once bitten, twice shy.

“There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are lots of reasons as to why mothers love their sleeping children so well; one of them is so she can sleep herself!

I wasn’t sleeping well in the weeks leading up to E-Niner’s hospitalization because he was having psychotic breakdowns in the wee hours of the night. Now, while he sleeps like a baby in the hospital a few miles from home, I’m not sleeping because I’m worried about him.

Thanks to all the thinking/reading/writing over the weekend, I was able to get my head together and communicate my issues succinctly and clearly to the hospital. It came in the format of a one page fax sent at 4:07AM. That felt good.

One of my dear friends is a nurse at the hospital’s NICU and gave me some pretty good advice via text messages yesterday, one of them being that having things in writing in the file is pretty powerful stuff. My husband reasoned that if you warn the hospital about a concern you have in writing, and if the hospital doesn’t respond and the concern becomes reality, they could be liable. Makes sense to me. So now there’s a note in the file: I don’t feel comfortable with a discharge today.

Additionally, I let them know that if they were to diagnose him with PDD-NOS today, I would add a dissenting opinion to his file. What I didn’t add is that if they were to better present their case, I could feel more comfortable about it tomorrow. They just need to do a better job doing their job where this diagnosis is concerned.

I probably wouldn’t be so belligerent if our experience at the partial hospitalization program were better. Last year, when he was discharged on a new medication, he “crashed” so hard I had to call the paramedics and they revised their medicines post-discharge. I don’t want that scenario to replay itself this time. I’ve wondered if they had more time with him whether they’d revert to the medications he took when he came.

Oh, well. The past is past, but we can learn from it. In the meantime, since I was awake from 3AM until 5:30AM, I’m going to go catch some Z’s…