The Sick Baby

MAS woke up this morning with a runny nose.

Mid-morning it morphed into a stuffed nose with a possible low grade fever. (First reading was normal; second reading was slightly elevated; third, he was a little chilly!)

Our pediatrician thinks this is a cold and a minor one at best. Nothing to worry about. MAS also seems to think a cold is nothing to worry about: he spent the morning happily banging his green plastic egg on everything he could find. After a mid-morning snack of sweet potatoes and prunes and milk he's contentedly sleeping on my bed while I type this.

But me? I'd be lying if I didn't admit to a frisson of fear when I saw that clear snot snaking down his upper lip. It could be: flu, swine flu, RSV... ?! Anything, really. But it also could be nothing.

Yes: I know that overprotecting him will never be the answer. Kids need to get sick so they can develop immunities. Put MAS in a bubble now and his first year at school will be a disaster.

Still. I thought I'd put the whole NICU roller coaster behind me, you see. At the beginning of the summer I made such a huge effort to not talk about it and to brush it off as nothing nothing, a little blip whenever it came up. He was born early but he's fine now. Quick, let's change the subject. Have you guys started solids yet? I even stopped blogging here because I didn't want to think of him that way. I wanted to pretend that MAS started life like all the other babies.

All it takes is a whiff of a cold, a whiff of allergies even, and all that comes tumbling down. MAS's story isn't like the others'. I can't change that. No matter how much I would like to.

It will always be there in one way or another. No matter how robust MAS is, there will always be some part of me that remembers my first glimpse of him: my 2 lbs 5 oz half-cooked baby hooked up to god knows how many wires, his nose irritated from the CPAP and his soft mewling cries more feline than human.

During our NICU stay my challenge was to step up to the plate and be there for him in as positive and consistent a way as I could. I spent hours by his side and even more hours holding him in kangaroo care, telling everyone--myself, my husband, my in-laws, the nurses and all the other grief-srtiken parents--that MAS would not only survive but thrive. If I could WILL him better, I would.

But now? My challenge is to step back a little and let him be... With all the flus and colds and scrapes that come with any normal childhood.

As one of the neonatalogists told me when she discharged us that last cold day in January: "Well, he's not a preemie now. He's a former preemie. Now he's just like everyone else."