It turns out that it’s really hard to tell if your baby is just congested or having trouble breathing. This is something I learned when my 10 month old, Robin, was struggling to breathe at bedtime. When Health Canada first approved vaccines for children under five, I was cautiously optimistic. This was the moment our family had been eagerly waiting for. the added layer of protection for the children we thought had been left behind in the rush to ‘get back to normal’. By July, other provinces had started vaccine programs for this age group, but we live in Alberta, which was slow to create a plan. The day before vaccine reservations opened in our province, on August 1, my three-year-old son, Henry, tested positive for COVID-19. Two days later, his brother, Robin, developed a fever and also tested positive with a rapid test at home. While Robin’s fever soon passed, his congestion went from bad to worse. We consulted mommy hivemind (texting and calling various mommy friends) and decided to take him to the hospital. After a three-hour wait in the emergency room, a doctor confirmed that Robin had croup and was actually struggling to breathe. His breathing difficulty was treated with an oral steroid and two doses of epinephrine, which is administered by tying a tiny breathing mask to the infant’s face and holding it there as the medicine enters his nose. My husband and I had to hold Robin down as our baby struggled, screamed and cried while trying to get the mask off. Because he is the youngest member of the family, none of us can avoid prefacing Robin’s name with the word baby. Unlike his couch-to-floor-hopping big brother, Baby Robin is still only learning the joys of standing, half-crawling, half-crawling from the floor to the dog dish to splash water and slurp blueberries . on his face. “Nice baby,” say people observing his calm energy. At the hospital, despite intrusions of breathing masks and x-ray machines and several strangers in masks and protective medical gear, Robin continued to be a mostly chill baby. At one point he gently offered his stuffed bunny to the nurse. A peace offering. As if to say, “I know you take care of me, would you like this bunny?” Baby Robin will be fine. We were finally sent home after he responded well to the medication and went back to his baby busy with his work.
But holding the hideous but necessary face mask over Robin’s mouth and nose, watching him struggle and suffer, I felt like I was in a tunnel and revisiting the choices we’d made as parents over the past two years. First the choice to keep Henry out of daycare, then the choice to send him back, the choice to have a second baby, the choice to keep Henry in daycare as public health protections dwindled to next to nothing when most Canadian adults – but not all children — were vaccinated. Nicholas Ruder and his three-year-old daughter, Caroline Ruder, are pictured as Jean Guo, a physician’s assistant, administers the Moderna Spikevax mRNA COVID-19 vaccine approved by Health Canada for children under five in Toronto. (Sabah Rahman/CBC) Sending Henry to daycare was both a financial necessity and critical to his social-emotional development. But it also meant, inevitably, that we would catch COVID-19. Not sending him, as we did in the first 14 months of the pandemic, meant that we might be protected from COVID-19, but that we might still have a child who was withdrawn from the other children on the playground, shy and withdrawn. I thought how silly it was that I was upset that I had options. “Be thankful,” I told myself, revising a familiar refrain of the past two years: “At least we have options.” I thought about the email from our daycare in early July informing families that it was no longer necessary for children who tested positive for COVID to stay home. Although “recommended”, it is no longer a requirement. I thought about all the competing messages I’ve heard over the past two years: “Children are not severely affected by COVID.” “It’s just a cold!” “We’ll all get it in the end.” “Kindergartens are full of germs; it’s good to be exposed early to build immunity.” But also: “Wear a mask if you’re indoors with a lot of people.” (Has anyone been to daycare recently?). “Long COVID is a real thing.” “There are pediatric deaths from COVID-19.” And so on. Then I thought how foolish I was to think that my choices would make a difference. that the decisions I made were somehow the right decisions.
The myth of the past two years has been that we as individuals, by exercising our “personal responsibility”, can protect ourselves and our children. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is “no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.“For the past two years, I have felt that Thatcher’s poor and unimaginative idea of ​​our collective responsibilities to one another has come true. It’s one thing for a family like mine, with our many privileges, insulated against the worst extremes of every kind of disaster, from COVID to violent acts of racism, poverty to homelessness, to “manage risk.” It is quite another to have a policy apparatus that offloads all risk management to individuals and families, telling them, in turn, that the calamities that befall them are their own fault. Because that’s what happens when you have a sick child — you rack your brain for things you could have done differently that might have led to a different outcome, however absurd and impossible that may be. If only, if only, if only… Do you have a similar experience with this first-person column? We want to hear from you. Write to us at [email protected]