I couldn?t stop crying. I sat slumped over, with my head in my hands, in a gloomy hospital room. It was January 2016 and my youngest son, then two months old, had been admitted to hospital after ceasing breathing in the emergency room. We had gone to have his jaundice looked at when he suddenly aspirated his milk, stopped breathing and turned dark blue. After being revived, he was transferred to a children?s hospital by ambulance. During our stressful six-day stay there, I began to realize that not only was something wrong with my son but there was also something wrong with me.
My son was on close watch for the first four days in the paediatric intensive care unit?he stopped breathing four times and was resuscitated four times by some of the most wonderful nurses I?ve ever met. As I watched my baby go through this, a feeling of helplessness overwhelmed me. It was incredibly stressful, but somehow, deep down, I knew my sadness was bigger than my son?s condition. As the nurses? shifts changed and days turned into nights, I cried quietly, almost non-stop. Horrible thoughts ran through my head: I was an unfit mother for not noticing that something was wrong, I?d let my son down, my two boys would be better off without me. After many tests, we discovered that he had reflux and an underdeveloped larynx?a common problem among newborns with known solutions. We were lucky, but the darkness didn?t lift when he was discharged from the hospital. At night, I became consumed with watch...