Who's Responsible For Your Baby's Health?

Here's a funny story to share with the group. Well, it's almost funny. And by almost funny, I mean that it might be funny someday when the crying stops ringing in my ears. It happened about two months ago, so I give it another ten months or so until it's really funny.

Gabe, my youngest of four, had a rash. He was aboout four months at the time and we were going in for a "well child checkup" anyway. And the doctor had diagnosed him with "apparent MRSA rash" earlier, so I thought the rash might be worth looking at . Just in case.

"Apparent MRSA", by the way, does not mean he had MRSA. It means he MIGHT have had MRSA. It means he kind of sort of LOOKED like he had MRSA, and since he had been born in a hospital, and hospitals are a great place to pick up MRSA, maybe he really did.

Anyway, when the doctor asked if all was well, I informed him that the baby had a rash. He looked at it and said it was definitely not MRSA, maybe just a few mosquito bites? But in the meantime, he said that the baby had a high fever, and would be please drive into the city and get blood work because the combination of a rash and a high fever might mean something.

The baby had a what now?

So I drove home, feeling despondent. How had I not noticed that my child had a fever? Every other day, I KNOW if the baby has a fever. Even a mild fever I notice immediately. We cosleep with the infant, have the toddler in the room with us, and homeschool the older children. I KNOW THEM. I BREATHE with them! I KNOW IF THEY ARE SICK.

But I didn't know that he had a high fever.

So I picked my husband up and we drive into the city. Getting blood drawn out of a newborn is awful. They pricked his foot and squeezed drop by drop into three vials while he bawled for forty-five minutes. It was heart-rending. But it was for the best. After all, he had a high fever. And a rash. That the doctor had said wasn't a rash.

When we got home again, I called the doctor to get results.

"The bloodwork is fine," he told me. "And, funny story, three other kids after yours came in with high fever and no other symptoms. Turns out our thermometer is broken."

I'm not mad at the doctor - actually, to be honest, he's growing on me. But we have to realize that doctors have been trained to think a certain way. And our culture has trained the entire medical establishment to respond a certain way. If the thermometer says the kid is sick, he's sick. If the doctor ignored a number on a chart, he could be sued for malpractice.

But who is ultimately responsible for your child's health? You are. You are their mother, you have the highest stake in their well-being. You also have the greatest access to all the information about their health, their demeanor, their appetite, their actual temperature, their nutrition, and their development.

It is very common in today's age for a mother to take her child to the pediatrician as soon as they have the sniffles. "Jojo has the sniffles today. Going to take him to the pedi tomorrow and he'd better give him an antibiotic this time so he doesn't keep this cold for three weeks like last time." This is the mentality of having given up our responsibility. In the future, we will talk more about these things.

I am not advocating not taking your chil to the doctor, just remember that the responsibility is yours. If I had more confidence in myself last time at the doctors, all I would have had to do was ask them to check his temperature again. They could have used a different thermometer and saved me and the baby both a lot of heartache. Next time I will remember - if the baby has a fever, I, his Mommy, will be the FIRST one to know.