Two Month Wellness - Still Dealing With Anxiety

I talked here about my struggles with anxiety after my second hospitalization. My hope was that my anxiety would subside after Henry was born. Instead I have found myself continuing to be anxious about Henry's health and wellbeing. The biggest source of my anxiety in recent weeks has been the fact that Henry is not yet smiling. In fact, he didn't seem too alert or aware at all. He mostly just slept, ate, and pooped. When he was awake, he wasn't making eye contact with us, choosing instead to stare past us. As the days went on and he still showed no sign of smiling, I got more and more worried. My google history was insane. "How can you tell if your infant is blind? Signs of autism in eight week olds. Developmental delays in near term infants (FYI, don't google that last one. Turns out there are a lot of recent studies showing that babies born in weeks 36-38 do show a lot of developmental delays)."

By Thursday of last week I had worked myself into such a frenzy that it became unbearable. I couldn't concentrate on work or Oliver or anything else. There was just a constant refrain of: "There's something wrong with Henry" running through my mind. I remember being worried about Oliver's development but it never felt like this. I was terrified. And what made things worse is that, because he wasn't smiling or responding to me in anyway, I kept thinking: "Who is this kid anyway?" It was like I couldn't figure out his personality and, therefore, didn't know him. I doubted that I had bonded with him at all. Like I said, I was worked into a frenzy. Completely over the edge.

On Friday morning, I took Henry for his two month wellness check (just for the record, he's up over ten pounds and now in the tenth percentile for weight. He's in the 90th percentile for head circumference. Huge noggin!). While there I laid it all out for our pediatrician - all of my concerns about his development. I'm sitting in the exam room and I'm bawling telling her how he's not smiling and he's not looking at us and I don't feel like I even know him ... Dr. Sharp assured me that since he was three weeks early that he was still safely in the "normal" range for the development of a social smile. She reminded me again to measure his milestone from his due date and not his birthdate. But I wasn't entirely convinced. So, I kept going - crying and getting myself all worked up. And then Dr. Sharp interrupted me and said: "Elizabeth, do me a favor. Look at him right now." I looked down and Henry was staring at me with the biggest shit-eating grin plastered across his face that I had ever seen. If he could talk he would have said: "Gotcha, Mom." It was crazy. Dr. Sharp reminded me that Henry had been feeling under the weather and that maybe now that he's feeling better he's more likely to be awake and alert. We decided to put his two month shots off until Monday to see if he made any progress over the weekend and I left feeling much more at ease.

And then Saturday came and Henry was fussy and sleepy and unresponsive once again. But he was fussier than normal even so I felt his forehead and realized he felt really warm. Turns out he had a fever of 101.5. They tell you that anything over 100.4 in a baby less than three months is an emergency so, after a quick call to the on call doctor, I headed to the ER with him (and with Liz who is the best person in the entire world and spent her Saturday afternoon in the ER waiting room for me so Henry didn't have to be in there surrounded by all the sick kiddos in Austin). We were there for five hours. They drew some blood (and put in an IV in case they needed to push fluids or drugs), inserted a catheter to get urine for a urinalysis, and took a chest Xray. After all that, everything came up clear so they told us it was probably just a viral infection that would run its course. But the whole trip, of course, served only to get my anxiety back up to insanity levels.

It's like every time things start to go well, then the other shoe drops. So now every time something good happens I just hold my breath to see what's going to go wrong. It's exactly the way I felt after my second hospitalization. Like a time bomb that might go off at any minute. I know that being this anxious all the time isn't good for me (or for Henry or the rest of my family for that matter) so I'm determined to work on it. I started running again last week and that has been a great stress relief but my anxiety still creeps up now and again. I have an appointment with Dr. Reich in a week and a half and if I'm still feeling this anxious I'm going to ask her for a recommendation for someone to talk to.

In the meantime, Henry is trying his best to put my anxiety at ease. After our trip to the ER on Saturday, Henry had his most awake and alert day ever on Sunday. It was like he woke up to the world. He spent his time between naps, staring at his daddy and big brother (and sometimes even me) and smiling. He spent time on his activity mat for the first time ever without crying. He was actually looking at the toys. He's doing great. He's just doing things on his own timeline and I need to be okay with that. And I think that the more I can see of him looking like this picture below, the better I will feel.