Even Sick Babies Are Perfect

Not even a year old and our little Ewan is facing the pharmaceutical regimen of an octogenarian.

My Friend Jackie and I both have four children. The last two (mine and hers) were born three days apart from each other. She and I have many times sat in the unladylike manner of two women very large with child and spoken of the charmed and bless-ed nature of our lives thus far. Though neither of us inclined to pessimism, we mutually admitted a growing sense of dread that with each child we add to our family there is a greater likelihood for tragedy - or hardship - illness- death - disease - something that doesn't feel quite so easy as a healthy newborn.

And newborns are SO easy.

Her fourth was born early and spent a fair bit of time in the NICU while she went back and forth from home to hospital trying to mother all of them in her postpartum delirium. Except Jackie doesn't actually suffer from delirium, or anything like unto weakness. She's kind of like the female Chuck Norris - you know, her tears cure cancer. It's just too bad she never cries.

I wanted to help her family while she was jockeying this trial, but as luck would have it my own very pregnant body was in the throws of a painful and protracted prodromal labor. And I am no Chuck Norris so I mostly kept to my bed.

Plus it was Jackie's fault because she fed us barbecued garlic chicken which produced nearly identical results just over two years before. Wives and husbands talked and laughed and ate more garlic than is healthy for intimacy of any kind. Kids played in the sandbox - then badda bing - Jackie's got a baby by morning and my Cecily comes three days later. 26 months later we do the whole routine over again - barbecued garlic chicken, badda bing, Jackie's baby by morning and my Ewan three days later.

Ewan came healthy. Ewan came big - 8 pounds, 10 ounces. He ate fine, he smiled, he slept, he grew, then he stopped growing. For five months Ewan not only gained no weight, but lost 10 ounces. He was diagnosed Failure to Thrive, which in medical mumbo jumbo is really just code for "this child has . . . ?????"

After many tests, including a full endoscopy at Primary Children's Hospital where I saw his pretty, pink insides we got more than a question mark.

"Eosinophilic esophagitis" said the very kind and hurried pediatric gastroenterologist on the phone just a week before we left Salt Lake City for a new home on the east coast. "Pick up this prescription, give it to him once a day, and good luck out there."

I gave it to him. He woke up. Ewan had a latent personality that emerged when suddenly his pain was suppressed and he could EAT. He gained five pounds in two months - which still leaves him soundly off-the-chart-small, but it is better than wasting away to nothing.

We finished Ewan's meds two weeks ago and I was feeling a bit liberated until we saw a new pediatric gastroenterologist last week. He sent me home with a new phrase - "chronic disease", and a slew of new meds that I have been afraid to start because they are so many and so specific in their requirements that I need a detailed chart of when and how much and before or after food and gargling with water to prevent thrush after this one.

Cause every one-year-old can gargle.

I'm pretty hopeless with a medically pedestrian round of antibiotics. Administering medication of any kind with consistency is for sick people - not me. But my son is sick, all 17 pounds of him, all 12 months of him, all the cherubic yumminess of him is chronically sick. I am the only person on this earth that will make sure that his mouth is rinsed out after taking budesonide to avoid an oral yeast infection. I have to do it.

So there it is - my diminishing returns on the ability to produce procreative perfection indefinitely. It is my "tragedy" which, for reasons unknown, seems more frightening at night when every one else has gone to sleep and I am left to eat massive helpings of worry all by myself.

My Mom pointed out to me today how lucky we are it is not something worse.

"It could be so much worse" she said.

"It could be," I agreed.

She was right. There was my little boy smiling at me, trusting that, come bed time, I would rinse his mouth out after the budesonide.

And I did.