Holy Crap.
I don’t know why they call families Nuclear. When I think of anything Nuclear, the words that come to mind include stuff like fallout, disaster, meltdown and war. None of these sound like the kind of thing I want for my family (or yours, either) but they do sound like things I’ve already experienced in my interactions with my own relatives at one time or another (and I’ll bet you have also). I guess I was hoping that E might bring an end to those kinds of events within our familial clan. For a minute there, I was thinking that maybe this nuclear family thing is based on the atom as its model. The new bambino is the nucleus, as he’ll be right in the middle of everything, and the parents must be electrons, negatively charged and flying in circles around the kiddo at something like Mach Two. In families that have more than one kid, I guess the parents become shared electrons, which must make them even more frantic, and that’s probably why electrons are negatively charged in the first place. I think this model has merit. But based on my own experiences with family members, the other nuclear references also seem to fit. Surprisingly well, which is both kind of cool and a little bit bothersome.
We’ve all certainly experienced fallout within the family. I have relatives I don’t speak with (by my choice), and other relatives that don’t speak with me (by their choice). The ones I don’t speak with have done things that I don’t like, and by my assessment, they’ve come up short in both the integrity and the accountability arenas. I’m not sure why those other ones don’t speak with me, but I don’t think it has anything to do with a shortage of personal accountability on my part. I’m pretty good about that. Must be something else. I would like to know, though, so I could either 1: be accountable for whatever I’ve done, or 2: feel better about not being in contact with people I really genuinely care about.
And as any family has, we’ve also danced with disaster a time or two. I don’t think there’s any correlation between disaster and family, though. I think disaster happens to people, and affects those peoples’ relatives differently than it does other people who lack the same personal connection.
Meltdown is easy. Everyone I’ve ever known has experienced a meltdown at least once. Maybe when each family member is having their own meltdown at the same time it leads to disaster, which is probably one of the things that happens before fallout. Or maybe disaster is what leads people to experience meltdowns. Either way, these things both precede fallout.
War is a horrible awful thing that I used to think everyone wanted to avoid. The political talking heads all say that they hate the war thing, and I don’t imagine too many young men and women are really all that eager to go to some other place where they don’t speak the language and engage in violence against the locals. I’ve known a number of combat veterans and not a single one of them liked being in combat. Not one. Within extended families, it seems like war is pretty common, and in my own family we might have a couple people who act like they’re pretty happy to maintain open hostility toward other people in my own family. I can’t think of very many families that don’t have at least a quiet simmering remnant of disdain for other people in the family that’s based on past disputes. Family members, just like diplomats and politicians, can be pretty good about pretending whatever lousy thing happened isn’t all that important anymore and we’re all able to move forward with our happy lives. They can also be pretty stubborn, which makes things harder for everyone else.
So here we are, my bride and I, thinking we’re going to do something different than whatever everyone else has ever done and we’re not going to create a family that will include war or disaster or meltdowns (well, maybe meltdowns are unavoidable with babies) nor fallout. Right.
One thing we’ve learned from two of our doctors and a whole throng of their assistants plus the midwife who taught our four week class on how to know when to go to the hospital and what to do once we arrive there and the woman who taught the breastfeeding class and the how to change diapers and swaddle babies and give them baths class is that Pertussis - commonly known as Whooping Cough - is a really big deal. It’s a big deal for babies that get it, and over the last while the number of affected people has been on the rise, especially here on the Left Coast. In Washington, which really is just across the bridge from Portland (and it’s a short bridge), the people who make decisions about how to rank infectious diseases have decided to call this round an “epidemic.” Sounds fancy.
They’re not calling it that on our side of the river but they sure are assertive in making sure we’re clear on the importance of not exposing our bundle of joy/meltdown generator to this particular form of ick. When adults or big kids get it, they get sick for a while and that’s that. When babies get it, it’s a real problem that’s awful to deal with and is often fatal.
Fortunately, protecting oneself – and my son, who I’m prepared to fiercely defend even though I haven’t met him yet – is really simple. Go to the local pharmacy, get a shot from a young woman who doesn't even look old enough to drive, pay $23. No doctor required. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: despite some of the things I don’t like about how my country handles some things, there are a whole lot of things that it handles really very well. Let's hear it for big pharma.
D and I told everyone in our family - that we speak with - and everyone else that might want to visit that they have to get a pertussis booster. The ones I don’t speak with don’t need the shot because they might never find out about the kid and regardless, they’ll never be invited into the house. For my side of the family, that was pretty easy. Everyone went to the pharmacy, spent a half hour and a few bucks and walked out with a sore arm that felt like it had just been filled with cold peanut butter. Actually, not everyone. The one relative who is convinced that inoculations are unnecessary and that they do more harm than good said he wasn’t going to get a shot. We agreed that he'd wait to meet the newest member of the family.
Meanwhile, in a small town in the north of Italy, D’s Mom, G, was looking into getting the shot. She found that no one at the pharmacy was of any use, so she made an appointment (which is harder there than it is here) and went to her doctor. The doc ran a bunch of interference and told her all about why she didn’t need the shot, and they went back and forth for a while until the doc finally understood that G wasn’t going to back down nor leave nor be quiet about any of it until she got what she needed. So the doc wrote a prescription, which G dropped off at the unhelpful pharmacy, then returned the following day to collect the now filled prescription, then took the magic serum back to the same doctor herself on another day when there were appointments available, where the doc put the serum into the needle and gave G her shot. I think pretty highly of countries that provide medical care to everyone who lives (or visits) there but given that this took four days of driving all over the place in a country where gas costs twelve dollars a gallon and dealing with people who are born with a special talent for making things harder than they need to be, I’m pretty happy with how these things work over here.
Shortly after I’d become convinced that Italy isn’t handling this pertussis vaccine thing very well at all, we heard from D’s sister, who lives in London. London is in England, which is the country that – for a really really long time – acted like they owned pretty much everything all over the world. Which was kind of true up until all the people who lived in those places but weren’t British realized that they’d rather do things their own way than follow the rules of the Crown and sent the Brits packing. So it’s easy to think that this former superpower that once ruled almost everything would probably have their act together when it comes to keeping their citizens in good health. It’s easy to think that the relative health of everyone that lives there might be a priority and that the former rulers of the Earth are smart about how they take care of their subjects.
D’s sister went to the local health clinic kind of place and explained that she needed to get a pertussis booster shot and was instantly denied. Because in England, the only people eligible to receive pertussis shots are pregnant women and children. So she said something polite and British sounding, then went to a hospital where there’s another clinic and – presumably – someone able to think beyond the scope of whatever’s printed on the documents distributed by the Ministry of Health. The hospital people, though, were unswayed by the whole “going to America to see my new nephew” scenario and didn’t care much about how important those vulgar yanks might think these apparently rare shots really are.
Realizing that going to the trouble of coming all the way over here from clear over there only to have someone like me close the door in her face would be lousy, she then made an appointment and went to see her own doctor. The doc, being all British and having that stiff upper lip thing remained completely convinced that the British way is the best way for everything and was unable to understand that people who don’t live on the same quaint island that he does might prefer to handle the health care of their babies in a more proactive way. So he refused, and said all the same stuff about there being a shortage of this vaccine and that there’s really only enough for pregnant women and children.
It takes two weeks for the vaccine to really provide protection, which means our London based relative has to get her shot in the next two days if she intends to come inside our house. Which she does, and we desperately want her to be here. She has to be here. Those uncreative Brits started to really annoy me.
So I called the State Department and asked a very nice and professional woman if she or her colleagues had any good ideas. They didn’t, really. So she transferred me to the office that takes care of inoculations for US Government employees who are going overseas somewhere that calls for getting shots before departing. They were nice people to talk to but they weren’t people who could be helpful when it comes to figuring out how to get Italian citizens living in London shots required by American doctors.
Next, I called the UK embassy in Washington DC, where they have a very sweet young lady who answers the phone in a perfect British accent and asked her how we might go about making this all happen and she sweetly apologized while explaining that she’d never heard this question before and that she didn’t have an answer. Which was all very nice but served only to convince me that everyone under British rule is in cahoots and unable to even speculate on possible solutions to problems like these. Apparently we’re the only people in all of America who have family members in the UK who’d like to visit their newborn relative. The odds of that being the case seem pretty thin to me given that there are more than fifty three million people over there and more than three hundred million over here, but here we were, presenting this scenario for, apparently, the first time in history.
Realizing that the way Americans are handling this pertussis thing is infinitely better than the inaction taken by the Brits, I started thinking that the US Embassy probably has a doctor, and maybe if we were really nice about it there might be a way to have my sister in law to get her shot from the Americans living in the middle of London. After a few attempts at making a phone call to London (which is simple for D but not simple for myself) I finally did get through to their answering machine, which told me that I could leave a message if I wanted, or wait until their regular business hours and call back to speak with a person. An American person.
By now, D and I are both doing a fine job of acting like electrons. We’re frantic and negatively charged, but because we don’t have the positive force provided by a proton rich nucleus to orbit, we lack focus and sort of bounce off the walls, occasionally bumping into one another and finding out exactly what happens when two negatively charged and kind of frustrated electrons crash into each other. It’s pretty cool.
This morning, D called her sister to find out how forceful she’d been with these health care people whose approach to medicine is apparently to stand around in white lab coats and tell people that they don’t actually need medical attention and we learned that she’d been to many more so-called health care facilities than we’d realized, that she’d been much more than appropriately insistent about it and that nobody anywhere was at all useful. We didn't realize how hard she'd been working at making this happen, and we really didn't fully understand just how absurdly stubborn those British health care employees can be. But she pulled it off. After a zillion attempts, she found a doctor somewhere in London that had enough of this magic serum that he could spare a dose. So she’s getting the shot, and all of this frustration has been for naught. Italy 1, UK 0.
It’s strange. We’re not germophobes, we’re not worried about
dirt, we want the kiddo to experience as much as possible, and here we are
being all insistent about this one thing already. We want to think that we won’t
be this pushy and demanding all the time but given how significant this one
little silly thing managed to become in just a matter of hours I’m left
wondering. Maybe we've already become a couple of those hyperparanoid parents unwilling to negotiate
or consider perspectives that differ from our own. Or maybe we're simply exercising
appropriate caution.
Whatever it is, at least we know E isn't going to suffer whooping cough.
