Things I'll Miss, part 1

In the grand scheme of our leaving Jackson, the biggest punch in the stomach comes when I (daily) think of the dear ones that have my heart here. The whole "how will my life be half as bright without them?" bit. All horribly true.

But it's also true that there are other things I'll miss that, although their impact hasn't been as significant as that spoken of above, have made our lives here much easier than they could have been. It feels important to me to write about some of them as they occur to me.

Today I took Annie for her 15 month checkup. I absolutely love our pediatrician, Stephen Chevalier. He and his fabulous nurse, Wanda. If I could pack them up and take them with us, I would. When Lucy was born and was the nightmare infant that she was, I don't think I would have made it without Wanda. If a day went by that I didn't call her in those first 6 weeks, she would call me just to make sure we were okay. When Lucy, at 6 weeks, had to be hospitalized in St. Louis for sepsis that might easily have killed her, Chevalier was involved from afar as if he were just down the hall - talking to the doctors attending to Lucy on every shift, getting the results of labwork, ultrasounds, chest xrays, spinal taps and more, and calling me often in the hospital to let me know what he had found out, how things looked, and what would happen next. He talked to me more in the hospital from Mississippi than the hospitalists in St. Louis did. And when we returned to St. Louis, he managed her condition so carefully and proactively. Every time thereafter that we had to hospitalize Lucy in her first 2 years, Stephen would come by the hospital to check on us and make sure we were getting the care we needed, even when it wasn't his day to round on the group's hospitalized patients. Stephen and Wanda love our girls...and Lucy loves them (Annie not so much at this point, but she's in the midst of immunizations, who can blame her?).

Dr. Chevalier is a great physician - very bright and experienced and all of that good stuff - but the thing I appreciate most about him is this...from day one, he has listened to me. Even as a new mom, crazily post-partum and neurotically sleep-deprived, he seemed to put so much weight in my take on things w.r.t. Lucy. He just naturally accepted that I was her mother and, even though she was just a few days, weeks, months old, and even though she was my first, I knew what I was talking about. He paid attention to my instincts and trusted them. He didn't know me then, and he didn't have to listen to me, but he did.

I don't think I realized what an amazing thing this was until I was in St. Louis and Lucy was sick (it's ridiculous how every trip for her first 3 years resulted in serious illness), and I took her to my nephew's pediatrician. Who did not listen to me. Who was not helpful. Granted, he didn't know me. It was a holiday. And everyone under 12 in St. Louis was sick at the time. But still...I was amazed at how dehumanizing it felt to be treated as if I was inconsequential, merely a vehicle for getting my sick progeny to his office where he could look at them, tell me how I should be handling their illness differently than I had been, and prescribe medicine that he thought they should have, despite my assertion that another treatment had been most successful for Lucy in the past. Ugh.

I will miss them. In general I will miss the landscape of our family's medical treatment here. I will miss Kim Nichols, who has delivered both of our children and handled me so beautifully through both pregnancies. I will miss the medical connections that Michael has made - colleagues and attendings of his who have seen us as patients for no fee. I will miss the expertise of surgeons, each of them renowned in their respective fields, who have reconstruced Michael's eardrum (after it was virtually obliterated by a blobbing accident at camp) and broken hand (after mountain biking gone awry). I will miss our health insurance, which, thanks to Michael's random assignment to the VA for payroll purposes while a resident and fellow, has meant that we have benefitted from excellent health insurance. I'm grateful for the federal government (words that don't often fly from my mouth): when I take my kids for checkups and don't pay a dime, when I go through 9 months of pregnancy and then childbirth and pay practically nothing, twice, to the doctor or the hospital, when our prescriptions are minimally expensive and our pharmacy delivers them to our door, I have lots to be grateful for.

In the midst of medical training that has been difficult, oft-times maddening, discouraging, and seemingly endless, our own medical treatment has been such a blessing. Such a beautiful way that God has cared for us through this journey. One of many. But today, one that I am especially thankful for.