I would like to interrupt the on-going, sad & sorry tale of my wedding day with a brief blog post to wish my daughter a happy 2nd birthday! Yep, it's today. 4th July. Independence Day for some (and best wishes to anyone reading this State-side).
Pearl Matisse Pich. Born at 9.09pm on Sunday 4th July 2010.
I was wondering what to blog about on such a hugely significant day. It was a tough one. Being the papa of Pearl these last two years has been an experience that in some ways is beyond words.
& then I got to thinking that, as our little Pearl turns two, a whole heap of people I know are having babies, or have just recently had babies ... or are at various stages of baby-dom and kid-dom.
And this question popped into my noggin; what's the one single moment that unites all parents? Is there one? Really, is there?
Yes. Indeed there is.
There is one moment that all new parents experience. Every single one. It's as certain as death and taxes. It's dead-set guaranteed. Nailed on. There is no doubt - none at all - that at some point, at one very specific moment as a new parent you will be faced with one very simple and very stark question ...
Should we take our baby to the hospital?
So here's another small excerpt from my 'book'. It's dedicated to anyone just setting out on 'the baby journey'.
This was our MOMENT.
---- from & then there were 3 by David Pich
Pearl began to cry. By the time we finally arrived home she had been crying continually for forty-five minutes. In that time I had stopped the car - twice - so that Eileen could climb into the back seat to comfort her. It hadn’t helped. Pearl had only become more and more distressed as the journey went on. So had Eileen. When we opened the door to our apartment with a screaming baby, Eileen was about as distressed as Pearl sounded. By the time we had taken our shoes off, Eileen was beside herself. Pearl hadn’t changed, she was still screaming.
Our initial thought was that the noise and motion of the car after the peace, tranquillity, and properly sung songs of the parents’ room might be the issue. But when Pearl continued to scream in the living room of our apartment we both began to panic. She had only just been fed, but in desperation Eileen tried to feed her again. The screaming only intensified. We knew that Pearl didn’t need changing, but we changed her anyway. Pearl stopped screaming. Momentarily. And then she went completely ballistic. Her beautiful baby-like complexion disappeared and she turned a deep shade of crimson-red. And then her entire body went completely rigid. We had nothing left. We had used up our entire arsenal. We had tried to feed her and then we had changed her. That was all we had in our Newborn Baby Problem Resolution kitbag. It was now empty. And so, having fired all of our bullets, we did what we assumed all parents would do when they were out of ideas and were left, bereft, with a ballistic baby in their arms. We drove Pearl directly to Accident & Emergency at the local hospital.
Heading directly to A&E wasn’t a decision that we made lightly. In those crucial moments just before we bolted out of the apartment with Pearl we agreed that we would do one last thing to try to resolve the issue ourselves. We checked the internet for possible causes of ballistic babies. It was a decision that was to prove absolutely crucial. We were in cyberspace for no more than a minute when we realised that we had poisoned Pearl. With breast milk.
Before leaving home for the airport that morning, Eileen had expressed some milk into a small bottle. It had been my idea. I knew I was probably being over-cautious, when I suggested to Eileen that a bottle of breast milk might come in handy at some point during the day, but Eileen had agreed. Once we were all at the airport we had given Pearl the milk just after Hagen and Karola had checked in, and just before they disappeared down the corridor towards Immigration Control. The four of us had ordered coffee at the one decent cafe in the International Terminal and, instead of messing about with her clothes and feeding blanket, Eileen had decided to give Pearl the expressed milk.
It was a decision that we were now rueing. Pearl was screaming blue murder and one or other of us happened to mention the expressed breast milk. I was desperate and Google was ready and waiting, its search box empty, the cursor flashing impatiently. I had been about to type ‘ballistic baby’ but at the last minute I changed my mind. I typed ‘off breast milk’ and clicked Google Search. It took exactly 0.21sec - one-fifth of a second - for our worst fears to be realised. We both froze. Frozen, we stared at the screen. It offered us 33,200,000 pages.
Off breast milk was an issue.
A huge issue. An issue of epidemic proportions.
Babies were dropping like flies as a result of off breast milk.
Breast milk can go off in minutes. Seconds.
0.21 of a second.
Breast milk can be POISONOUS.
BREAST MILK IS POISON.
We were out of our apartment and into our car in minutes. Seconds. Less than a second. 0.21 of a second.
In the seven minutes it took us to get to Manly District Hospital with our poisoned baby, Eileen and I had managed to get ourselves into a right old state. Pearl was going absolutely ballistic. We rushed through the heavy plastic doors of A&E and the lady behind the reception desk sprang into action. She reached for a pen and a pink admission form, asked us to take a seat in the waiting room with all the other people and took a sip of her tea. I was thrown. I had been expecting a George Clooney-like, ER-style response. At the very least I thought that we would be escorted to a gleaming white- curtained cubicle by a posse of professionals in gleaming white coats. I hadn’t expected to find myself sitting on an orange plastic chair with a wonky leg filling in a pink form.
I had only been sitting on that orange plastic chair, rocking on its wonky leg, for about two minutes when Pearl stopped crying. A little less than a minute later she fell asleep. She had been asleep for a further two minutes when it dawned on Eileen and I that we were sitting in the waiting room of Accident & Emergency Department at Manly District Hospital on a Sunday evening with a sleeping baby.
Right at that moment a triage nurse appeared. We had seemingly, and miraculously, jumped the queue. Our ballistic baby had had the desired impact. As the triage nurse approached I suspected that our sleeping baby was about to have a slightly different impact. The nurse sat next to us on an orange plastic chair. She studied the pink admission form that we had very easily completed since Pearl was sleeping soundly in Eileen’s lap. The nurse looked a little perplexed and to be honest I didn’t entirely blame her. She was faced with two quite conflicting stories: a pink admission form that described a 3-week-old baby poisoning emergency and a Google-search that had thrown up 33,200,000 hits in 0.21sec, and a perfect picture of peace and tranquillity beside her on the orange plastic chairs. She was lost for words. To break the impasse I asked her if she had, by any chance, heard the commotion over at the A&E reception desk a few minutes earlier. She hadn’t. She had been busy in triage with a broken ankle. Undeterred, I explained that our baby (the one who was currently sleeping soundly on Eileen’s lap) had, just five minutes earlier, been crying, screaming, going ballistic, and that we suspected that we might have accidentally poisoned her with a bottle of off breast milk. The triage nurse didn’t bat an eyelid. She was fully focussed as she listened intently to everything I said. And then she told me that she thought it was much more likely that Pearl had had a bit of wind.
Wind! I was stunned. I pointed out to the nurse that I had, on occasion, had wind - I could see Eileen nodding out of the corner of my eye - and that I had never screamed ballistically on any of those rare occasions. The nurse said that 3-week-old babies are different to adults and that wind can be very painful for a baby, but that it eventually passes. The two of us wanted to curl up with Pearl and go to sleep right there on the plastic orange chairs in the waiting room of A&E.
----
Happy Birthday Pearl. I love you.
That was then ... and this is now.
Plus, of course, Dale was there and, despite the blood, drama and race across London in an ambulance ... she was still pregnant. Even Chris, my oldest mate in the whole wide world, made it through the snow to get to the Reception at the very last minute. He's a true mate that fella.
We're off to Tahiti at the end of July. A dream honeymoon to make up for her non-dream wedding.
