Tonight's picture was taken in October of 2007. We took Mattie to one of the local Fall Festivals in the area and as you can see he was enjoying one of the very long slides. This was a wonderful sight for Peter and I to see because it took a while for Mattie to get to the point that he LOVED slides. When Mattie was a toddler he was afraid of slides and did not want anything to do with them. In fact when we first took Mattie to the Fall Festivals he went down these slides with Peter. As he got older, he zoomed down them by himself. However, I always had Peter up top with him and I was always at the bottom taking photos. I wanted one of us near Mattie at all times, but of course there are some things you can't protect your child from, such as cancer. A reality we learned all too well.
Quote of the day: The worst type of crying wasn't the kind everyone could see--the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. ~ Katie McGarry
This evening I went back to Virginia Hospital Center to take another test to figure out what is causing my pain. While sitting in the radiology waiting area, there was a little boy running around with his parents. This fellow was a live wire with a bad cough. I was distracted with my own pain and a very full bladder as one of the tests I was awaiting was a sonogram. Yet this little one just made me laugh, so I decided to ask his mom how old he was. I learned he was 15 months old. Needless to say, he was at the hospital to get a chest x-ray because of his cough and congestion and like any mom, she was concerned that her son was going to have to sit still and undergo a scan without her. Clearly she saw me in the waiting room sitting by myself and I would imagine she deduced I had no idea what she was going through. Unfortunately I knew the angst she was feeling! If I wasn't called back to my test, I would have given her some strategies because I know this Hospital does not have a pediatrics program nor any child life specialists on hand. Yet I have learned a thing or two about surviving scans with a child.
In an ideal world, what this mom needed tonight was Linda, or a Linda equivalent. Linda was Mattie's child life specialist, and a person none of us could have done without. The beauty of a child life specialist is this professional could have helped this child tonight prepare for the x-ray, distract him up until the point of the actual x-ray, and would have educated the x-ray tech on the best strategies to work with a child to get the scan completed. If you think a child just sits still even for an x-ray, you would be wrong. Everything about a scan can be frightening, daunting, and scary. Even if a child isn't scared, sitting still maybe hard to do or even uncomfortable. Now add to the equation NOT feeling well and that makes everything much worse. Fears are compounded when you aren't feeling well, if you doubt what I am saying, think about this the next time you are in a hospital undergoing a scan! Then imagine how a child must feel unaccompanied by a parent.
As for myself, I worked with an absolutely lovely tech tonight who couldn't have made the entire process go more smoothly. As is typical with Virginia Hospital Center, everyone really tries to accommodate your needs. I don't know how they seem to manage this but this customer interface needs to be a model that should be adopted at other institutions. I know it makes a big difference to my mental state when I know I have more compassionate people around me who are listening to me when I am not feeling well. I know I am not an outlier on this front and I just wish more hospitals would embrace this philosophy because it does make a difference in the quality of health care.
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