Emergency Room Dropout: Mental Stories From Motherhood

+ thoughts on hiring a nanny and paying for your village

“I need someone to fucking look inside of my baby and make sure everything’s OK,” I texted my sister in a frenzy on Friday afternoon. “Like I’m not fucking around anymore. Something is WRONG. He is hungry and can’t eat and squealing in pain when he tries.”

Last week, I shared a little about our feeding journey with Ziggy — and it has been a journey to say the least. Last I left you, I was a few days into my weaning journey (that is, starting to stop breastfeeding/pumping) and hopeful that we had finally found a formula that agreed with Ziggy and that he enjoyed.

But by Friday afternoon, he had all but stopped eating. After a few good days on this new formula (Nutramigen for anyone who needs a quick refresher), he suddenly was on a hunger strike and told us so by hysterically crying after the first few sips of every bottle, refusing to ingest anymore.

Now, Nutramigen smells like pure ass, to be sure. Alas, I thought babies were like dogs in the sense that they don’t know stinky formula from a cheeseburger because how would they have anything to compare it to? But Ziggy’s visceral reaction to this formula had me all fucked up. Was it the actual formula itself or was something else going on? Was something… wrong? Was his throat on fire? Did he have horrific reflux that had burned his esophagus and I was just letting it happen to my poor, helpless child? I had gotten so many messages of solidarity re: Nutramigen being the only formula their baby could eat, so it couldn’t possibly be that my three-month-old didn’t like this stuff. It was deeper than that, and I had to help him.

Long story incredibly short: After seven hours, a chaotic waiting area, a prison cell of a room, and a doctor who was more interested in explaining his studies on weed to us and looking at his phone than helping us in any way whatsoever, we left the hospital with the suspicion that Ziggy was 100% healthy and might just be a picky fucking eater.

Long story longer but still super short: We were right. After throwing out the Nutramigen and replacing it with Kendamil (which, FWIW, was the number one answer via Reddit for “best formula for picky eaters”), our baby did a complete 180º. No more screaming and crying during feedings, no more hunger strike. We’re now on day four of our baby chugging Kendamil like a champ, happily shitting his brains out, and our lives feeling much, much better.

Now we know me. I operate by finding the humor in everything because if I don’t laugh, I’ll dwell and cry and spiral and spin out (this tactic clearly didn’t work on Friday, though). It took me less than 24 hours to be laughing AT myself about running Ziggy across town to the ER simply because he’s a little bitch with good taste like his mama. So much so, I saved my sticker ID I had to wear at the hospital and put it in his baby book under Month 3 and hope he makes me tell him the story a thousand times over when he’s old enough to appreciate it.

Our first unnecessary ER visit got me wondering how many other similar, silly stories are out there about rushing your baby to the hospital out of sheer ignorance and panic. So, I asked my IG audience to share reasons they took their babies to the ER and, per usual, they delivered.

Parenthood is hard. It’s also amazing and scary and stressful and rewarding and joyous and terrifying and maddening. So let’s all take a second to laugh at the absurdity of raising humans with some of these stories my followers so kindly shared with me over the weekend. They had to fit their stories into the character-limited questions box, so please enjoy some of these incredible one liners.

Reasons You’ve Taken Your Baby to the ER

“He snorted a pea.”

“She loved mac and cheese too much. Thought she was having a reaction to altitude.” This one made me laugh SO hard because the information is so minimal, yet I think it’s exactly what it sounds like. They were on vacation somewhere high above sea level, and her kid was eating too much mac and cheese so she decided something was wrong enough to go to the ER.

“He said his foot hurt. Literally, his foot hurt and I thought it was cancer.”

“Gas.”

“A not-insane fever when he was 1. Treatment was 4 Jellos and a popsicle that cost $3,000.”

“Feet and hands looked purple after bath… she was cold. 🫠”

“Thought daughter had a hernia… it was just black marker on her stomach.”

“He was coughing in his crib. It was a fake cough. He just learned how to do it.”

“Their arm was asleep.”

“He gently slid from sitting to the ground while on pillows and cried for 1 second.”

“Thought baby’s teeth were rotting. Realized he ate colored Goldfish.”

“Uncontrollable crying that turned out to be gas.” If we all had a dime, amiright?

“Breathing wasn’t ‘regular.’ Spoiler alert - it was.”

“He rolled off the couch. 6 hours in the ER. Doc said ‘Don’t worry - kids are bouncy.’”

“I thought my son’s penis was broken because it was purplish… he’s mixed race and it was his melanin coming in.”

“Tongue thrush wouldn’t go away… turned out to be breast milk. In my defense, midwife said thrush!”

“Legit losing her mind and it had never happened before. She was just teething. 😑”

“I thought she ate a AA battery. She was 3 weeks old. Literally impossible.”

“I thought she was blind because she wasn’t tracking objects - turns out, not blind - just too soon to track objects.”

“Her breathing sounded very disturbing. Doc said ‘This sounds…like a baby.’” HAHAHAHA

“His cry was different. Obviously that meant he was near death in my mind.”

“I was out of town and husband thought 1 year old swallowed a suction cup hook. It was still on the window…”

“Nanny said she had 100 and 5 fever. She meant 100.5, I just didn’t bother to check myself.”

“Refused to swallow food and excessive drool. Figured something was lodged in him. No, just teething.”

“As a nurse, I saw an entire family bring an infant in for bleeding from clipping her nails. The bleeding had stopped by the time they arrived, but I’m talking 6 family members came in, all panicked.”

“Had a black spot on the top of his mouth. It was lint.”

“Fussy, spiked fever, dressed in head to toe fleece. The doctor told me to unzip him and cool him off 🙃”

“Didn’t pee for 10 hours. Peed as soon as we got there. Billed $400 for Pedialyte.”

“Umbilical cord fell off and it was bleeding. I thought she was dying.”

“High fever that wouldn’t come down. Turns out our thermometer was broken.”

“She wasn’t crying during her normal five hour evening crying period.”

“He said his testicles hurt. Turns out, when you squeeze testicles, they hurt.”

“She was sleeping too well (i.e. too long).”

“My baby let out ‘too many’ contented sighs.”

“Still in hospital after birth. Frantically called the nurse in because… hiccups.”

“He fell off a chair and I thought I saw blood in his mouth. Turns out it was a fruit snack.”

Now over the paywall we go into the Land of the Personal.