Let Me Get A Chair......

I can promise you that when you’re a parent waiting for feedback from a paediatrician on a brain scan for your premature babies, the last thing you want the doctor to have as an opening line is, “let me get a chair”......My heart jumped in my mouth when our gently spoken paediatrician uttered these words this afternoon. However after he had taken 40 minutes to take us through everything I then understood why he had wanted a chair in the first place.

Essentially the news is positive. The radiologist did the scan this afternoon and didn’t ring the paediatrician afterwards. The paediatrician took no news to mean good news – however he reassured me straight away that this is not just French “Laissez Faire Medicine” – apparently she always rings if there is a problem. The paediatrician also sought to assuage our concerns about the bleeding that was seen in the initial scan on Friday. After a bit of a lesson on the anatomy of the brain, which hurt my brain because it was all in French, I think I understood that he was saying that things looked ok. He also said that we shouldn’t focus on the bleeding because all of the clinical signs, essentially the demonstrable behaviours such as movement and alertness, were so good, and because the bleeding was really very slight on Friday. He said if it had been him, then he wouldn’t even have mentioned it to us and that for him, the initial examination was “normal”.

Despite still not being sure if he is actually younger than us, and despite feeling particularly guilty about how much his work benefits society compared to our own, we both really appreciated his calm and gentle demeanour. He had an excellent bedside manner and let us ask all the questions we wanted without giving us the feeling we were being rushed at all. Glasnost at last! I’m almost ready to vote communist.

He also took the time to explain the major phases of the premature baby which really helped my personality deficiency that requires that I put things into lists and boxes (just ask anyone who has worked or lived with me!). Stage 1 is stabilisation of the respiratory function (going well so far), stage 2 is getting the babies to accept milk (all related to the maturity of the intestines – just for information, both Capucine and Gaston are drinking a whole 2ml per meal!), and stage 3 is when they are sufficiently mature to suck milk from a bottle. I was particularly reassured because once we’re through stage 1, everything else is directly related to eating – this is definitely something that the O’Brien’s have never had a problem with. Because of that I can therefore end this posting with something of a (no doubt medically irrational) spring in my step.