Murphy's Law Revisited

Yesterday, I dropped a perfectly healthy little boy off at school. My neighbor picked a perfectly healthy little boy up from school while I was at work. I picked up a perfectly healthy little boy from my neighbor late last night.

At one in the morning, I found myself rushing a not so perfectly healthy little boy to the ER.

I had tucked them in last night around 11:30 after I got home. K was still awake when I checked on them about an hour later. He was fine. No cough. No congestion. No fever. No sign that anything was wrong.

I was playing Candy Crush at around one a.m. when I heard what sounded like K gasping for air. At first, I thought he was playing. (Believe it or not, he's done that.) Until I walked into his room and watched his eyes roll back into his head, vomit everywhere, unable to breathe...and don't ask me in which order I realized all this, because I slipped into panicked Mommy mode too quickly to be able to tell you for sure which order it came in. All I know is, I nebbed him twice in an attempt to get him breathing. When it didn't work, I bolted out my front door and pounded on my neighbor's door for them to take Byrd. Being from a rural area originally, my immediate instinct was not to call an ambulance, but to throw my seizing, barely conscious, hardly breathing son into the front seat of my truck and speed off to the ER myself.

We got there and were immediately brought back to be seen, where they realized more was wrong than just an unusual (for him) seizure. My mom showed up, and we waited together to find out what was happening to my boy.

My perfectly healthy child was admitted to the pediatric ward of the hospital at four in the morning with pneumonia, with no symptoms prior to the ones that brought us into the hospital.

He is on steroids, antibiotics, and oxygen, with a 30% lung capacity at the moment. We don't know what happened. There were no signs, and with the build up in his lungs...there should have been. He is now sitting up and talking, with oxygen off and on, and the hope that the steroids and antibiotics will kick whatever invaded his shot system. My boy has no immune system; sneeze fifty miles away, my boy will catch the plague. I don't know how this happened. I don't know why he showed no signs of illness before those terrifying moments last night. All I know is, hug your babies tight. Run to them if they make a strange sound in the middle of the night. Because if I'd written off the strange sounds I heard coming from his room late last night...he'd be dead now.

Operation: Overprotective

I am one of "those" moms.

I am one who, no matter how much my children show me what they can and can't do, will always worry. Always have panic attacks and anxiety when they are out of my sight. They'll be grown and have children of their own, and I'll still worry myself sick over them.

I don't do it as much with my little man. I love him to pieces, but the world won't be so cruel to him.

Today was my sweet big boy's first day of daycare/school. I worried all day. I took the day off from work just in case.

He had a blast. He was so good. The only thing I heard all day was "He's upset, and wants his chewie. Can you please bring whatever a chewie is?"

Then we got to the store, and I told him to pick out the backpack I kept forgetting to buy him.

He picked out Hello Kitty. I showed him all the other backpacks. He HAD to have Hello Kitty. I can just see the bullying begin. So I called my mom to tell her how the day went and about his new bag, and my fears over it.

And that conversation brings us to this post.

Yes, I am overprotective of him. He is my world. Him and his brother. But him...he's been through everything with me. I've walked through fire for him. He is my sweet, innocent little boy. I don't want his sweet nature and innocence destroyed anymore than it already has been.

I remember all too well the terror of his first days of life. And yes, he's so much bigger and stronger now. Perhaps it's the perpetual worrier in me that can never fully shake the first moments I held him.

I remember all the things the doctors have told me. And yes, so much of it he's overcome. But I haven't forgotten.

We've been homeless. We've had the shit abused out of us by he-who-shall-not-be-named. (Yes, I am a Harry Potter fan.) We've been broke, flat. He kept me going when nothing else would. He took a broken, frightened, lonely twenty year old and gave her something to live for.

And I don't want to see the light dim in his eyes again. I don't want the hope to go out of him.

I don't want this precious, beautiful little boy to turn into me.

I was broken. I was scared. I hated the world. I don't want that for either of my sons. I see the good in the world, the light in the world, through them. It was something I'd lost so long ago, I thought I'd never find it again.

I'm selfish. I don't want to lose that light again.

So yes, I am overprotective. Is it a bad thing? I don't know. Maybe. I learn to let go a little at a time, and yes, I know I've given him the tools to deal with it if he gets bullied. But no one comes out of bullying wholly unscathed.

He's been through enough.

I don't want that added to the list of things he has to overcome.

Sorry. My bad.