Life-long Bonds

My husband was offered a job in Ireland. Which was a very good reason to renew contact with my long lost classmate from college who is settled there. As is turns out, the offer may not be as great as it sounded initially & the huz might not even take it up. But, the feeling of talking to a really great friend, the baby of the batch, who has now, no doubt turned into an exceptional woman, was incredible.

Even if the whole thing comes to nothing, it still served to bring us back in touch & I hope we stay that way.

This is the same heady, happy feeling I had when I got in touch with my roommate, now settled in Goa, after about 8 years. Within 10 minutes on the phone, we were just like giggly roommates again, exchanging life's most intimate notes. The years that went between our last meeting seemd to vanish - we just picked up right from where we left.

So many times, I have relied on the support of my classmates and I have never been let down by these amazing women.

In whom do we trust?
I have been MIA - Young Juju has been sick. Bacterial infection, they say. He was running insane temperatures like 104+ etc - what with giving him tepid baths & rushing to Government Hopital ER's with the burning body in my arms, now that he seems better, I have been thinking... about the problem of diagnosis & medication.
Both my kids, Juju, who is 3 & Oju who is barely 9 months have been misdiagnosed & over-medicated at some point. First it was Juju - when he was just a wee 2 month old, he used to cry, you know, for no apparent reason, everyday. The first baby has the capacity to make the best of us neurotic. Therefore, off we rushed to one of the most "popular" peds. The fellow pronounced him colic & prescribed ''medication'. When the crying did not stop (Juju was 100% breastfed BTW), we went to him again & he said, no kidding, these are his actual words:
Doctor: "You see, all this milk he's having, bound to make him gassy."
Me: ???? - But he feeds on demand...
Doctor: If you weigh, say, 70 kg & drink milk in the same body weight proportion that he does, you would be drinking about 5 litre, nobody can digest that much milk. I suggest you put him on 1 or 2 bottles of soy milk.
Something did not feel right over here, so I went in for a second opinion & sure enough, I was told that I was just not burping him properly - he was just taking in too much air due to a blocked nose. Moreover the colic medicines that he had been prescribed 3x daily were "morphine like". I was told to forget the soy milk nonsense & carry on BF'ing. Needless to give out graphic details of what I would have liked to do to the doctor I saw initially.

Then there was the case with Oju. At about 6 months, he started having repeated cough & was prescribed salbutamol sulphate based syrups repeatedly. Then we shifted our house & he was exposed to lots of old dust. Thereafter, he started having repeated attacks of chest congestion. The ped said he had allergy and that as a parent of an allergy prone kid, I had to learn to live with some symptoms. Meanwhile, the nebulizers, steam in the room & Salbutamol doses continued. He finally pronounced little Oju "having asthamatic tendencies" & put him on salbutamol & steroid based inhalers. That day, I cried & cried. I went to Homeopaths, ENT specialists & chest specialists. I was in denial and seriously scared. I could see my baby getting thinner & developing dark circles under his eyes. I scoured the internet & looked up an allergy specialist. Luckily, this lady is pediatrician who later did a lot of research on allergies. She did a few blood tests & pin pointed the exact allergins - just fungal spores & sunflower. It seemed that all the steam we were introducing in the room was actually aggravating the problem. Also, the salbutamol was causing his growth to slow down esp. in the time that he was developing mentally. So, we got new cotton matresses & threw out the inhalers. Oju has been abs. perfect & has started gaining weight again.
Thanks for having the patience to read till here. The point I am trying to make here is that, let's say, I stop being a mother for a minute & take a higher level view & allow for the fact that doctor are just humans & may make mistakes. But again, as a mother of these two individual children, can I forgive people who exposed these kids to chemicals that interfered with their mental & physical growth? I think the best solution is mother's instinct. If it does not feel right, I'd say one should get a second opinion, even a third or a fourth, till one is sure that one's precious child is in safe hands.

Stuff that Hindi movies are made of
Juju seems to have overcome his gag reflex to some extent, you know, where he used to vomit out any oral medicine you gave him or if he so much as caught a whiff of any unpleasant smell. So much so that I had to resort to injectables & suppositories every time he needed medication :( Now he is actually swallowing his deworming medicine and his iron supplement. Phew!
And with this came a rare confession from the husband. After years of hinting directly and inderictly that Juju has got his "temprament" from me, the huz actually admitted that he also was prone to puke in stressful circumsatnces. He actually puked when MIL left him for a day in his uncle's house when he was little.
This reminds me of a movie where Jitender fathers a son and there is a court case somewhere later when Jitender & family try to prove that the kid is'nt his (this was pre-DNA test times folks). For the life of me, I cant remember the name of the movie. But then Jitender has this habit of rubbing his nose in a peculiar way with the index finger. He sees the kid do that in court & announces "Bas judge sahab, ye case band kar dijiye. Ye mera hi beta hai " ("Stop Judge sahib, please close the case. This is my son"). For non-Indian readers, let me tell you that movies starring Jitender are totally hammed up and were the staple entertainment of the growing up years of my generation. Having said that, I must confess that I could not sit thru a Jitender movie with a staright face today.

A good intention that turned and bit me in the leg...
My sincere efforts to make my son more altruistic were probably a bit misguided and a wee bit premature. No matter how dismal a picture I paint of the plight of the poor kids with whom we need to share, I fail to evoke even the slightest sympathy. Out comes the atavistic instinct of self preservation and the pure emotion of avarice. Once or twice, I had to face a tantrum when I gave away a packet of chips or biscuits that had been lying in the car for months...

Maybe my approach was wrong... How I went about it was that whenever he clamoured for a toy, I would tell him that he could get it only if he gave away two of his old toys to poor chidren. Now, when he sees a poor kid, he feels that the kid is out to get his stuff - so he is rude to poor people :( Maybe I introduced the concept too soon. I should've perhaps started the idea of sharing at home. Charity, as they say, begins at home etc etc.
So, let's go easy on the philanthropy for the moment and let him blossom with all his primal instincts in place, shall we?