The Head Pat

I see that you don't understand, you poor thing

Thinking about this post, a description of a licensed therapist explaining to ignorant laymen that it’s actually quite normal and unremarkable for Minor Attracted Persons to want to have sex with children and you uncredentialed idiots should stop being so judgy, I remembered something I haven’t thought about for years — and then I realized just how germane the memory is to our current weirdness.

Our daughter was born in 2008, at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. Because of complications with the pregnancy and a premature birth, we spent a couple weeks in a very large teaching hospital — a doctor factory — and it was my first experience in that kind of environment. Good news up front: It was mostly great, people were mostly very kind, and we went home with a healthy child and a healthy mom.

However.

When a certain young lady finally deigned to grace us with her presence, late one night, she emerged into an audience. “Let’s have peds,” the OB said to the nurse, right as the feet cleared the birth canal, and then we got a small army of pediatrics residents — who appeared to move in a pod, like flightless birds. They checked her out, pronounced her beautiful and strong, and rushed her away down the hallway. I followed.

In the nursery, the pod dispersed, and we were alone with a quite small and fairly grouchy RN. The nurse barked at me that she was going to check the baby’s blood sugar levels, and then she drew blood with a heel stick. She gathered some blood onto a slide, put it into a handheld measuring device, pressed a button — and then squinted as the machine made a low-tone failure beep at her. “It don’t work,” she said. This moment is burned into my memory. I can see the whole room, and the nurse’s face.

So she did it again, on the other heel: Heel stick, blood gathering, handheld device, low-tone failure beep. “Huh,” she said. “I’m gonna do it again.” Put yourself in the nursery at Cedars Sinai and see this moment with me: Two failures in a row; decision to repeat the same process. Bleeding newborn, ten minutes out of the womb.

I stopped her. “You’re not going to do that again,” I said. “It isn’t working.”

She went bad cop, immediately, and said that I was preventing her from providing urgently needed medical care to a child who might require treatment for dangerously low blood sugar. My obstruction was threatening harm to the child.

“Find an alternative,” I said. “You’re not doing that again.”

She pulled herself up to her full not-quite-five-feet, and hit me with the ultimate gotcha: “That’s it,” she said. “I’m getting the doctor!” And away she went, power-walking, arms cocked outward and pumping to match her stride.

A tired-looking pediatrics resident entered soon after, alone, the nurse having withdrawn entirely from my horrible presence. He arrived with the report that I wouldn’t allow anyone to provide treatment for my child, and opened on that premise: “Look, I know that people who aren’t medical professionals can misunderstand what we do here, and I’m sure you’re feeling very emotional, but….”

And then that was the end of that shit, because I made myself clear in a hurry. He quickly saw the point, and they fixed it: A different nurse came in, they got blood and an actual result, and we were all good. I appreciated that very tired doctor, and that very capable second nurse. But I remember this cycle:

1.) I saw something wrong, something that someone was doing poorly and failing at;

2.) The immediate response to my observation was that I was getting in the way because I wasn’t credentialed and didn’t understand.

3.) Nevertheless, I persisted. And we fixed it.

Later, while that certain young lady spent a week in the NICU, I showed up every four hours with a new bottle of freshly pumped breastmilk, while my wife sighed heavily and said she had begun to understand the life of a dairy cow. “Breastfed babies,” we had read, “have a lower risk of asthma, obesity, type 1 diabetes, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Breastfed babies are also less likely to have ear infections and stomach bugs.” And formula looks like this, with plenty of healthy corn syrup and soy oil for newborns:

So we made our decision — and you get to make your decision — about what our baby would have for her earliest nutrition. (This mom, not so much.)

Then I walked into the NICU and found a nurse feeding our daughter a bottle of formula, and the cycle began again, and a nurse practitioner saw that I wasn’t a medical professional, and….

But this cycle of presumptive condescension seems to be at the root of the current fake crisis over mRNA uptake: You people aren’t listening to medical professionals. What eugyppius just usefully described as “containment ideology” is an expression of status and identity, of relative positions: We’re supposed to be up here, you’re supposed to be down there. There’s an underlying reflex to it that we’ve seen before, and at least some of it can be overcome with ordinary square-your-shoulders-and-say-no stubbornness. Just say no, and then say, “I said no,” and then say it again if you have to. You can, it works, and it doesn’t matter at all what attitude comes flying back in your direction.