I Just Want You to Know_ Letters to My Kids on Love, Faith, and Family - Kate Gosselin [4]
“I know,” I said, “but I’m a nurse and I’ve listened to her chest and it doesn’t sound good. I think she should be seen by a doctor. I’ll take whatever you’ve got; I just need my child to get in today.” Finally, the assistant gave me an appointment and I hung up. Now I had to find a babysitter to stay with the rest of the kids.
Most moms know how hard it is to be seen by a doctor at the last minute. Imagine trying to coordinate the one appointment available in your physician’s schedule with the schedule of a babysitter to watch your other seven kids. Taking them with me wasn’t an option. I called everyone I could think of and no one was available. As it grew closer to the appointment time I only had one option left—call Jon home from work early. I hated to do that unless it was a real emergency.
Jon came home to stay with the kids, and I was a little late for the appointment, but I was so glad I followed my instinct. My tiny girl had pneumonia! Poor Leah! I was right to insist that she be seen. Had I waited a day, who knows how sick she might have become? The doctor had me start her on a nebulizer, and she prescribed an antibiotic—Zithromax.
I picked up the prescription on the way home and gave her the first dose shortly after we got back. Unfortunately, my poor baby threw up fifteen minutes later. She was hysterical. I was afraid she had thrown up the medicine and I wasn’t sure whether or not to give her another dose. She needed to be on it, but I didn’t want her to overdose, and it was too late to call the pediatrician by then. Day one of the illness was anything but smooth.
The next morning Aaden seemed to be doing worse so I listened to his lungs. They also sounded crackly. I called the pediatrician, but before they would put me through to the nurse, the front office staff wanted to know what I needed.
“Well, now Aaden’s lungs sound crackly…Yes, I had Leah in there yesterday and her lungs sounded the same way…She has pneumonia. So I was wondering if the doctor could call in a prescription of Zithromax for Aaden too? Okay, I’ll talk to the nurse…”
When the nurse called back, I repeated all of the information and answered her questions too. But then the conversation got weird.
“The doctor would never do something like that!” she said suddenly.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Call in a prescription for a patient she hasn’t seen.”
To get my kids the medical care they needed, I had to work hard to convince the office staff that when one of my kids got sick, the others did too. Finding a last-minute babysitter for seven so I could take one sick child to the pediatrician was part of my job as a mom of eight little kids. And repeatedly calling the doctor for appointments, prescriptions, and refills had to be done no matter how much I annoyed the office staff.
I was quickly learning that we weren’t normal by the world’s standards, but I also found out that with enough persistence, we could make things work. In the end, Aaden was seen by the pediatrician and was also treated for pneumonia. I’ve learned to always trust my mommy instincts.
If I learned anything during our time in Elizabethtown, it was that our dreams of “normal” as defined by an average-sized family weren’t possible. Our logistics and our way of doing things was never normal and never would be, but we learned to stop comparing ourselves to other families, and we redefined what normal meant to us.
Normal for us meant, in part, having mounds of trash and weeks of illness; but it also meant having large group fun we could never have had with a smaller family, like team sports and playing school.
Another difference in our family was that we put extra effort into giving the kids special, individual opportunities. We knew they didn’t get much time alone, so being intentional about allowing them space and attention was more important for us than for other families.
Redefining normal helped us to accept that things for us would be different, and whether it was good or bad depended on what we made of each situation.
I think every family needs to understand what makes