Missing the Signs of Stress and Anxiety in My Preschool Child

         I ought to have recognized it. Having experienced my first physical breakdown at the age of 13, the unmistakable warning signs should have triggered a screaming brain alarm between my ears. Maybe I was just too wrapped up in my own pain to see beyond the protective hedge I’d encased around my heart and mind to be able to recognize Parker’s suffering, the daily unraveling of his normally happy constitution.

           

            Sleep apnea symptoms were first on his breakdown list. On several occasions during his daytime naps, he appeared to stop breathing, then gagged and choked to get it jump-started again. Often, he’d wake up crying and scared from these episodes, like he’d just awakened from a hideous nightmare. Other times he’d cough several times and then quickly return to sleep. Thankfully, I was present during the first event, and made sure he napped within my eyesight from then on—in my bed—so I could watch and count his breathing. Then I moved his little red toddler bed back into our bedroom so I could hear him more clearly at night.

           

            After a lengthy discussion with her, his pediatrician recommended a preliminary sleep study analysis. The challenge: getting a four-year-old connected to electrodes and breath-measuring machinery, then having him remain in deep sleep long enough to obtain valid data.

           

            So, one Friday night, a respiratory therapist arrived at our home with the necessary bells and whistles, lines, leads, and monitors to hook Parker up, plug him in, and instruct Chris and me in the use of the machinery. For the second time in eighteen months, we were receiving yet another crash course in home therapy and medical telemetry. After several attempts at trying to keep Parker calm and quiet, and from angrily plucking and yanking sensors from his nose and body, we eventually succeeded in getting him to sleep.

           

            Finally, all seemed well, and the therapist departed, after promising to return in the morning to gather the equipment, review the data, and forward the information to our physician and pulmonary specialist. But within minutes of his departure, the first brain-shattering alarm sounded. Our hearts slammed in our chests as Chris groped frantically for the override switch to kill the sound. But every time Chris flipped the switch back to “ON,” the alarm wailed again.

           

            After a speedy machinery assessment, we figured out that Parker’s heart rate was dropping below the monitor’s set threshold. After reaching the therapist on his phone, we learned how to set a lower threshold and restart the measurement. Through all this commotion, Parker slept soundly, without interruption, sprawled like a pint-size skydiver on our king-size bed. That didn’t really surprise us; he never awakened for any of our house-rattling, Southern California earthquakes either.

           

            Then, several minutes into the new threshold setting, the eardrum-slaughtering EEEEEEEEEE!!!! screeched again. Chris ejected himself from the bed like a rock slung from a catapult and then mumbled several incoherent words. He raked his fingers through his hair while stabbing at the phone buttons to call the therapist again to have him okay another setting adjustment. “But,” the therapist warned, “any lower than that, and I’ll need to return to your house, and we won’t be able to conduct the test.” We re-set, murmured prayers, and then repositioned ourselves for the night: Chris flat on his back in bed, me sitting cross-legged on the floor, propped against the wall, regulation notebook at the ready to scribble mandatory log entries. Every time Parker twitched, sniffled, squirmed, toe-wiggled or breathed, I had to make a note of it. How we were going to ensure that he slept on his back—the mandatory position—I wasn’t sure, but I dimmed the lights, settled in on the floor, and kept my eyes glued to the digital data illuminated on the monitor screen.

             

            Just how and why I was relegated the task of staying up all night, I don’t know. Maybe that job just gets automatically invoked under the Mother moniker. Anyway, up I stayed, A-L-L     N-I-G-H-T      L-O-NG, with the entertaining nocturnal crickets, to take those hallowed notes. Mercifully, we managed to accumulate enough information for a proper evaluation. At daybreak, it took Parker nanoseconds to disengage his airway and toe sensors, his chubby fingers peeling and yanking. I helped his effort by gently removing the EKG pads crammed together on his modest chest. Both of us were relieved to discard the wire and sticky-pad arsenal.

           

            But it wasn’t long before the analyzing specialist informed our pediatrician that further studies were necessary; and this time, “further studies” meant an in-hospital sleep apnea monitoring evaluation followed by an appointment with a pediatric pulmonary specialist.

           

            Like a detonated combustion engine, my mother’s worry gene jerked from zero-to-sixty in five seconds, and the question-that-wouldn’t-die rattled around my brain like a mental pinball against the cranial bumpers:

           

            “God, when will this path of sorrow ever end…?”

           

            Little did I realize that He was using my hurting son to pull my focus away from me.

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NEXT WEEK: The next test: Sleep apnea testing up-close and personal…

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Until next week,

Thanks for joining me!

Blessings,

Andrea

PS Tomorrow’s my birthday! Thank you, Lord, for yet another year, to tell another story about You and your everlasting goodness!

The Ugly Side of Medicine: Malpractice, Arrogance and Money

           So there I was, just barely surviving the first anniversary of Victoria’s death, with an unexpected lawsuit staring at me, and a marriage that seemed to be hanging by the proverbial knot on a fragile silk thread. At that point in my life, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hang on.

           

            Even though we were obviously going about it in entirely different ways, all Chris and I really wanted to do was to heal and return to living.

           

            Yet a lot of people, most especially doctors and insurance companies—and lawyers—involved in this gut-wrenching mess wouldn’t let us.

           

            Not long after the volatile first anniversary, a bill from the attending physician to Victoria’s delivery arrived in the mail one fine spring day. At first I stared slack-jawed at it, shoulders slumping south under the weight of yet another reminder. Then anger churned and shot to the surface as read it.

           

            It bore one of those big, bold, screaming scarlet stamps stating that if the balance were not paid in a certain amount of time—amounting to days—they’d ship my name to a collection agency. It was agony upon agony, insult upon insult. 

           

            Several months after Victoria’s death, the medical group that had misdiagnosed my placenta previa had blatantly refused to pay any of Dr. Gordon’s charges. In addition, they hadn’t forwarded any of his bills to my insurance company—which had already paid the five-figure hospital bill. Their excuse? They kept up their monotone repetition that “the case was under their review.” Translation: Legal foot-dragging.

           

            Gracious Dr. Gordon announced that I didn’t need to be responsible for his portion, which amounted to thousands of dollars, adding that he was prepared for a legal fight with them. My brittle emotions sagged under the burden, but I promised him that I would do everything in my power to make sure he was paid. He nodded compassionately and said, “Thank you. But don’t worry. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. I’m ready for the fight. You just need to heal.”

           

            But I wouldn’t let it go like that, so I donned my mental galoshes and waded into the legal muck. After five months of verbal battling with my former medical group, calls to my insurance company, and stacks of mailed bills, letters and explanations, Dr. Gordon’s fee was fully paid—five months after Victoria’s death. My insurance company lamented that they never received the original bills and gave me the lengthy explanation that the payment needed to be denied three times by my contracting medical group before they—the insurance company—would pay the amount.

           

            On one of my final conversations with her, the woman at the insurance company divulged an ugly secret: “This medical group does this kind of thing to us all of the time.” Then she added the icing-on-the-cake information: The contracting medical group had no right to deny the charges originally because they were incurred during a lifesaving emergency.

            I think it was the first real smile I’d cracked in months, and those game-changing tidbits set my mental wheels to churning at a blistering pace. Armed with this new, insider information, glee bubbled around the edges of my embittered heart. Then disgust surged to swirl around glee’s edges. How could people in the business to help others deliberately set out to cause so much harm, so much emotional pain? How could they have been so callous?

           

            In that first question, I found my answer: To so many of them, it was a business, not a calling, privilege or gift given by God to benefit others. It was a business, with all of the ugly attributes often associated with that sometimes-dishonorable pursuit. To them, I had become a liability, a dollar sign bleeding their profit coffers. They would fight for every precious penny.

           

            What they hadn’t counted on was this broken mother fighting back. Unfortunately, the fight would consume strength and arrest healing, but the battle against injustice had to be waged.

           

            The consummate insult came to both Dr. Gordon, a highly-skilled and compassionate physician, and to us—the bereaved parents—when the medical directory of my former high-volume, cut-rate medical group, (remember from my story the doctor who wanted me to wait several days for an ultrasound when I was bleeding and who wouldn’t pay for me to be admitted to a hospital for my severe morning sickness?), boldly proclaimed that I probably did not have the complete previa Dr. Gordon said he found on ultrasound and within my uterus when he opened me up. They also insisted that Dr. Gordon had been “very uncooperative” with them. Subtly, arrogantly, they tried to accuse Dr. Gordon of malpractice. It was another pathetic, groping tactic to find a “reason” to avoid cracking open their piggy bank to pay the bill, which was high by 1993 standards.

           

            This supercilious woman—a family practice physician—presumed to tell an experienced specialist in obstetrics and infertility, that he had misdiagnosed the situation over which he had so closely presided. She hadn’t seen me in months, and only communicated by phone with Dr. Gordon on a handful of occasions. And there she was, pointing her culpable, bony finger and shifting blame.

           

            Poor Chris. He couldn’t regain his balance. Men loathe feeling helpless. They rebel and flail against it, and often lose good judgment in the midst of it.  In the middle of this added misery, helplessness— brewing in a toxic blend of smoldering anger and fresh hate—took center stage in Chris’s psyche. He repeatedly insisted that we file a malpractice lawsuit against her, my former obstetrician, and their medical group. Even Dr. Gordon confirmed that he would support us in any decision we made. (And he felt confident in his diagnosis, not only because he was inside me and saw the previa first-hand, but because he tirelessly traversed the halls of the University of California—Irvine Medical Center to review my case with his former medical school professors and respected perinatologists, who all confirmed that he’d done all that he could have done.) 

           

            Yet, I was reluctant to weather a lengthy battle while lawyers gathered evidence, interrogated everyone remotely involved, drudged up my past medical history, and bantered back and forth for legal ground, while any award I’d receive was being magically siphoned from my bonus sheet and tacked onto the ledger column for the lawyers doing battle for me.  Since our former medical group informed Chris one day that, “Our lawyers are already working on the case,” we reasoned they must have been preparing for a fight. That comment stunned us into the realization that maybe they thought they needed to prepare.  We had a difficult decision to make.

           

            Yet, after exhausting mental gymnastics and prayer, and consultation with my pastor, I elected to avoid a lawsuit. I was tired; I wanted to move on. So many things had kept me from doing that, from having what people refer to as “closure,” which, I really doubt anyone ever truly experiences. But an ugly malpractice lawsuit wasn’t going to undo the already done; it wasn’t going to bring our precious daughter back. My decision to forego a legal battle wasn’t based on financial reasons, or fear.

           

            It was based on sanity.  The outcome of a lawsuit would alter nothing. I’d still be a grieving mother with a vacant nursery. With only mildly registered disappointment and resignation, Chris respected my feelings.

           

            But I had just enough energy left in me for one thing: I needed to see my promise to Dr. Gordon fulfilled. So with one last mustering of mental strength and physical energy, I set out to be as sly as a serpent and as harmless as a dove. What Chris couldn’t do, his fast-talking, fast-thinking, heartbroken wife could.

           

            I got Dr. Gordon paid his entire bill, and he responded by sending me a gracious thank you letter saying he appreciated and recognized what it cost me to see that happen. That letter sits today in my locked security box.  

           

            And the case was finally closed.

           

            Or so I thought, until that overdue bill from the assisting physician arrived that glorious spring day.

           

            I didn’t even attempt to conceal my anger when speaking with his bookkeeper on the phone.

           

            “Why haven’t I received a bill before this insulting statement?” I demanded.

           

            “Oh, we don’t send the patient the initial bill as a courtesy,” she countered condescendingly.

           

            “Well, how did you expect me to pay the bill when I didn’t know it existed?” I hissed at her. Fortunately for her, I couldn’t slither through the phone.

           

            “We do that as a courtesy to our patients,” she kept repeating like a broken record. “But now that I know the situation, I will make sure that you are not reported to a credit agency.”

           

            “You are not going to get paid unless you send me the bill directly. Send a copy of the bill to my insurance company, not to the provider, and a copy to me. I will then send it on to my insurance company with a letter, and I will call them to let them know it’s coming. I have a personal contact person there, with a huge file; they know all about my situation,” I rattled on. “But you have to send me the bill, too!”

           

            After more phone calls, and bills shuttled back and forth, the last financial issue was resolved. One more problem solved; one more step toward that illusive closure.

           

            I was so very tired…

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            I sometimes wonder if I should have commenced with a legal battle. If I thought that a lawsuit would result in curtailing their practice—making it impossible for them to harm another woman or unborn child the way they harmed my baby and me—I would not have hesitated.

           

            Doctors are hard to curtail, but maybe I should have made the effort. Maybe that’s the higher justice I should have aimed for, particularly since in the fall of 1994, nearly six months after my loss, my former obstetrician lost both a mother and her unborn baby to toxemia.

           

            Yet even Dr. Gordon was quick to point out how rapidly toxemia can begin without warning, resulting in a tremendously difficult situation to treat. Like I said, doctors are hard to curtail, particularly since they quickly stick up for and protect one another.

           

            What I did do was act as a modern-day town crier, roaming the area, cautioning everyone I knew against using that medical facility.

            And bringing it up today—nearly twenty-one years later—unlocks loathing in my husband’s heart. Although Chris refrained from pressing me then, he still believes we should have taken them to court for malpractice. Maybe, as a father, he feels as though he didn’t fight hard enough on behalf of his baby girl.  

            All we can do now is forget that which can no longer be, and press on.

           

            May God have mercy upon all of us.

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Chris and I weren’t the only ones suffering from this loss. Death affects all ages. NEXT WEEK: See what an emotional breakdown can look like in a four-year-old.

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Until next week,

Thanks for joining me!

Blessings,

Andrea

What Happens to the Mind and Body When You Can't Let Go of Grief and Negative Emotions?

Do not make friends with a hot-tempered person, do not associate with one easily angered, or you may learn their ways and get yourself ensnared. Proverbs 22:24-25 NIV

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            The month of April had rolled in with the joyous anticipation of Easter, and the first anniversary of Victoria’s death. Three days after my euphoric worship solo in church, I was still floating on high spirits, anticipating the anniversary date to pass with melancholy memories and gentle reminiscing with Chris.  The dawning of April 13, 1994 didn’t publicize an omen of the path that day would take. If it had, I would have decided to forego the day.

           

            Parker headed off to preschool, and Chris went to work, leaving me home alone to do what housewives normally do during the day. At midmorning, however, my quiet routine was interrupted by a call from a former instructor at the technical school where I had taught. He was being confronted with charges of sexual impropriety in the classroom, and the intention of his call was to learn my address and acquire directions to my home, so he could officially serve me with legal papers for his retaliatory lawsuit against the school. He droned on about the ridiculousness of the students’ charges, how he didn’t have a problem with me personally—just the school—and how he simply needed to print my name and the legal jargon in the newspaper to prove that I’d been served. I silently berated myself for answering the phone.

           

            As the conversation escalated to controlled fury on his end—since I refused to accommodate him with the information he requested—I gathered enough emotional strength to calmly relay to him that I didn’t think I should be speaking with him about the matter.  I patiently listened to more of his diatribe and his reiteration about how he was attending law school in San Diego and was an expert on all legal matters.

           

            My patience abruptly disintegrated; I couldn’t take any more. Through gritted teeth, I told him that it was the first anniversary of my daughter’s death, and that I was really not in the mood to discuss the matter further. The conversation quickly ended, but the stress of knowing that I’d be named in a lawsuit eroded my emotional armor. Suddenly reduced to a state of fear and anger, I stood helpless and shaken in my suddenly horribly quiet kitchen.

           

            My coping skills also dissolved as I emptied the dishwasher with only mildly controlled vengeance, banging dishes into stacks, tossing silverware into designated slots, and slamming cabinets and drawers for an impromptu, melodramatic finale. After the performance, I rushed/raced/sprinted to another project to avoid collapsing into mollifying hysteria.

           

            When will it end? I wondered.

           

            Well, it wouldn’t end that day. There was more.

           

            An hour later, I received a phone call from a florist wishing to verify my address and asking if I’d be home all day. So much for surprises, I mused.

           

            Then I thought, How sensitive, as I imagined Chris sending me flowers on the anniversary of our loss. I was certain he’d also call from work to see how I was doing.

           

            But I waited…and waited…and waited, and his phone call didn’t come. And the flowers that might have brightened the sorry afternoon didn’t arrive until after 5:00 PM.

           

            The flowers sent not from my tender, loving husband but from my thoughtful parents.

           

            Reeling with fury, I hotly confronted Christ at the door upon his arrival home. Being consumed in and blinded by self pity, I ignored the conspicuous signs of pronounced weariness and pain etched on his face and immediately launched into a barrage of accusations concerning his glaring deficiency in failing to recognize the significance of the day for me.

           

            Before I could describe the incidence with the suing doctor, Chris unleashed/vented/discharged his own fury and counterattacked with slurs/insults about my insensitivity to his feelings, screaming, “ All I wanted to do was to forget about Victoria that day?”

           

            I was stunned. How could he be so callous, so dismissive, so selfish? Yet the frightening, threatening expression chiseled on his face warned me that there would be no further discussion about it.

           

            My body shook. How could this have happened to us? This wasn’t the man I knew and loved; this was someone twisted by anger and a broken heart. He chose to escape the pain by working, deliberately obliterating unpleasant memories from his conscience, while I played the masochistic martyr, venturing headfirst into the emotional floodwaters and fully immersing myself in the sucking turbulence.

           

            It takes strength, discipline and abolition of pride and ego to work out your problems and disagreements, to stop hanging onto your “right” point of view, your “right” feelings, your “right” needs and humble yourself before your spouse.

           

            It takes real, sacrificial love. And we weren’t there yet. We were still too tied up in our sorrow, wrapped up in ourselves, nursing our own hurts, cleaning up the ugly debris and collateral damage remaining after the original assault.

           

            Actually, we really weren’t trying to clean it up; we just swept it into a corner, bound it up with dirty rags and let it sit there to rot and stink.

           

            So, unwisely, we let the sun set on our anger. We were selfish human islands, still battered and bruised, agonizing self-destructively in solitude.

           

            Again.

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           When you’re tied up in your own sorrow, it’s difficult to see beyond it, to even want to look beyond it to see someone else’s needs. But sometimes that’s exactly what you must do to pry yourself out of your self-focus and move past it.

           

            But you must also unravel that suffocating binding tied you around your heart and soul and begin working on the infected, festering wound. You must expose it, be vigilant about cutting into and extracting the putrid remnants you’ve allowed to breed there.

            Digging deeply to dredge up and analyze the pain isn’t comfortable. But for complete healing to occur, that’s exactly what needs to happen. Since I’m a medical person at heart and by training, let me give you an illustration I think you’ll understand. At the least, it’ll give you a vivid word picture of what can happen to the heart and soul when emotional pain is disregarded or allowed to evaporate into a fog through ignoring.

           

           

            When I attended Indiana University, the athletic training staff and students worked with the cyclists who raced in the Little 500 bike race, a strenuous, immensely entertaining race run as a cycling counterpart to the Indy 500. This April rite of passage event was a big deal in Bloomington, Indiana. (If you’d like to learn just how big of deal it was, rent the movie Breaking Away, somewhat of a cult classic with the Little 500 and racing group.)

           

            And this is no ordinary bike race. Dorms and fraternities have well-toned, passionate cyclists who train seriously for this race, which is set up so teams of four relay-race for 200 laps (50 miles) around a quarter-mile (440 yards) cinder track. Thirty-three teams are selected to compete after going through qualification rounds.

           

            Did you catch that? They ride around a cinder track.

           

            Cycling races are notorious for collisions and nasty pile-ups. Ever see what happens to the skin when it’s been ground into a cinder track? It’s not pretty, and it requires immediate attention.

           

            The skin has usually been ground down several layers and is imbedded with those little cinder chips. Unfortunately, those chips don’t just flush out with a nice blast of water, and, if left in, can cause nasty infections, healing difficulties and scarring.

           

            First, the athlete needs the area cleaned and disinfected. Then the “fun” begins! A stiff brush, usually soaked in antiseptic liquid, is applied to the wound in a circular scrubbing motion. Beginning in the center of the wound, you work your way out to the perimeter. If you’re thinking ahead, you realize this is done so the debris and bacteria is pushed from the inside to the outside of the wound for complete cleaning.

           

            To say this process is painful is a gross understatement! This treatment continues until you get some bleeding of the tissue, which further cleanses the area and gets healing juices going. But the blood itself is also an irritant, so this increases the pain level. And these aren’t usually small wounds; they can sometimes spread nearly the length of a thigh and be four inches or more wide.

           

            Antibiotic ointment is then applied to the wound, followed by a sterile gauze wrapping, and an ace bandage. Often, the cyclist returns to the race for another go ‘round.

            Can you imagine what could happen to this wound if it weren’t cleaned properly? It would continue to fester, weep fluids and probably never heal properly. Like a laceration that’s been stitched shut without cleansing, the wound remains angry, red and tender. You don’t want to touch it. Or it may look as though it’s healed nicely, and only later do you learn that the infection has buried itself deep in your tissues or spread through the blood or lymph system to other parts of the body. In the worst-case scenario, the patient may be overrun by the bacteria and die.  

           

            And you don’t want me to go into a discussion about autolytic, surgical, or maggot therapy debridement when a wound develops dead (necrotic) tissue or a compounded infection.

           

            The same type of “wound” can occur in the human heart, mind and body. It needs to be recognized, addressed, cleaned, wrapped in a protective “bandage” and allowed to heal. Just like a physical wound, you need to “start in the center” and push or “lift” everything out to the perimeter and then flush it away. If it’s ignored or “closed over” prematurely, it will fester, ooze, and compromise your mind and body.

           

            Remember, the mind-body connection I’ve been preaching for the last three months. When the body is affected, the mind is affected; when the mind is affected, the body follows suit.

           

            Please don’t understatement it or regard it skeptically. It’s real, and it’s just as injurious as a flesh wound, cancer or a wasting disease. It wreaks havoc, which can progress until the body becomes overwhelmed and has no choice but to succumb and stop functioning.  

           

            Make no mistake about it: Stress kills! And, with the death of a loved one ranked at the top of the stressors list, you can only imagine what it does to the body.

           

            And what it does to those around you. Like a dangerous, communicable disease, your words and behavior affect those with whom you come in contact. You can lift them up or tear them apart with your words and your actions. Words and actions usually driven by volatile emotions. Sometimes selfish, irrational emotions.

           

            Most people don’t deliberately set out to hurt their loved ones or others. Sometimes quarantine or isolation is mandatory to keep that from happening. But always, attending promptly, thoroughly to the injury, illness or wound is necessary for hope and healing.

            Please, don’t wait! Start working on your wounds today.

           

            Let this be the day your true healing begins!

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NEXT WEEK: Malpractice, and the ugly side of medicine…

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Until next week,

Thanks for joining me!

Blessings,

Andrea