Warm Fuzzies and Small Miracles

First, the fuzzies.



Baby Pandas. Doesn't get much cuter than that. If you want to feel all gooey inside, go to Zooborns for more cute babies.

So, on the home front, winter continues to hold us in her grip. But. There are small, subtle changes to appreciate, like noticing that it's no longer pitch dark at 5pm and being grateful for the daylight.

The soundtrack to our lives is no longer the dry hacking barking cough we've listened to for three straight unrelenting mind numbing nerve wracking weeks. The sound of the quiet and the joy at returning to something resembling normal is almost impossible to describe. It is nothing less than a small miracle.

We were scheduled to see a speech pathologist Tuesday morning because the ENT said it was our best hope to stop the cough. We waited four long days for the appointment, and when they called the day of to reschedule due to illness, I did what any responsible, strung out mother would do. I cried. I whined. I said you are our only hope, when can we come? A few phone calls later, we were in that day at 5pm. An angel named Cathy stayed late to see us, and I'm not lying when I say I love her. She jumped right in. Showed us a model of the throat and all it's mysterious parts, explained the damage the cough was doing to the cartilage, said it had to stop right now. She said simply, the more you cough, the more you cough. Get it? Your brain is stuck, and you have to make it stop making you cough.

She took Em through three different options, including tiny coughs or throat clearings, breathing exercises to relax the throat, and counting to see how far she could get without a cough. She made Em talk and sing and breathe and relax and sip water and get up and walk and breathe and count and ahem and breathe and before the hour was up, the cough went from continual to 30 seconds apart to a minute to three to a small quiet noise and it was nothing short of a minor miracle to the exhausted parents who watched it happen. (Who had found all these techniques online and had tried them, but not as forcefully, convincingly or assuredly as Cathy, who said the most important ingredient was wanting more than anything for the cough to stop. There's something to be said for professional competence and authority, and the inability of a child to listen to a parent!)

The elation of this breakthrough was marred by the emotional breakdown that ensued when daughter was told she needed to go back to school at once, back to everything, back to her life, and be forced to control the cough, because the less she coughed, the less she would cough. She was petrified to be so far behind in her classes, afraid she'd be embarrassed, afraid her friends wouldn't miss her. I'm estimating it took 5 hours of crying to actually make it through the doors to the school the next day, but she did it. And she was fine. She came home happy and almost back to normal. And she is coughing less and less and less, and the silence is music to my ears.

This parenting gig has never been what I imagined. It is more complicated, mysterious and confounding than anything I have ever done in my life. The teen years are even more complicated and precarious as I remember the train wreck that mine were and try not to let the past repeat itself. All I can do is try, and try some more. And be grateful for what is, and what isn't.

Thanks for sharing this stretch of the journey with me, for offering up kind comments, suggestions, words of encouragement and understanding. I am grateful, thankful and humbled over and over again. Full of warm fuzzies inside, even as the snow falls outside.




XXOO