When the day came that my son no longer needs a heart monitoring, everyone was happy but I was happy
This is the first person’s experience of Natasha Chiam, Who lives in adamonton. For more information about CBC’s first person stories, please View faq,
In the picture I do not remember that my husband is standing at the entrance of a pediatrics ICU patient’s room, his head is resting on his arm because he bends against the frame of the doorway as if it was just a thing to catch him.
There were at least 10 people inside the room, all were doing their share to save our seven -year -old son who had just gone into cardiac arrest.
One of these people, soft -spoken, is still a senior resident doctor, on the hospital bed, who is compressing the chest on our boy, his big gloved hands cover the entire duration of my baby’s chest.
I remember that I was standing about five feet behind my husband. I don’t remember that I was breathing or crying. I am not sure that it was a nurse or two holding me, but I do not remember clearly that he did not want to sit.
As I saw the work of a medical team on my son, I was separating.
I was imagining the trajectory of my child’s life into two and focusing on the most terrible of those futures. I saw myself planning for my child’s funeral, told my five -year -old sister that he had lost a brother, and I failed badly in life without him.
Fortunately, the providence-and every health care in that room was focused on the future with the stable hand and the child’s survival of the professional.
Pediatrics ICU team successfully revived her and put her on Extracorporial membrane oxidation (ECMO), an advanced therapy that works in the heart and lungs when a patient’s own organs are very sick or weak to work on their own.
Our son stayed at ECMO for six and days. His body, many machines that were attached to it and pumped drugs worked in concerts to fight streptococcus infection, causing septic shock and multi-organ failure.
Learn to let the trauma go
Today, after more than 10 years of all this, I think I was trapped between remembering and moving forward.
When you see my healthy, wide-pronounced son-now longer than your father and more man than a boy-who he has tolerated, his only visible reminder is three inches, his neck is the right and faded mark based on his neck. This is a scar left by an incision created by the pediatric cardiovascular surgeon when they connect it to the heart-fafe machine.
About six months ago, I found a call from the pediatric brain injury clinic at the Glenorose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton. Because even while living on ECMO, he had a small stroke, a side effect that happens About 10 percent patientsMy son has been monitored by the program for the last decade. He was evaluated on every major cognitive or emotional transition in his life: post-Illness Renewal for Primary School, Junior High, Junior High to High School from Primary School.
He was two months shy of his 18th birthday and the clinic was calling him to discharge. He was getting out of the program.
I know this is a good thing – they do not require services ahead of the clinic over the years, recently a clean bill of health from her pediatrician and has been accepted in the program of her choice at the University of Alberta.
He is ready for this next transition.
Then, why, when I hung that call, was my stomach very heavy understanding? For example, with our careful health and survival, carefully choreographed the huge net under the Trapes Act?
I now realize that the trauma we went through used to leave a permanent impression on my mind, body and soul. And as much as I want to move forward, I am struggling to go to the medical services that have surrounded us for so long, offering a sense of control, comfort and assurance in a world that once felt so critical.
When my son was in the intensive care unit, he was constantly monitored by a machine that measured and displayed every breath and heartbeat. My own heart will defeat the flashing numbers on the screen and beat in time.
When the day came that he no longer needed a monitor, everyone was happy but I.
How did I want to sit there only without the continuous assurance of those eyelid numbers, knowing that only a week ago, his small heart was closed?
In the hospital, without monitor to count our heartbeat, without monitor, I woke up on the blue vinyl cot between my son’s bed and the wall, to see the rise and fall of my chest in the dark, holding my hand to feel his pulse.
I know that the “body scores” is the truth for the statement because I feel it deep within my whole self.
remembering
In later years, nothing will set my heart race such as another parent carelessly refer to a round of the strap throat through a classroom.
In our house, even a little fever – anything above 37.5 – is treated rapidly and seriously. And I will become the first person to accept the level of hyperviocene about both my children’s mental health that may be passionate borderline.
Although this may not be a healthy way to live, there is a kind of comfort in knowing the score and what my trauma triggers are.
Apart from this, keeping the score is the part of my brain that pipes every time and asks me to stop being so dramatic. Because my son survived. He no longer needs intensive medical care. He is healthy and strong. He is a honors student.
He surprises me daily -sometimes with his interest and opinion about world politics, sometimes with a random throat out of adolescence’s strange blue yon. I could imagine by every possible metric, it is getting rich.
My brain knows that I should feel thankful to how far he has come and how lucky we are that we are an incredible health care team care and services. The rational part for me knows what it is that is time to accommodate. On the other hand, my body, still misses, reacts to what was and what it was.
All this “discharging” from pediatric services seems as if an independent fall is being thrown into an independent fall – no contingency, no security trap – and last time I felt it was the day when the nurses had shut down their monitor all the years ago.
Here I am again, relying in his recovery. That my healthy and affluent child’s infection for adulthood is more than a launch and less like a dip in an abyss.
I know that I will eventually get the reliable part.
Till then, as long as my little boy lives under my roof, I will always have a part of me, which needs to peep into my room from time to time, to listen to the squint and the sound of his breathing in the dark to exclude his silhouette.
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