A Child's Love

In our busy days we sometimes forget the innocence of children. My son knows that I am a doctor and I have tried to explain what a psychiatrist is, but it is certainly hard to explain what depression or psychosis is to a four year old who has not experienced it first hand. He has been up to the staff lounge where I work briefly, but because of confidentiality reasons, not to mention safety, he has never been on the actual unit proper. He has no idea what an inpatient psychiatric unit looks like. All he knows is on weekdays, Mommy goes to the "hosipal" to help sick people who are sad. He also knows there is a helicopter outside Mommy's window and that is pretty cool.

Fortunately, with the exception of the month he spent in the NICU after he was born, he has never been admitted to a hospital. He has visited some very nice ER's though, where he gets stickers and people tell him he is cute and a very brave boy and he gets to lay or sit on a special bed with bars with Mommy or Daddy. Once, he even got "a big pill up my butt", a fact that, rest assured, he will tell you about. In all three of those visits, he was sent home with more stickers and people telling him he was a brave boy. It never occurred to me that he did not realize that people stay in the hospital as inpatients.

I discovered that earlier last week, the last time I had to take call. I took a call from the ER about a potential admission. Business has been good and we have been running full. "Do we even have a bed?" I asked. Once that was clarified, I accepted the admission. My son overheard the conversation and his response was not what I expected. He gave me a quizzical look and asked "We have a bed upstairs?" Of course we do not. Our house is a ranch house without an attic and I could understand his confusion as he does not always separate telephone conversations from the one in the room. I explained that I meant, do we have a bed on the psychiatric unit where I work, which is upstairs from the ER. He still seemed surprised by this and had to tell my husband. "Daddy, they have a bed upstairs at the hosipal!" followed by the question as to why we kept beds in the hospital. I explained that these were for the patients to sleep in when they stayed there. "They stay there at the hosipal?" I did not realize that he did not know that patients stayed at the hospital. His only experience with hospitals that he would remember are the ones above. He had never been exposed to a situation where he had to experience someone as an inpatient. This idea was all new to him. I got a good laugh about this and went to work with a new "my son said something this morning that was so cute" story and went about my day.


I thought maybe I should show him some pictures of his month long ordeal in the NICU when he was first born. He had been told he was a "preemie" and spent a month in the hospital before but never paid much attention before. I asked him if he recalled being told about being in the hospital for a month after he was born which he really did not have much memory of. This time was interested to see the pictures. I showed him pictures of the warmer he stayed in at first, then the small crib where he was kept tightly swaddled to help with muscle development in a premature baby. He saw all the tubes, heart monitor leads, oxygen monitors. I told him that we came by three times a day to feed him and that the nurses fed him with a tube the other times. I showed him the feeding tube. That's when his response really moved me.


We probably felt worse leaving our son than he did being left behind. Preemies in general cry when they are disturbed too much. They have important things to do, like grow, so they do not mind being left alone. The mind of a four year old is different. When I told him that we came three times a day to visit then went home, he started crying and said that he missed us when we left. It was very touching. I reassured him that babies that little do not have that kind of awareness but he insisted "but I really loved you guys and I didn't want you to leave." Of course at his age, it is hard for him to process having feelings any different than the ones he has right now, but I also know from his response how much my husband and I are loved by our son. That means a great deal to me.

Money can buy you things that might make you happy at times, but a child's love must be earned and will bring more than happiness. It will give you a reason to get up in the morning every day.