Right in the Head
Oct 5th, 2010
by Alexis Novak
I have these critical parenting moments when a little voice yells something is WRONG over and over in my head even though everything logical disagrees with her. But since I am the Queen of Mommy Angst and she yells at me often, I have trouble differentiating between when I should listen to her and when I should shove a giant brownie in her mouth to shut her up.
Sadly, baked goods only work temporarily and you have to deal with the voice of Maternal Instinct sooner or later as she is one determined beeyatch.
My current crisis is a story that begins last Valentine’s Day, when my sweet little “Peachy” was born. Remember Freddy Kruegger? My second birth tale was exactly like that.
At my brand new and highly understaffed hospital, triage nurses urged me to go home after they checked me in. There were two emergencies that Saturday night and they didn’t want to deal with someone boring and time-consuming like me, a very long laborer whose cervix is slow to do its job. Altruistically, I understood I was lowest woman on the totem pole, but who feels altruistic when their contractions start? I didn’t want to come back six hours later while the inevitable loomed. My busy obstetrician was the only one on the wing and was training residents through these emergencies. My 12 year old Labor and Delivery nurse was pumped by the emergencies as her learning experience and wanted me to “labor down” while I was 9.5 then 10 cm, which apparently meant that she was going to leave me and not come back for an hour and a half. Oh! And the best part of all? Two totally ineffective epidurals that didn’t make a dent in my pain left me acting like the chick in The Exorcist. I was punching the bedrails and anything else within reach because I couldn’t escape my body. How could it have been healthy for my baby to be stuck like this? I was desperate to make sure she was okay. I worried that she might die. This is what Maternal Instinct kept screaming to me. In fact, the chord was around Peachy’s neck.
Though she was born a beautiful babe, my daughter’s head was never quite symmetrical. The doctor said she had a fine APGAR score. But she has one “normal” right side and then on the other side her skull bulges out subtly above her ear and continues towards the back of her head. As she has grown it’s became more pronounced. This is compounded by her sleeping on this side of her head which has flattened out her left cheekbone. I could see it in pictures, when her left eye starting drooping down like it was being pulled back a few months ago. The voice started getting louder and louder.
Her pediatrician ordered a CTscan. A 3D scan. A specialist. A physical therapy evaluation.
The tests showed her brain is fine. She has torticollis and positional plagiocephaly “flattened head syndrome”, depending on the doctor/therapist/specialist I have asked. One doctor didn’t diagnose her, then an occupational therapist did. Some said it was because of my nightmare labor, others said there was no connection. Everyone has a different opinion of what she needs and we parents are left a ball of nerves and no definitive answers. There is an urgent time table that this gets resolved before her first birthday, since the skull sutures close then and correction of any kind becomes much more complicated.
My anxiety takes me places I don’t want to go, imagining the torment of my sweet Peachy having to live with a partially sunken-in face. I envision a weird droopy eye smiling back at me in an elementary school photograph on a face that isn’t quite right.
Then I hit the wall. When I can’t think or talk about this anymore, Maternal Instinct has different ideas. In the middle of the night, she tells me to push on. Make this right she says. A good friend of mine has been in the same exact place with her own child. She gave me sage advice that has stuck in my head, “You must be your daughter’s voice when she has none”. Maternal Instinct couldn’t have said it better herself.
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