Staffilococcus II

Poor little Milo had to be operated again yesterday, as the left side had swollened as well to a very unhealthy size, filled with pus. This time I asked that he'd be sedated, to spare him the stress and the fear (not to mention the excruciating pain) he had experienced the first time last week. And the only possible sedation was full anesthesia...I will never forget the tight knot in my stomack when I saw him entering the surgery room, with his green gown, sitting up on the stretcher, white as a ghost, his eyes filled with terror. It all went very fast and within 40 minutes he was out and sleeping in his room. He woke up within few hours and recuperated his usual curiosity and energy level within the afternoon. We came home last night, reliefed and exhausted. We're going to have to go back daily to the hospital to drain the wound (it has been left open with a 'straw'), and it is going to take a few months before his lynphonodes resume to their ususal size and consistency; we still do not know exactly how he picked up this bacteria. We met a few children in the waiting room with the same problem, though. Milo has been very corageous, all considered. His mantra has become "non voglio più andare all' ospedale, basta punture" (I don't want to go to the hospital anymore, enough with the shots). He alternates it with "voglio andare a Parigi, devo andare a scuola" (I wanna go back to Paris, I gotta go to school). He's got a great bike as a reward, and he has immediately learnt how to enjoy it, riding it freely in my parents' courtyeard, reminding me of my carefree childhood summer afternoons...

Staffilococcus bonanza

We are in Italy supposedly vacationing since 2 weeks ago, and instead we are held hostage by a nasty staffilococcus which has sneaked in Milo's neck lynphonodes, swollening them to the size of an apple. It happened all of a sudden the day we arrived...he woke up from his nap with an "apple" in his throat. Ever since we have been at the nearest pediatric hospital almost daily, and 10 days later we are stil not sure what it is. It's nerve wrecking. The poor boy who already didn't have much sympathy for doctors, has developed a monumental phobia of the white shirts men...he has been administered massive doses of antibiothics, he has been cut without anesthetics to evacuate the pus on one side, he has been taken blood samples and submitted to sonograms...today we should finally have the last results and understand why the antibiothics did not work until now and the swolening persists and appeared on the other side as well. The good news is that he can come home at night and does not have to eat that terrible hospital food.The Belgianite is in the US for business and Zeno is taken care of by my parents, thank God...and I am running out of good reasons to motivate Milo to get in the car to go back to the hospital, AGAIN...let's hope it will be all over very soon.

Milo and the doctors

Since Milo's birth we have seen at least 4 or 5 different pediatricians: for some reason we don't seem to find our fit. Lately we have been going to the same doctor, a middle-aged woman whom, I must say, has good no-non sense advises, but happens to have a very callous and austere personality, and has behaved extremely harshly with Milo. I can't say exactly when, he has developed a fear for the stethoscope and, as a consequence, for the lady. Just hearing the word 'doctor' makes him cry. To my astonishment, during our last visit the day he contracted chicken pox, she begun literally shouting at him, intimidating him to stop crying for nothing. Evidently, the lady had missed her Pedagogy 101 courses...
So, needles to say, here I am hunting for the next pediatrician.

I have lived myself with a phobia for everything that concerns the medical world all my life. I could not even have my tension taken without fainting or literally feeling I was going to die. Endless conversations with my parents on the subject never revealed any specific traumatizing episode in my childhood which might have cased this phobia. It's only during the pregnancy that I found the motivation to dig into it and grab the bull by the horn, facing my Achille's heel. A nurse trained in psychology helped me finding not necessarily the causes, but a way to overcome this fear. And ever since Milo's birth, the phobia has dissolved: miracles of motherhood!

Because of this, I have been very attentive to the way Milo lives these experiences, and it really breaks my heart to see him terrorized each time we need to go to the doctor. I have been thinking as a starter to buy a stethoscope and start leaving it around the house, so Milo might familiarize himself with the object, make it eventually a toy. But I also need an understanding counterpart, and I am surprised at how difficult it is to find a pediatrician who's at once gentle and competent.