, we eventually ended up in the ER, where they decided she may have a telescoping bowel, then ruled that out via CT, decided her Area looked inflamed and that it was a bladder infection, which they then ruled out via catheter, and finally discovered that the culprit was in fact ear infections.

Now, lest you think the ER doctor should have thought of this earlier, let me assure you that she did: she looked in Simone’s ears first thing, and while one was slightly pink, they looked fine. She asked whether Simone had been pulling her ears, and while she has scratched one of them to ribbons, this is nothing new, on account of they itch from her eczema. But finally, out of ideas, on a whim, the doctor put numbing drops down Simone’s wee aural canals, and five minutes later our baby was grinning and blowing bubbles at the nurse.

While all this was going on, I was in a bad way, sitting uselessly on a chair in the exam room, trying not to throw up as Scott held the baby. Usually I am the one holding the baby, not to mention peppering the medical personnel with questions, but I was anxious, and having what I can only describe as flashbacks to the night I was admitted, and later, when looking at the monitor, to the NICU. Strangely, the flashbacks were to times I remember handling quite well—stoically, even. It was only Saturday night that I realized how terrifying they had been. It was a bad night all around, and I blame January.

January last year is when everything went so horribly awry: when we lost Ames, when I went into preterm labor. The January before I had a tiny miscarriage, the January before that Scott and I nearly separated, and the January before THAT—New Year’s Day, to be exact—I miscarried again. I swear to god, January has it in for me, and I have been terrified all week that sometime this month, Simone will die.

I know how completely, ridiculously irrational that is, and I am a big fan of rationality, honest! But when Simone was screaming in pain and they told us to take her to the ER and then couldn’t figure out what was wrong…well, it was hard not to think the worst, somehow.

But! by six a.m we’d all made it home alive, and Simone is much improved, so I am trying to relax and enjoy my shiny new year. And I have plenty of things to keep me busy this month, which is good, because ridiculous or not, I think I will feel much better when January is over.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |