My Child is Sicker Than Yours

My Child is Sicker Than Yours

I ignore it as much as possible, but every once in a while I stumble across a conversation involving this awful competition. It goes something like this…

“My child has hypotonia…”
“Oh, so does mine! She also has a trach and a gtube”
“Well, he doesn’t just have hypotonia. We’ve been struggling with…”

The discussion continues. By the end, the entire world knows both children’s full medical history, even if they don’t know their first names. What on earth is the point?

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10 Signs You’re a Parent of a Tubie

Thought some of you moms (and dads) would enjoy this. Please share it with others that need a smile.

  1. Some sounds will wake you out of a dead sleep and will probably continue to do so for a long long time, if not the rest of your life. The high pitched beeping of a medical grade pump, for instance.
  2. When you have to give medication to a child without a feeding tube, or they have a belly full of gas. You won’t really wish they have a feeding tube, but you’ll think for at least a brief moment you would be able to help them a lot more if they did.
  3. The idea of dropping your child off at daycare is foreign to you. If you leave your child with anyone, they’ve gone through at least several days of training to make sure the caregiver isn’t going to cause an emergency room visit.
  4. You don’t wait more than an hour to be seen in the emergency room, because if it’s not something the doctor would be willing to call ahead for you can take care of it yourself at home.
  5. You already know what’s wrong with your child when you take them to the hospital, but the hospital is the only place that can do the things you need done fast enough to prevent your child from developing complications.
  6. It’s no longer surprising when someone implies you’re a bad parent. “Obvious,” solutions for your child’s complex medical problem seem to flow from everywhere. Clearly all of the therapists and specialists you’ve been seeing for years are incompetent and have no idea what they’re doing. They couldn’t have possibly suggested these, “obvious,” solutions when you first started seeing them. It’s not like your child’s medical professionals have experience with these types of problems or anything.
  7. You know immediately whether or not a doctor or resident has read your child’s chart as soon as they walk in the room. They’d look a lot more terrified if they had.
  8. If an elective admission has to be pushed from June to July you ask to be called if there are any cancellations in June or to take care of it in September.
  9. By the end of the year, you haven’t had to pay out of pocket for medical services for at least three months, and for some as many as eleven.
  10. People tell you they don’t think they could ever handle the things you’ve been through with your child’s medical problems. You look at them like they’re crazy, because you can’t imagine anyone doing anything differently. There’s way too much love in your heart for that little angel to let them suffer a minute more than necessary.
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