In honor of Baby Kai and his new parents...
... I went searching through a cache of papers to find an article I wrote. I don't know where the original is, but I found a copy of the newspaper that gave it fame. That is, my article was read by a columnist for The Tacoma News Tribune and he published it in said column on May 7, 1979. It had to do with pediatric medical records. I had a four-year-old son, a two-year-old daughter, and was ending my first trimester of a Bonus Pregnancy. That is to say, I knew something about baby doctors.
We were military, responsible for picking up our own medical records ("Take a number. If you can't find an empty chair, stand against the wall."). We were responsible for holding said records while we wrestled a restless, irritable, fevered child and waited to see a doctor and, in my case, carried in a Baby Pack or discreetly nursed a second child. A hand-scratched sign near the intake desk indicated the estimated wait time to be seen, and it always bore that sideways figure eight on it -- the medical icon for infinity.
While military medical records weren't sealed, the folder carried a stern warning against peeking, WARNING: GOVT PROP DO NOT OPEN, under which was a recapitulation -- those jokers, the government! -- of what they called our "right to privacy". Essentially it said that the Army used our SSN to identify us, which we were not obligated to allow them to do, in which case they were not obligated to acknowledge our existence. I was brought up by parents who believed in the chain of command and the heirarchy of authority; in other words, I was a Minder. Though I resented being known as XXX-XXXX-XXX, I granted them permission rather than die unrecognized and unnamed. And I might never have opened my records or those of my children if not for the influence of another mother, stuck beside me in Pediatrics for six hours one day, who was not a Minder. She opened said Govt Prop.
"Oh... my... LORD!" she gasped. "Oh... NO, oh NO, OH NO!!!!" She had my attention now, and that of every person sitting in the room and standing against the wall. Only the staff remained impervious. The mother shifted her snuffling child in her arms to better read the handwritten notes within her son's medical records, then began to sob. "Why didn't they TELL me?" she wailed. My two-year-old, accompanying me with her sick four-year-old brother, reached out and patted the woman's leg in sympathy, and the gesture propelled me from the hiding place of my own helpless silence.
"Is there something I can do?" I asked softly.
She closed the records and wept. Underneath WARNING: GOVT PROPERTY DO NOT OPEN, I saw the name Swenson, Harold G. "Is something wrong with your Harold?"
"N-noooooo," she wailed. "It's -- it's my Devin! He's -- he's got --" She stopped talking, stopped wailing, and eyed me suspiciously. "Do I know you?"
My daughter was still patting the woman. She looked at me suspiciously, too. "Uh, no, I don't think so," I admitted.
The woman's rage at the fickle finger of unwellness turned toward me: "So how do you know my husband?"
And that's how we discovered that, no, her four-year-old son Devin did not have the heart, lungs, and liver of an average 40-year-old, but rather her 40-year-old husband, Harold, did.
Had the woman not been yelling as she carried her child and her husband's records to the counter, you could have heard the veritable Seventh Seal being ripped away as every other mother in the Pediatrics waiting room opened and read the Govt Prop they held. As far as I know, we each had records that matched the child we'd brought in, but most of us were annoyed just the same.
I learned, for instance, about myself: "Mother sets no firm boundaries." I remembered the episode that provoked that professional, scientific, medical observation: We'd waited about an hour in Records, four hours in Pediatrics, and once in the Doctor's Office, a young assistant announced that the doctor needed to take a conference call. Turns out, it was a call about a conference, and we waited another quarter hour while he discussed which hotel to stay in based on the proximity of gyms and malls. The entire day I had been carrying a hyperactive three-year-old with an ear infection, on my hip, and held him by the hands in my lap now lest he touch any thing or any body and get something even more dire, and believe me when I say there came the moment when I was D.O.N.E. Penicillin, I figured, would wipe out the worst he could do. I set the boy loose. He scurried around the room like a crazed cockroach. He'd scarcely opened and slammed all the cupboards, spun loose the stirrups from the end of the exam table, and tipped over the hazardous waste before the doctor decided to hang up the phone. We got our exam and antibiotic; he got his revenge in the medical records.
Reading medical charts that day, we were all pretty angry, as I recall -- although not as angry as Harold's wife when the MPs were called to escort her out -- and not at the actual treatment charts, but at those casual observations that shouted "Ignorant Mother Here, Folks!" We discussed together exactly what it meant when they wrote, "It's m's 1st baby" -- as though perhaps when we reported things like, "He's crying all the time", we were not yet aware that the orifice below the sniffer could actually render sound, and that we didn't know the difference between burpy spit-up over a shoulder and projectile vomiting that cleared the sneeze bar at a buffet.
Well, now I've worked myself into a state. And though I realize my irritation is aimed at a system drawn from 1979, I'll wait until tomorrow to share my Pediatric Record Medical Terminology. For now, I'm bored and young and poor and my husband is in the Army, so I know! -- for old times' sake, I believe I'll manufacture an ailment so I can spend a full day at that fun-filled venue, the hospital, with the first baby I've ever laid eyes on in my whole life, yay!