I saw a baby today, she was maybe 8 months old, and she was being pushed in her stroller by a nurse who was pulling an oxygen tank behind her. The baby was receiving oxygen through a trachial tube. We got onto an elevator together.
I waved at her and smiled and she smiled back at me, and then they got off the elevator. The two other women in the elevator and I just started crying.
I feel so grateful that my son is healthy.
Moments like that so make me appreciate my own healthy children.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was young, I had a younger brother--younger by three years. When I was about four 1/2 and he was about 1 1/2 he was diagnosed with cancer. He spent the next year and a half in and out of hospitals, going through chemo, radiation and surgeries before he died. Over that year and a half, I ended up spending a fair amount of time on pediatric wards of hospitals. I would get to know kids in the playrooms and then they would be gone--with me never knowing if they had gone home better or not gone home at all. Children in those hospitals made a pretty indelible mark on me, as did watching all that my very young brother endured. David's mother worked for a span of time when he was a kid as a neonatal nurse working in peds ICUs, so his version of what infants are like were babies in incubators with tubes. I think the two of us are unbelievably grateful that we've had such healthy children. I feel lucky that neither of us have let our early experiences make us hyper-afraid that something tragic is going to happen. We simply feel blessed.
ReplyDeleteI am so hyper-afraid that something tragic is going to happen that I can hardly bring myself to comment on this post.
ReplyDeleteOh, man, I'm crying too.
ReplyDeleteA woman in my book discussion group's 7-year-old son has just had a leukemia relapse after a year in remission. And I was complaining because my kids were whiny. What a reality check.
Oh, my god. I am in tears.
ReplyDeleteIt certainly does put alot of things in perspective.
ReplyDeleteLawmom, I'm so sorry about your brother.
It's so hard to understand a world where little kids, babies even, can have such serious illnesses.