Our house has a mother-in-law apartment in the basement, that's where Tea and Ashlee stay. Ma stays upstairs with our little family because she hasn't been able to do the stairs for a long time now. The upstairs is set up where the kitchen and living rooms are on one side of the house and the bedrooms are on the other side. Ova and I have the master bedroom and right next door is Ma's room and then next door to that is the kids rooms. This living arrangement worked out perfectly until Ma came home from the last scare at the hospital and we had tons of visitors all the time at all hours of the day. People would come to see Ma, not thinking that our poor baby Katea is so fragile...sometimes people would come with runny noses or coughs....and it was not good. I trained for my job during the day and I was gone most of the day. I had no way of protecting her from everyone that came over. Ova is still bedridden and he keeps her in the room with him, but most of the people stop by and see him too. How can I protect my daughter from getting sick, when my house is constantly full of people...some of them sick?
Baby Katea has a very weak immune system. The smallest little thing to everyone else is a huge huge deal for her poor weak little lungs. The last time she was hospitalized, right after her birthday was with the Rhinovirus, which is something that she caught from all the people that are constantly in our house.
We had to think of something because we couldn't keep doing this. I didn't want to stop people from coming to visit Ma, because she needs the visitors.....but I couldn't keep doing what we were doing....not for my sanity and especially not for baby Katea. Everytime she has to go back on oxygen, her little lungs get damaged more and more.
To be honest, when she got sick this last time...... to see how fast it progressed and how severe it got with her needing to go back on the CPAP and everything she had to go through....and to think that it was because someone came over with a cold, I was mad. I was so mad that people didn't care. I could put a sign on the door to not come in if they were sick, but they'd read in and still walk right in. I was sitting in the hospital staring at my poor baby girl and I was mad.....I was pissed off! My angry mind immediately thought of moving back to my parent's house and getting baby out of that situation...
After a few hours and the chance to calm down a little bit, I realized that it's not that people don't care, it's just that they don't understand. Not every child is as vulnerable as her and it's hard for people who haven't had to deal with it, to understand. Then it popped in my mind that we should just move downstairs. Everything we need is downstairs, we have a kitchen, a laundry room, a storage room, a living room, bedrooms, a bathroom....everything we needed was downstairs. I called Ova from the hospital when I was there with baby Katea and told him that I thought we needed to move downstairs, and he totally agreed!
As soon as baby got released from the hospital, we didn't even take her upstairs....Ova had his brothers and cousins come and move all the big things for us and everything else was bagged up and thrown downstairs. Tea and Ashlee moved upstairs and honestly it's been the best thing ever! Ma and Tea share the master bedroom now, which is WAY better because there's room for people to visit when they come see her. Ashlee has Ma's old room and now there are extra guest bedrooms for the visitors who decide to sleep over. I can't believe we didn't think of this before! It was a total downgrade for us to move downstairs...everything was smaller, and there was no space in the kitchen to put anything, or to cook....but we had to do it for our daughter....and to be honest, I love it so much better! We have our privacy and can do our own thing downstairs....which we've never really been able to do our whole marriage..... and everyone can still come visit Ma and not even be anywhere near baby Katea. Win, win! Nobody comes downstairs if they are sick and things have been great. I can cook for our little family and Tea and Ma are right upstairs if they need us or if we need them. I'm so glad we had the option to move downstairs, hopefully we'll be able to keep baby Katea out of the hospital now!
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