Know My Pain

May 6, 2020: Diary Entry

Because I have anxiety, I can't ever trust my gut instincts. This means that I have to trust James' instincts AGAINST my own.

Last night Blake got up from the dinner table like she does every night, and went to stand in the pantry to sing along with the FrozenII soundtrack, because that's where our Sonos player is (was. Spoiler, I moved it last night). That's also where our laundry is.

About 10 minutes later she came back in and said, "mommy, I ate something". She opened her mouth and James and I both took turns looking into it, running our fingers along her teeth, smelling her mouth, etc. Neither of us could find anything and I thought, "super. She ate the dog food". But I asked her to show us what it was anyway, just in case.

She led us to our laundry detergent pods.

We tested each one to make sure none of them were leaking. We searched the whole area to see if we could find an open one. We asked her extensively if she ate one or if she just bit it. By then she was crying, because she had just wanted a strawberry.

I have worked with a lot of children in my life and have therefore called poison control a lot in my life. So I immediately gave her a bottle of water and watched her drink the whole thing. And then I gave her another bottle.

James took her upstairs for a bath and I sat in the baby room and called poison control.

The woman told me what James had already told me. That none of the pods were leaking, that Blake wasn't coughing or throwing up or showing any signs of respiratory distress. That I did the absolute right thing by immediately giving her water. That, in her opinion, Blake was fine.

So we gave her a bottle of milk and read her five bedtime books and sang her three bedtime songs and let her go to sleep.

The logical side of my brain said that I was fine. That Blake was fine. That she wasn't lethargic or physically sick. That the last time we took her to the ER they charged us hundreds of dollars even though the hospital is in our network, because the doctor assigned to us was not. That keeping Blake up hours past her bedtime and exposing her to god knows what in the ER would be worse than letting her sleep off any potential small amounts of detergent that she had ingested.

But the logical side of me is very small and the emotional side of me is very dominant.
And the emotional side of me wondered whether I had just made a decision that would kill my daughter.

I wanted someone other than James to reassure me that we had made the right decision. But a part of having anxiety means that you set up different rules in your mind. If you don't talk about it then it'll be fine. If you worry about it then it won't come true. If you stay vigilant that you'll be safe. If you let down your guard then the worst will happen.

I text my childhood best friend and vaguely asked her to pray for us, because that's within acceptable parameters of the rules.

I sat in Blake's room and stared at her. I leaned over her to hear her breathing. I (I'm sorry, James) poked her until she halfway woke up, and then watched her roll over and go back to sleep. I checked her temperate. I briefly wondered if I was stealthy enough to stick her finger in a pulse ox monitor but decided that I wasn't, and that ours is for adults anyway and wouldn't give an accurate reading.