The urge to protect is mixed with the urge to strangle
Bill Linnane gains perspective from a hospital visit
My daughter got grommets when she was two. She had been plagued with ear infections from birth as she was, to quote my wife, cursed with my little button nose; a nose which would be better suited to a woodland creature, or a member of the Sylvanian Families toy range, rather than a functioning human being. So we opted to have tiny valves installed in her ear drum to compensate. The whole process was terrifying, as almost everything is for first-time parents — on her first trip to the doctor with the first ear infection when my daughter was only a few months old, my wife cried because she felt like she had failed as a parent. In reality her only failure was in not picking a partner who had a set of nostrils like the Jack Lynch Tunnel.
But the simple operation to install the grommets was a great success. Shortly after, she was returned to us, half asleep, wrapped in a blanket. At some point as we cuddled her and each other I looked down and all I could see was blood. The valve in her cannula had opened, most likely due to the child being squeezed for dear life. I called for a nurse, one came, and while they easily rectified it, I had to get up and walk down the corridor a few times, because all I could feel was some ancient part of my brain firing into life and screaming protect your child, protect your child, protect your child.
All this came back to me as I watched my now 17-year-old daughter get canulated in a hospital last week. Perhaps after her first encounter with a canula at age two, she has now developed the ability to retract her entire vascular system to deep within her body at the first sign of a needle, in much the same way a sea anemone whips its fronds within its fleshy mass when it’s poked. The young doctor trying to find one of her veins, despite being humiliatingly ghosted by it, was doing his best in a pressure gig — a father standing there, silently watching him rummage with a needle in the hand of his firstborn. Adding to the tension in the air was her reaction, which went from emitting some powerful language — which I can assure you she did not learn from me — to an agonised silence. But he persevered, and after much sub-dermal slithering he hit red gold, she was ready for her completely avoidable infusion.
It was avoidable as she has a relaxed approach to taking the medications which stop her lupus from going haywire. We used to give her the meds morning and night, and it led to arguments — she was able to look after herself, she told us. So we left her look after it. In the most predictable plot twist of all time, she did not look after it.
We went back to giving them to her, in blister packs, with days, dates, AM and PM marked on them. But there is always some reason why she doesn’t — she forgets, she feels sick, she lost them. Somewhere mixed in with that primal urge to protect your child is another urge to strangle them for not following simple advice, not even their parents’ advice, but medical advice.
Sometimes the damage from lupus is obvious, such as arthritis, sometimes it is more subtle and works quietly to attack the body, like sappers strapping explosives to the struts of a bridge under cover of night. Without her smorgasbord of tablets, she cannot control it. However, those of us with teenagers will know that getting them to do just about anything is a tricky business, be it getting up at a reasonable time, going to bed at a reasonable time, or everything in between. She hates her medication, and tells us it makes her worse, and while all medications have side effects I feel that it is what those tablets symbolise for her — that this is her life now, and it isn’t fair. But our trip to the hospital also gave us both some perspective — there were many others, much the same age as her, who were chronically unwell. She’s back in the hospital in a week for the second half of the infusion — hopefully her veins and some common sense with regards her medication will both rise to the occasion.
‘Those of us with teenagers will know that getting them to do just about anything is a tricky business, be it getting up at a reasonable time, going to bed at a reasonable time, or everything in between’