Miller Squared

One Little Sock

It is a little dark in the hospital labor room. A knitter sits in a rocking chair beside the bed. She rocks and knits, rocks and knits, mostly because there is nothing else to fill this moment. The woman in the bed is finally asleep, but even with drugs to help her sleep and numb her contractions she still moans a little with each one.

The knitter pauses in her work and leans forward to the edge of the bed and soothes the woman’s hair. They are alone in the quiet room.  She wouldn’t dream of being more than an arm’s reach away. You never leave the brokenhearted.

The knitter is also a doula, a labor companion, and she has done this a hundred times-sat with a woman in labor. She always knits something for the baby during the quiet waiting times, times while they wait for labor to get interesting or when people are resting, like now. She starts with tiny little socks…

Mothers love having something that was made for the baby while they were having the baby, and they often find the doula’s quiet knitting reassuring. They look over during labor and see her knitting, and they know everything is all right. Who would just sit there if things weren’t all right?  If she’s knitting, then they are okay.

…When she arrived at the woman’s house this morning the knitter put her soft wool yarn and tiny needles on the table and gave the woman a hug. She became the doula and asked all the questions, filled in forms…

She and this baby had already met. They had played games of “I poke you and you kick me.” The baby liked to lie on her right side and deeply resented the doula’s friendly poking. The doula knew the baby’s body: the lively curve of the bum, the little knees, elbows, and heels.

“We’ve got to go,” she told the woman, and they phoned the hospital for advice. They took the fast way to the hospital, and she comforted the woman with wool, casting on a little sock on the way. It was meant to be a good sign, knitting the sock. No need to panic, no reason to stop knitting. They worried with pale blue wool all the way.

At the hospital, the knitter put away her work again and told the doctor and nurse that they have come because the baby is “quiet.” She said this in a way that she hoped meant nothing to the woman and everything to the doctor. “Quiet” she said again.

Suddenly everything went very fast. The gentle knitting was replaced by monitors, beeps, and ultrasounds, cold things that plug in. The woman and the doula were both badly frightened now. The nurses were impossibly gentle, the doctors impressively kind. The baby was still quiet. There was only bad news, the worst news.

Hours later, the whole thing had gotten too cruel. It is a horrible truth that you must finish what you start, even though it seems too sad to do. The doula counseled carefully. They had planned a natural birth, since it would be better for the baby, but now? Now it isn’t better. “Ease the pain,” she soothed. “It hurts enough.”

By then it was late, and the woman was very, very tired. When the medicines worked, she fell asleep. The doula-knitter hoped that she would sleep for a long time, for when she wakes up, it would be sad work.

Now the knitter sits down in the rocking chair. She thinks about it for a little bit, and then she picks up the pale blue yarn and starts back to work on the sock. …There will probably only be time for this one little sock. The knitter is careful not to knit the sock too long. Nobody is going to grow into it, and she wants the woman to have something just the right size.

Let us call the woman a mother now, for though there is no baby to take home, there once was one. The daughter played poking games and rolled over and heard her mother’s voice. Even though the mother will have no child, she will be a mother. This one little sock will be her proof.

From Yarn Harlot: the secret life of a knitter by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Childhood diseases return as parents refuse vaccines

ziyadmd:

This has been a long suspected outcome of the anti-vaxxers refusal to vaccinate their children; the return of childhood illnesses such as measles.

A 4 year old boy called Landon was living in a homeless shelter when he first became ill. He started with a fever of ~40*C, then proceeded to develop a rash on his forehead. The rash then spread to his mouth and throat, so swallowing was torture. He began vomiting and developed a cough that nearly choked him. He was rushed to the emergency room and hospitalized for five days.

Landon is one of at least 152 cases of measles diagnosed in the USA so far this year — twice the number seen in a typical year and the biggest outbreak in 15 years, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Half of patients have had to be hospitalized.

For the doctors and nurses caring for patients like Landon, the return of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles — a viral illness that once killed 3,000 to 5,000 Americans a year — is both frightening and all too predictable.

Not to mention a waste of time and resources that could have been spent elsewhere on other patients. Instead we have preventable diseases clogging up the healthcare system, potentially putting others lives in danger 

In the past three years, doctors also have seen outbreaks of other vaccine-preventable diseases, such as mumps, whooping cough and a life-threatening bacterial infection called Hib. All can be deadly. 

Although overall vaccine coverage remains high, 40% of parents say they have deliberately skipped or delayed a shot for their children.

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