How to Survive Your Child's Hospital Stay (Parents Magazine, April 2017)
I starting writing this piece just a few months after we survived our first 21-day hospital stay with Violet, when she was just a month old. Then life, other work, and a bunch of other hospital stays got in the way of finishing it... so I'm really happy that it's now in the April issue of Parents Magazine. More than 2 million American kids are admitted to hospitals each year, and for them and their parents, it is a bewildering and terrifying experience. For us, it was also where we learned how to be parents, over the course of that first stay, and then the next six (or was it seven?) admissions in two years, which racked us up to frequent flyer status. Obviously, there is so much we're still learning. But trying to be good parents has become synonymous with being good advocates for our child and ourselves — and I think that's probably not the worst lesson for any parent to learn, though I wouldn't have minded learning it less...emphatically.
So my goal with this story is to help anyone going through something similar and trying to figure out that weird etiquette of when can you go to doctor rounds (always) and what should you wear to use the communal PICU shower. (In the hallway on the way there, the answer is pants, always pants, even at 3 am. This is a lesson my husband learned the hard way and no that anecdote didn't make it into print.) To say nothing of navigating all the big questions of how you continue to make your child feel safe and loved under these strange circumstances.
I also wrote a sidebar on how to help a friend going through this situation. That's a question I get asked at least a few times a month. This list gives specific ideas of things that your friend will likely find helpful, but what's most important is that you pick something and just do it. Generic "if there's anything I can do..." offers are automatically dismissed, because you just made it her problem. And she's got enough of those.
If you'd like to read the piece, it's online here, and in the April issue of Parents, which is on newsstands now.
PS. We'll return to regularly scheduled talk about food things next week. If you want to read something thought-provokingly foodie in the meantime, I suggest Frank Bruni's Donald Trump vs. The Food Snobs.