When children scare parents

If there’s one thing children are good at, it’s their ability to give their parents a good scare.

When our son David was about 2 years old, we were at home, just a regular day, not much going on. At some point, either my wife or I, I don’t remember which one of us saw it – but we noticed he had some kind of liquid all around his mouth. Like he had been drinking a smoothie or something. But there were no smoothies sitting around. So what was it?

Then we saw the open bottle nearby – it was calamine lotion. You know, the stuff you put on itchy skin for some relief. And it’s for external use only. So of course we had no idea how dangerous this was. And back then, there was no Google or WebMD to get answers immediately.

We called 911 – and oh wouldn’t I love to hear the audio of that call today. The 911 dispatcher either called Poison Control, or connected us to them. And they told us, thankfully, that calamine lotion is generally non-toxic. So it wasn’t a big deal. But for a few minutes, to two scared parents, it was a very big deal.

Recently in the Facebook group, one of our Tuesday questions was this: Parents – what was the scariest moment with your child? And you should see all those stories in the comments. And I thought – hey, this should be a podcast episode. So I asked some of the commenters there to just give a short version of their story by audio, and that’s what we have here today.

And this is the kind of thing we talk about in the Facebook group all the time. At the moment there are 8,862 What Was That Like listeners in that group – and we’d love to have you come over and join us in the conversations. WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook

And now – some stories of when children gave their parents a big scare.

 

Full show notes and transcript for this episode are here:

https://WhatWasThatLike.com/218

 

Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.

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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):

If there’s one thing children are good at, it’s their ability to give their parents a good scare.

 

When our son David was about 2 years old, we were at home, just a regular day, not much going on. At some point, either my wife or I, I don’t remember which one of us saw it – but we noticed he had some kind of liquid all around his mouth. Like he had been drinking a smoothie or something. But there were no smoothies sitting around. So what was it?

 

Then we saw the open bottle nearby – it was calamine lotion. You know, the stuff you put on itchy skin for some relief. And it’s for external use only. So of course we had no idea how dangerous this was. And back then, there was no Google or WebMD to get answers immediately.

 

We called 911 – and oh wouldn’t I love to hear the audio of that call today. The 911 dispatcher either called Poison Control, or connected us to them. And they told us, thankfully, that calamine lotion is generally non-toxic. So it wasn’t a big deal. But for a few minutes, to two scared parents, it was a very big deal.

 

Recently in the Facebook group, one of our Tuesday questions was this: Parents – what was the scariest moment with your child? And you should see all those stories in the comments. And I thought – hey, this should be a podcast episode. So I asked some of the commenters there to just give a short version of their story by audio, and that’s what we have here today.

 

And this is the kind of thing we talk about in the Facebook group all the time. At the moment there are 8,862 What Was That Like listeners in that group – and we’d love to have you come over and join us in the conversations. WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook

 

And now – some stories of when children gave their parents a big scare.

 

 

Story #1

Several years ago when my children were small, my husband was in the military, we were young parents and he was gone a lot, and I did a lot of the parenting on my own. My children at the time were three, four, and seven. I had taken them grocery shopping with me one day to Walmart in Hampton, Virginia. After a stressful time of picking up groceries and trying to wrangle three small children, which is like herding cats, I finished my shopping and we made our way toward the exit. And I’ll never forget, we did not leave on the grocery side. We left on the other side, where the pharmacy and everything is.

 

I’ve got my groceries. I didn’t have many, so I didn’t take my cart out. I’ve got my 3-year-old by one hand, and the 4-year-old is holding the bag that I’m holding. And the 7-year-old is walking along nicely. I was blessed with three very well-behaved sweet little girls. We’re walking out of the exit and we crossed the crosswalk. Suddenly, my three-year-old let go of my hand and took off running. At that time, everything suddenly went in slow motion. All these years later, I can remember screaming her name. Her name is Sabrina. I screamed her name, and she just kept running. At the time, I remember seeing a car backing out of its parking spot, and little Sabrina is just running full speed. I don’t remember the color and the make of the car, but I remember everything in slow motion, and I remember screaming, and the car did not hit her.

 

To this day, I don’t know how that car missed her. She stopped running just in time. I had that mother’s sick feeling when something bad is about to happen to your baby. I remember my stomach dropping, and I remember being hysterical and my knees almost giving out. She stopped, and the car stopped, and my baby was safe. My faith has always been important to me but, that day, I truly, genuinely believed in angels because I don’t know how that car did not hit my baby girl.

 

 

Story #2

My scariest moment was when my youngest daughter had a febrile seizure. She was three years old and she hadn’t been feeling well. So we were snuggling and I was talking to one of my older kids. One minute, she was just sitting there and everything was normal and, the next second, her eyes rolled to the back of her head and she just went completely limp. My brain was not computing what was happening. I thought she’d just fallen asleep. So, I started shaking her and calling her name, and she began actively seizing. I screamed for my husband, who was fortunately home, and I began calling 911. I had no experience with seizures, but he knew what to do, so he scooped her up and he was holding her on her side while I was talking to the operator. We lived pretty rurally, so it took the ambulance a while to get there. In that time, she seized two times for a total of three minutes. Then, she just kind of remained unresponsive until the ambulance got there and I just held her limp body. Since she was so young, I was able to ride in the ambulance with her, but she kind of remained this limp rag doll.

 

At one point, she began babbling a little, but she wasn’t moving. Since she was three, she was kind of at an age where she was speaking full sentences, so she was babbling like a baby that was just beginning to talk. So, I began to get alarmed. I was asking the EMTs if this was normal because she wasn’t acting like herself, but they couldn’t answer. I don’t blame the EMTs at all, and I didn’t at the moment. I know they can’t make any promises or prognosis or anything like that, but it just kind of sent me spiraling. I was thinking, based on how she was acting, that she had, like, severe brain damage, and in my mind, I just saw this split into before and after this moment. I kept having all these thoughts, like I’ll never see her graduate or know what she would’ve wanted to be when she would grow up. I was just seeing this life that I thought I was going to have lost.

 

She liked Paw Patrol, and the EMT suggested that I pull up something for her to watch so that she would feel safe. So, I pulled up my phone and I was trying to interact with her so she’d know she was safe, and I was trying not to cry so she wouldn’t be scared. It was about 45 minutes from when she started seizing to when we finally arrived at the hospital. My husband was a little bit behind us. We would always tell her that she was so cute and, recently, she’d started responding back, telling us we were so cute too. So when my husband walked into the hospital room, she finally said her first procedure words. She looked him in the eyes and she goes, “Dad, you’re so cute.” In that moment, I just felt all the weight, all the anxiety, all the worry just dissipated, and I knew that she was going to be okay and that she was still there.

 

The doctor came in shortly after that. He explained she was experiencing what is known as a postictal phase of the seizure, and that it’s perfectly normal and she should make a full recovery. We followed up with her pediatrician the next day, and she ended up getting diagnosed with flu, strep, and RSV, and she’d also just had COVID a couple of weeks before. So it was kind of the perfect storm where her body had just been put through so much and it just couldn’t handle it all.

 

She’s five now. She hasn’t had another seizure. I will say I’m very quick. The second I even think she might be getting a fever, I’d start the anti-fever meds. So we always start those really quickly because, once you have a febrile seizure, you’re more likely to have one again. But fortunately, that hasn’t happened again, and I like to share that story so that people know if their kid has a seizure, you know what to expect, and they don’t have to go through that anxiety like I did.

 

 

Story #3

This happened around 12-13 years ago when my daughter was around three years old. My cousin was visiting from out of town, after Christmas, and we were just meeting up to catch up, exchange gifts, and eat. We met up at a restaurant in a little strip mall. When we finished, we gathered all our things. We have a bunch of gifts and things like that. I have a 3-year-old, so my cousin opened the door for me so that I could maneuver my way out with all these gifts and my child. She was behind me at the time. So, I exited sideways. When I did that, my daughter decided that she was going to just run out of the restaurant. She’d never done that to me before. It was just odd. She was so happy and excited. She just was laughing and ran out, ran past me before I could grab her.

 

She ran out and into the street. So in this restaurant, as soon as you exit the parking lot, there are a bunch of cars parked in front, and it was packed that day, so there was very low visibility. She ran out between two cars. At that moment, I’m horrified. I had tried to grab her as she passed and I couldn’t. Then, I saw a car coming from my left. I thought it was going to be driving past us as my daughter was running out to the street. She did not look back at me. She did not stop. She was just going full speed ahead. That whole incident took less than 30 seconds to happen but, in my mind, I felt like everything was in slow motion just like in the movies.

 

I ran after her. I tried to yell out. There was no stopping it and I was just mentally calculating everything. I just knew that, unless that car saw her, which it wouldn’t see her till last minute, it was not going to stop. There was no stopping what was going to happen unless she decided to stop. At that moment, I didn’t see that happening, so I’m bracing myself mentally for this traumatic event, just thinking this child is not going to survive this SUV going 10-15 miles an hour. I still am running against hope, horrified. My blood feels like it just stopped pumping and everything inside of me is just cold.

 

She runs out into the street. The car’s coming past and, by the grace of God or whatever higher being anybody believes in, she stopped. The car kept going. Once it passed her, it also stopped for a second and then kept going, but it stopped, like, right at her face, so it missed her by not even an inch. I could not believe it. I was shocked. I reached her. I was trembling. I don’t even recall the walk to the car or getting her in or putting everything away. I just remember getting her in the car seat and sitting in my front seat. I’m trembling. I am trying to cope with what just happened, thanking God that she was not run over, and just trying to bring myself down.

 

I happened to glance in my rear view mirror to look at her, and it was like she understood the gravity of what just happened, and her whole face just looked like it had fallen. Her eyes even looked, like, droopier. It was just the craziest sight to see. I looked back at her a couple times and I even thought about taking a photograph. I don’t know why I thought to do that at that moment – it’s the least important thing – but I just felt like I’m never going to forget this and I just needed that photograph to verify that I wasn’t imagining the look on her face at that moment. There was just something so powerful that she seemed to grasp the miracle that we had just experienced because there was just no way that vehicle was not to hit her.

 

I don’t know what made her stop. It was just the worst experience. I thank God now she’s 17. I have her now but that was not the outcome I expected. It was for sure one of the most traumatic experiences I had as a parent.

 

 

Story #4

My name is Keely and this is my birth story. It was a Tuesday in October. I had just turned 38 weeks that day. I had a regular doctor’s appointment to go to, as you usually go a lot towards the end of pregnancy. I went to the appointment and was getting my ultrasound and all that stuff down, and I had felt him being very active that morning. It was a very normal day. He was also very active the whole pregnancy. Well, at this appointment, he wouldn’t move around a lot, so they sent me to do a stress test and they told me that he was having a low heart rate. Luckily, the hospital I was going to be delivering at was across the way and they sent me there for a longer stress test.

 

Well, after a little bit, they determined his heart rate was still low, so they pretty much told me, “You are not leaving this hospital until you have a baby.” So I start getting a little anxious and antsy and my mind just kind of clouds. So I’m calling my then boyfriend now fiance, and telling him like, “You have got to get all of the bags and such together. I am not leaving this hospital until I have the baby.” So they start inducing me. Finally, my fiance got there. We settled in for the night and everything. The next day was just kind of a lot of waiting around to see what he was going to do. I would say by the, I want to say, the second night, I had asked for an epidural finally, and I was still waiting for him to drop down. I would say, by day three late afternoon, I was about 5.5 centimeters dilated, but he still had not dropped down or responded well to the induction. His heart rate was still a little funny.

 

Finally, I remember my doctor and about 10 other people came rushing in my room to tell me that they would have to do an emergency C-section due to his heart rate and my whole mind just got very cloudy because it was very unexpected. I really did not want to go that route. The next thing I know is I am on the table with all these crazy, bright lights, and I’m just thinking that it’s so crazy that I am awake while they are doing all of this to me. They said the procedure was supposed to be about an hour, but it felt like 10 minutes.

 

I finally heard my baby crying, and it all felt so fast. He was perfect. He was healthy. Heart was fine. He was six pounds, so he was a little on the smaller side, but everything checked out. He passed all the little tests they do for babies when they’re born. We stayed in the hospital for maybe two or three days – or I think it was, like, three days since I had the C-section. I’m not sure what happened that day. I had a normal healthy pregnancy thus far. I guess he was just ready to come out and meet us. Now, 19 months later, he’s a happy, healthy little boy and he’s the best thing in our lives.

 

 

Story #5

Last summer in 2024, we had a family reunion at the Lake of the Ozarks where my wife’s grandparents rented out a huge Airbnb for all of their kids, grandkids, and the great grandchildren. About 40 of us gathered for the week to just hang out and reconnect. My wife and I are the oldest grandkids and, therefore, we had three of the four youngest great grandkids to look after just from our family, but we had lots of help from aunts and uncles and some older cousins to help look after the kids. We made sure to go over water safety with our kids and remind them to always wear their life jackets on the dock at all times and in the water. It was a pretty chaotic week. Our kids at the time– the oldest two were eight and five, and they had been in swim lessons and doing pretty well with it, especially our 8-year-old.

 

The house was in constant chaos. There was a foosball table, a pool table, and other games inside it. There was an in-home movie theater, so kids were constantly cycling in and out. We had rented a boat and two jet skis. Those were in constant rotation with different groups going out. So the kids were all over the place between all these different activities. The dock itself was quite large. I’m not sure how deep it was under the far edge of it – I never touched the bottom though, not that I tried too hard – but I would guess it was at least 15 to 20 feet deep. The water’s pretty murky there too. There were a lot of waves that would regularly hit the dock and cause some chop just from the passing boats and jet skis. If you were in the water, you couldn’t pull yourself up from the side of the dock. You had to go to the ladder. It was just too tall to get up there from the side if you were in the water floating by the side of the dock.

 

About 20 feet past the dock, there was a buoy floating with a large foam platform tied to it, and the kids would play on it. I want to say this big foam rectangle was probably 8 feet wide by about 15 or 20 feet long. The kids would sit on it, they’d walk on it, they’d splash on it, and it would sink a little bit here and there. As an adult, if you sat on it, your section would be underwater. The kids just had a blast playing on that thing and jumping from the dock to it.

 

A couple of days into our stay, I was on the dock. I’m not sure what I was doing. I was fiddling with something. It was late in the afternoon. My wife was out on a tube with her siblings. They were just floating near the buoy about 20, 30 feet out. There were some cousins kayaking the boats and the jet skis were in use, and there were just a few kids hanging around. My five-year-old boy got out of the water – I’m not sure why – maybe to get a snack or to run inside and get something. He took his life jacket off again – I’m not sure why. Maybe he went into the house and didn’t want to drip everywhere. But then, when he went to jump back in the water, he had forgotten to put his life jacket back on, and everyone in the water was just chatting over by the buoy.

 

I was in the middle of the dock at a picnic table doing whatever I was doing, and I didn’t notice him jump in – no one did – due to just the sound of the water slapping the dock. The water was pretty choppy. It was pretty rough at this time of day, and we’re not sure how long he had been treading water, but I don’t think he could get his words out. We want to say he was probably in the water for at least 10, if not 15 or 20 seconds. He finally got a gas of air and got his head above just a split second before the next wave came, and yelled, “Mom!” My wife heard him from where she was floating – 20, 30 feet away – just this soft call for mom, and she started yelling, “He doesn’t have his floaty on! He doesn’t have his floaty on!” Just frantically started yelling.

 

My brother-in-law immediately ditched his inner tube and started swimming toward him right off the edge of the dock. I jumped up from the picnic table and basically jumped over him. We got to him about the same time and got him safe again on the dock, and he just said, “I forgot my floaty. I forgot my floaty.” You could tell he felt bad and it was really scary for him. In his swim lessons, he’d only been treading water for maybe 10 seconds at a time, but it’s pretty cool that when it counted, he was able to stay up in this rough, choppy water, this murky water. I just can’t imagine how scared he was.

 

What’s gets me the most is that if he had not called out when he did, he could have very easily sunk beneath the surface surrounded by family and no one would’ve even noticed probably for an hour or two until we went back into the house and tried to find him. We probably would’ve assumed he was playing inside with grandma or watching a movie or doing something or maybe taking a nap somewhere. I still think back to this because that night could have gone completely differently and I’m just grateful for how lucky we were that day.

 

 

Story #6

Hello, my name is Silvia and the scariest moment of our lives – me and my husband – was back in summer 2020. We were on family vacation. Our only son was five years old at the time and he was playing with a friend – another 4-year-old boy – that he met at the pool. This was the kid’s pool, like one-foot deep. The mom of the 4-year-old started talking to us, and this probably was one one-minute exchange of words with her. Suddenly, my husband stood up and said to me, “Where are the boys?” And right at the moment, I stand up too – and the mom to the other boy – and we start looking for them all over around the pool, and we cannot see them. At the time, my search instinct kicked in and everybody in the other pool beside us noticed us that we were looking for kids, our boys, and started asking everyone if they had seen the two kids running around and started giving them their description, what they were wearing. I was crying at the same time. One other thing about me is that English is my second language. So sometimes, it’s hard to understand me. But when I’m in distress, I’m in this situation that – I don’t know why – I’m in fear or nervous, my English comes up so perfectly. Anyway, that was something about me, I will say.

 

Anyway, I was giving everybody the voice description, and I only wish I could remember this gentleman’s face because he told my husband, “Oh, I saw that two kids running. They ran towards the beach.” When I heard that, I said, “Oh my God.” I start thinking the worst. But at the same time, my husband ran the marathon of our lives. I always say that, when I tell this story, he ran so hard and fast and cut out with these boys and brought them back. When he brought back my son to me, I couldn’t stop crying. I keep crying. I was, I guess, in such a shock. Our boy cannot stay really demeaning of the situation at the moment. He was just running, chasing his friend, so he didn’t understand much. But he did say that he remembers that moment that I keep crying and won’t stop.

 

I guess I scared him for life. I don’t know how now. We learned a little lesson the hard way, me and my husband, that day, and this is my advice to every parent with small kids. You should always be on the lookout. No, don’t even take your eyes off even for a second because our scary moment, I believe, took, like, five minutes total, but felt more like hours to me. A tragedy can happen any given moment, but we are grateful that we have a happy ending.

 

 

Story #7

My son was about two, maybe three at the time, and he was with my husband on the computer. They were watching YouTube videos and I was in another room when I heard a commotion. My husband said, “Get that out of your mouth.” So I came into the computer room to find my son with a mouth full of super glue. He was chewing on a tube of super glue. I guess my husband didn’t realize that super glue was on the computer desk and he had probably about half the tube in his mouth. My first reaction was, of course, to call 9 1 1 because I panicked. I thought, “Oh no, he is going to have his mouth fused closed with super glue” because that’s what superglue is supposed to do. So I actually calmly called 911 and let them know that my son – he was two at the time – had chewed super glue and it was all in his mouth.

 

They dispatched EMTs to our apartment building and they stayed on the line with me. I believe it was the 911 operator that told me that I shouldn’t have anything to worry about, that as long as super glue stays wet, it will not fuse, so have my son drink water and wash out his mouth and scrape out as much of the glue as possible. He didn’t swallow any, but they did inform me that if he did swallow some it would be okay because super glue is non-toxic and, because your insides are wet, there won’t be any problem.

 

The EMTs did come. Because it was not an emergency situation, they invited him to come in the ambulance and check it out. So, he came down and he checked out the ambulance and that was great. Then, in the aftermath, some of the glue did in fact get hard in his mouth. It was a bit on his lips. His tongue was covered and his teeth were covered. We rubbed off as much as we could, but the EMTs did tell us that once it had hardened – if any glue hardened – not to try and take it off because that will bring skin with it. It will naturally come off. So that’s what happened. But it did take several days. Of course, my son at the time didn’t like having glue in his mouth and it was uncomfortable, and he didn’t want to eat. So he didn’t eat for a few days or he ate very little. But it all worked out in the end.

 

The lesson I learned was if you think your house is childproof, think again. It’s an ongoing process. You’re always going to bring new things into your home and they can get into things even when they’re sitting on your lap.

 

 

Story #8

For my story, I’m taking you on our first vacation as a family of six. When I say vacation, I mean traveling somewhere beside my family. My family lives seven hours away and we’ve made countless trips to visit them in the middle of nowhere over the years. It’s cheap and we have a lot of support. So back in 2023, my husband won tickets to an event. I had absolutely no desire to go to this, so I suggested he take his best friend. We decided it’d be fun if we made a family vacation for both of our families out of it, since I’m close with his friend’s wife.

 

At the time, my youngest was six and all my children were at an age where they would appreciate and enjoy vacations. I knew there would be some hiccups, but I did not have “what was going to happen” on my bingo card. My biggest fear was someone throwing up as I don’t deal with that at all. And of course, somebody did throw up – luckily, one time. That wasn’t the worst thing that happened. We spent two nights in one city and we were doing all the things touristy and living our best lives.

 

My 10-year-old was even sleeping through the night. A little background on him. He wasn’t even a week old when he first slept through the night. I was so terrified when I woke up that I started waking him up throughout the night after that to nurse him that night. He slept through the night, which was pretty much the last time he slept through the night. Everyone assures you that your baby will eventually sleep through the night – not my child. When he was a little older, we tried melatonin with some luck. Over time, it wasn’t as effective. So why am I sharing this about my son? We’re getting there.

 

After two nights in one city, we move on to the next. We have another fun day and, by bedtime, we are spent – that is everyone except my 10-year-old. My other three are winding down, and this child is wound up – not unusual for him. We were all sharing a room and it’s affecting his siblings. He does eventually lay down at the foot of my bed on my feet, and I’ll take it. I think he’ll lay there for a bit, and if he can’t sleep, he’ll just let us know. Well, that didn’t happen at 3 AM.

 

I wake up to this banging noise and I notice my son is not in bed. Then I hear our friend say his name. I’m thinking he got into something. We always say that when he gets bored and curious. It’s a terrible combination. Since I wear contacts, I sent my husband out to go check on things, thinking maybe he broke something. I was a little bit annoyed. Couple minutes later, my husband came back to the room with my son. He didn’t break anything. He took a walk. He left the building and strolled the busy street nearby. Somebody saw him and called the police. Nobody heard him leave.

 

Between having no idea he left and all the possibilities of what could have happened, I was completely freaked out. To this day, if I think about what could have happened, I spiral and, you bet, I feel like the world’s worst parent. In my son’s mind, he did nothing wrong. I’m not making excuses, but he has ADHD. As wild as some of his thoughts seem, they’re perfectly normal to him. I was so shaken up. I thought about calling it quits and leaving our vacation early. My son and I stayed back the next afternoon as he had no desire to go out and I really didn’t either. I was also expecting a knock on our door for a follow up from what happened.

 

The following evening, I called his pediatrician and explained what happened and how his sleeping troubles were now a safety concern. He started him on Trazodone as soon as we got back, and God bless Trazodone because my son sleeps through the night now. I spent my last two nights on that vacation with him wrapped tight in my arms at night. We didn’t leave early, but the dynamics definitely shifted after that night.

 

As parents, our greatest fear is losing a child or something horrible happening, and I’m just so thankful for a good outcome, but I still can’t think about the what ifs. I think it’s what many of us do and it’s frightening even to this day. I’m someone who chooses to laugh and find humor in everything. It’s how I cope. I got in trouble a lot growing up, but I never rode in a police car. I joked with my son, he beat me there. He did not find it funny at all, and he’s embarrassed when I bring it up. My family went on our first vacation since just last month. I’m happy to say no police were involved. Two of my children did get sick, but I’ll take that over a ride in the police car.

 

 

Story #9

My name’s Jackie. My story happened about seven years ago. My youngest daughter was three at the time, and my older daughter was five. We were coming back from my grandparents’ place about an hour and 20 minutes from home, so it was a long drive. About half an hour from home, my girls asked for a purse candy. I keep these little cucumber candies – they are little hard candies that I get when I get my nails done at the salon. So I gave each of them one.

 

Of course, as children do, my youngest fell asleep about 20 minutes from home. So I pulled into the driveway. I got my oldest out of the car. I go around to the other side and open the back door and try to gently wake up my youngest to get her out, and I guess I still startled her. So, as most children do, she started crying instantly and was shocked and startled, so she took in a big breath. I’m looking at her and she’s just got these wide eyes and I’m like, “Oh my God, I don’t think she’s breathing.” She’s got this panic look on her face. So then I quickly start unbuckling and trying to get her out of the car seat as quickly as possible. I am probably saying, “Oh my God,” I don’t know. Something along those lines. My oldest is standing beside me. She’s now crying.

 

Thankfully I was a daycare provider at the time, so I had gotten my first aid. So I took her out and I scooped her throat, nothing. I scooped a second time, thankfully. I did release the hard candy at that point. I threw it to the ground and I just instantly started shaking because the adrenaline was just at a high. So I’m now shaking uncontrollably.

 

My youngest is crying. My oldest is crying. I’m now reassuring her, “Everything’s okay. It’s okay. Everyone’s fine. We’re good.” But it was probably the scariest moment of my life with my children. It wasn’t the first time I had to scoop a child’s throat. I had taken my kids to a playgroup at the park one day, and there was a mom there and her baby – I don’t even think she was one yet – started choking and I’m watching her from afar and the mom started to panic and I realized what was happening. At that point, I didn’t scoop because I didn’t know what was in there, but I pounded on the back of the baby’s back and whatever was lodged in there did come out. It wasn’t a hard candy. I forgot what it was now. Thankfully I had that first aid training because it came in handy twice – one for a mother at a park and once for myself.

 

I had forgotten who this mom was, but I actually ran into her at my nail salon, believe it or not, just three years ago. She started telling me, thanking me again for what I had done in the park – not that I had forgotten the situation, but I definitely forgot which mother it was. It’s something that will never leave her as well – watching her child choke and I was able to help her.

 

 

Story #10

It was about 19 years ago. When my husband and I had been married for about five years, we decided to start a family. At this point in my life, I’m not sure if I’d ever even held a baby, let alone changed a diaper. So anything that baby was going to do was definitely going to be new to me. Our daughter, Avery, was born in January of 2006. She surprised us a couple of weeks early, but it had been a healthy pregnancy and she was a healthy newborn. So off we went home. At the time, we lived in Colorado and our family was from Illinois. My mom came to stay with us that first few weeks to help us settle in.

 

Everything was going smoothly. She was a typical newborn. She ate, she slept, she pooped, and repeat. Everything was going beautifully. At exactly the two week mark, though, something happened. It was a Friday afternoon and I had just nursed our baby and laid her down and decided to take the opportunity to take a shower and just freshen up like most moms do. While I was in the bathroom, my mom knocked on the door and said that Avery had woken up and was fussing. Her diaper was good. They had bounced her, walked around, nothing was happening.

 

It seemed to be escalating, so I hurried out of the bathroom. My mom and husband were both there, and they gave her to me. I sat down to try to nurse her. Usually, that kind of solved the problem. Did not work this time. So I got up and I was walking her around, bouncing her, and she was escalating. The crying was turning into shrieks. I remember I was standing in our kitchen. My mom and husband were by me. Our brand new beautiful newborn baby threw her head back in my arms and her body went stiff. When her head went back, she held her breath and the screaming immediately stopped, and she turned blue, and her lips started to turn blue, and she started foaming at the mouth. Like I said, I didn’t know a lot about babies. It was only two weeks in, but my mom was there and she had lots of experience and she definitely knew that this was not normal, so we called 911.

 

At the time, our neighbor was the retired fire chief of the town. When the fire station saw the address pop up, they responded rather quickly. I couldn’t tell you in that timeframe how quickly they came, but it was quick and suddenly our road was filled with police, the ambulance. There were fire trucks. Everybody knew something was going on at our house.

 

Well, by the time they got there, Avery was breathing again. She had stopped screaming. Her color was returning to normal. We were not okay though. We were beside ourselves. Of course, though, the paramedics came in, they checked her out. She was obviously breathing okay. They asked us if we wanted to be taken to the hospital. At the same time, we had called her pediatrician, who was just a few blocks away, and they said, “Go ahead and bring her down to our office, since you’re so close.” So we packed up and went to their office. They ran a couple of simple tests. She did seem to be fine, but when they called the children’s hospital in Denver, they were concerned about what had happened and they wanted us to come down.

 

We were about an hour north of the Children’s Hospital. So, that Friday afternoon, we packed our baby up and headed to Children’s Hospital of Denver, where we were greeted in the emergency room and they ran several tests on her. I guess there are several indicators if a child has had a seizure, and that’s what they were looking for. After a couple of hours, they came in and they gave her a clean bill of health. They said she looked fine. There was no indication that it had been a seizure. Then the doctor asked us, “Which one of us was a high strong individual?” Because it appeared that our beautiful newborn baby had thrown a fit and a temper tantrum, basically. While very unusual for a two week old baby, that was the official diagnosis.

 

So that was it. We went home with our baby and she proceeded to do those kinds of tantrums for about two months, almost daily. It was a fun time, but she outgrew them and she is now 19 years old. She’s beautiful, healthy and perfect. But I have to tell you, that high-strung fit-throwing really lines up with her personality, but that’s okay. We’re just happy that she was okay.

 

 

Story #11

In March of 2020, the world kind of started to shut down and I was well prepared to stay home. I was a new mom to an eight month old, so I spent quite some time just kind of being in a bubble with her and monitoring her first and milestones, and then transitioning to solid foods, which is where this scary moment came. I was really concerned about choking because they tell you about cutting things down and letting them feed themselves. I didn’t think much of giving her peanut butter, unfortunately. I don’t have any history of food allergies in my family, nor did my husband at the time. We were just offering her good, healthy options and trying to give her a broad palette. She took a bite of bread with peanut butter on it and she loved it. But in a matter of seconds, I noticed she had redness around her mouth and then her cheeks and then hives popped up all over her tiny little body and I absolutely panicked. I knew right away that she had one of these peanut allergies I had heard of.

 

At the time, with COVID being new and the lockdown, our local hospital was surging with cases and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t feel comfortable taking her there. I called our pediatrician’s office urgent line and they instructed us to give her a high dose of Benadryl, put her in the car, and wait in the emergency room parking lot in case she stopped breathing with COVID. They didn’t know which was the worst fate – for her to wait in the car or to go inside. They told us to sit in the car and wait and, unless she had trouble breathing, to just wait till her reaction improved. It was a really scary time that felt like it took forever. She cleared up in about 15 or 20 minutes but, upon following up the next week and then some further testing, we learned she had a life-threatening peanut allergy. That meant that ingesting or even coming into contact with peanuts could cause her anything from hives to anaphylaxis or even death.

 

We had a lot of learning to do. We learned how to read food labels, how to use and store EpiPens in case of accidental ingestion, and then we learned how to navigate the world. Even when going to the park, there would be kids eating their lunch and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then trying to hold my daughter’s hand. There were Snickers wrappers on the ground that a tiny kid doesn’t realize. They see something colorful and they want to touch it. So it really felt like navigating a minefield even at home.

 

One day, we’re playing in the yard and I realized, “Oh my gosh, those are peanut shells.” And on a walk one day I learned that one of our neighbors was feeding squirrels in the backyard and feeding them shelled peanuts. So those squirrels would bring basically little bits of poison into our yard. So it was incredibly scary. But luckily, she got a little bit older. We were able to instruct her about peanuts and her allergy, and she was also one of the youngest participants in a clinical trial that helped to desensitize children to their allergies in case of accidental ingestion, which means that, while she’s still allergic a reaction, could be less severe and less deadly for her. So we continue to learn, advocate for her.

 

She has learned to advocate for herself to keep herself safe. This year, she started kindergarten in a local school that is peanut free with a principal who also has a peanut allergy that is life threatening. Lots of safety protocols are already in place for her to keep her safe, and that is incredibly comforting. So while it’ll always be part of her life, we’re really grateful for a peanut-free school and EpiPen just in case. While her first reaction was scary and it was a lot of anxiety and concern, she advocates for herself just like we did when she couldn’t and I’m really proud of how far we’ve all come.

 

Thanks for letting me share this. And a little PSA to your listeners, if you could feed those outdoor critters peanut-free treats, that would be great to keep kids like mine safe. Thank you.

 

 

Story #12

My name’s Brooke and I’m from Australia. My story about one of the worst days of my life is about the day I had to hand over my eight week old baby. Her name is Asha, and she was born with the birth diagnosis of Down Syndrome. Within days, we were told that she would require open heart surgery. She had a complete AVSD, which basically meant she had holes in her heart and it was causing the blood to flow in the wrong direction. In essence, the blood was slowly drowning her and going into her lungs and going the wrong way.

 

At eight weeks old, we had to go up to the city as we live about three hours away in the country tree. We had to go up about a week earlier and get a whole bunch of pre-surgery testing done. I had to get lots of blood taken as a standby blood donor in case she needed that – which it turned out she did – and a whole array of other testing that we had to endure. Lots of needles for my tiny little baby, lots of scary doctors prodding her, meeting the heart surgeon who also had an office full of whiskey bottles, which really confused me at first. Then, on reflection, I thought, “Well, when you’re dealing with hearts the size of golf balls and you have to operate on them with the idea that you want to get this baby back to their parents alive, that’s a lot on somebody.” So I got that in the end.

 

The morning of the surgery, we had to wake up super early. Obviously my baby had to fast, so denying her milk was quite tricky. We got there at about six or so in the morning and waited. We got through to a bed waiting room area only to be told by the nurse that they weren’t able to operate that day because there were no beds available. But she also knew that wasn’t good enough and said to us that she’s going to try and fight to get us squeezed in and, thankfully she did. So after a little hiccup, surgery was going to go ahead. We get there, we walk down the hallway and we’re basically told we just have to hand her over and then go and wait.

 

Handing her over to the nurses and surgeon was probably one of the hardest things I think I’ve ever had to do, knowing that we might not get her back and knowing that it was pretty serious surgery. Once I’d handed her over, I basically fell in a heap on the floor in that hallway and it’s like yesterday, but at the same time, it’s like so long ago. Anyway, my husband, myself, and my other daughter went to a nearby park and tried to seem as normal as possible just for the sake of my other daughter, not wanting to worry her, but also just trying to keep our minds busy.

 

We were getting phone calls every hour or so with updates. Finally, about 6 hours later, we get the call that she’s out, she’s good, and we can go and see her when we walk in. She’s got leads everywhere. She’s hooked up to so many painkillers and I don’t know what else, but she was okay. Fast forward to now. She’s almost 12. She’s thriving, and the only evidence of her ever having heart surgery is her little zipper at the front of her chest, which you can hardly see anyway. Her cardiologist has said that if that zipper wasn’t there, even just looking at the heart, you’d never know. Even though it was the worst day of my life, it was probably the best day of my life also because I got to enjoy her and I didn’t lose her that day.

 

 

Story #13

When my oldest son was 7 years old, he got really sick with high fevers – 102 to 104 degrees – and vomiting. He got sick on a Thursday evening – day one. We originally thought it was a stomach bug, but he was not any better. By that Sunday, I took him to the pediatrician’s office on Monday – day five. He was still running fevers and vomiting. By the time we took him to the doctor, his throat was red, he had a strawberry tongue, and he had a rash on his chest and stomach. The doctor said he had strep throat and scarlet fever. The doctors gave him a shot of antibiotics in the office and gave us a prescription for him to take the rest of the week. The doctor did tell us that the rapid strep test came back negative, but that they sometimes do. So they were sending the test to the lab for regular testing. The antibiotics did stop him from vomiting, but he still had high fevers.

 

On that Wednesday evening – day seven – my son was talking to me and I turned to look at him and the whites of his eyes had turned red. I knew this was not strep throat or scarlet fever. I immediately called the pediatrician’s office and the doctor that answered the phone happened to be the doctor we saw on that Monday. She’s not his typical pediatrician and there’s 7 or 8 doctors in that office. I told her that my son was still running high fevers that Tylenol nor Advil were bringing down, but that he wasn’t vomiting anymore. I then told her that the whites of his eyes had turned red. The doctor said, “I think he has Kawasaki’s disease,” and told me to bring him to the office first thing on Thursday morning. I took my son into the doctor’s office first thing, Thursday morning – day eight. You’ll understand why I am telling you these dates.

 

She diagnosed him with Kawasaki’s disease and she admitted him to the local children’s hospital for invasive treatment. I was freaking out internally and super scared. My mind was racing as to what invasive treatment my son was going to receive and what the heck Kawasaki’s disease is. We were admitted into the hospital where my son was given treatment for Kawasaki disease. I learned that day that invasive is not what I was envisioning. Thank goodness. My son had to get an IV of IVIG treatment, which he ended up being allergic to. But because IVIG was the only treatment that works well on resolving Kawasaki’s disease, they had to slow the drip and heavily dose him on Benadryl due to him being so allergic with these humongous hives. He also had to take two adult aspirins three times a day while he was in the hospital because Kawasaki’s disease makes the platelets sticky, which can cause blood clots. The high dose aspirin therapy helps to send his blood so that didn’t happen.

 

When we were released, he had to stay on aspirin therapy for a few months, but made a full recovery, which some kids are not so lucky, and here’s why. There is no test for Kawasaki’s disease, so the doctors end up ruling out things which can cause a delay for treatment. For instance, originally, when they thought my son had strep throat and scarlet fever, once the doctor suspected Kawasaki’s disease, they admitted him to the hospital and the hospital started the IVIG treatment while still ruling out other things. But not every doctor in the hospital does that.

 

Kawasaki’s disease is a condition that causes inflammation in the walls of the vessels in the body and can cause aneurysms of the heart vessels. It is usually seen in children five and under. My son was seven. If the diagnosis and treatment occur by day 10, this is where the counting comes in. Then it cuts down on the chances of developing aneurysms. Kawasaki’s disease is the leading cause of acquired heart disease in children in the US. Thank goodness my son did not develop aneurysms, but not all kids are that lucky. It was definitely very scary when the doctors tell you the things that can happen.

 

I want to leave you with a couple things. Most importantly, advocate for your kids. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or even question doctors. Don’t be afraid to go to another hospital. Your kids are counting on you. Secondly, I want to tell you the symptoms of Kawasaki’s disease so you are aware. The doctors won’t diagnose a patient with Kawasaki’s disease until they have had high fevers for at least five days and at least two or more of these other symptoms – bloodshot or bleeding eyes, a rash, a strawberry tongue, and their lips can be red and cracked also, swollen lymph nodes in their neck, red palms or soles of their feet and swollen hands and feet. Their hands and feet may even peel and their joints may hurt.

 

Kawasaki’s Disease was first diagnosed in 1961 by Dr. Kawasaki in Japan. The doctors still do not know what causes Kawasaki’s disease, but remember to be aware and to be your child’s advocate. For more information on Kawasaki’s Disease, please visit kdfoundation.org.

 

 

Story #14

I have two kids. At the time of this incident, my son was five and my daughter was three. We lived in Pennsylvania. It was a hot summer day and my husband was occupying our kids outside while I got some stuff done inside. At one point, my 3-year-old wanted to come back inside. So, she asked me if she could come inside and I told her, “No, stay outside with dad for a little bit longer, and play with your brother.” So she went back out. Not more than 2-3 minutes later, my husband came running back inside saying he couldn’t find her. I ran outside to help look for her, and we ran everywhere. We ran all around the house. We looked in the pasture behind our house where some of our neighbors had horses. Another neighbor was outside and he hopped on his bike and rode up and down the street looking for her. I ran back inside and looked there in case she had snuck back in, and we yelled and panicked.

 

We lived in a suburban neighborhood with large yards – we had about two acres. The main road was about a hundred yards away so, of course, my mind went to the worst case scenario that she had run to the road and she had been hit, or she had been picked up. After about 15 minutes of looking and panicking, we called the police. A few patrol officers showed up within just a few minutes. The first thing they did was to go next door to our neighbor’s house and look in their pool. Thankfully, she wasn’t there. A few of the officers then fanned out all around the house, shouting and yelling for her.

 

After a few minutes of that, one of the officers spotted her as she peeped her head up from where she was sitting in a camp chair on our side porch – one of those camp chairs that fold up that you just buy at Walmart. I had stood inches from that camp chair just right next to her just minutes before screaming her name, but it was facing the other direction. With the high back of the chair and her crouching and hiding her little three-year-old body, I didn’t see her and she did not make herself known. But curiosity got the better of her when she saw the officers, I guess, and she blew her own cover. The officers gave her a nice talking to and gave both kids a tour of a police car. It took me several days to calm down after that incident, just shaking and heart racing.

 

It can happen so fast. Little kids can disappear in the blink of an eye. I know sometimes people wonder, “How can it happen?” Well, it happens so fast. So that’s my story. She’s 16 now, and now we have a whole other set of fears.

 

 

Story #15

Our daughter was born in March of 2018 at 33 weeks gestation via C-section. After she was born, she was taken to the NICU so that she could be monitored for breathing. Bored that she was so early, she stayed in the NICU for two and a half days and was able to be released. It was such a blessing to all of us. We stayed in the hospital for another three days for monitoring, and then they released us. We went home to her 4 other excited siblings to see her, and we were very thankful that she was home with everyone. Resting and recovering was going really well. We were just taking it one day at a time because we knew that she was still really tiny and we needed to make sure that everything was going well.

 

She was about 10 days old and my husband and I were getting ready for bed. I was going to nurse her and then we were going to go to sleep. However, I was getting myself set up in the bed and my husband said, “The baby’s not breathing.” I thought he was joking. I said, “Stop playing games.” I looked at her and she had turned blue and my husband immediately started rescue breathing for her. My pediatrician was a really good friend of ours, so I gave her a call and she said, “Call 911 immediately.” We lived out in the country and we knew that it was going to be a while before 911 was going to be able to get to our home, so my husband and I made a quick decision that we were going to jump in the car and head over to the hospital.

 

She had started breathing again, and we were relieved. However, once we got into the car and started driving, we realized that she had stopped breathing again. I immediately started rescue breathing for her and breathing in her face as I was talking to the pediatrician on the phone. We got to the hospital. When we got there, they were not set up for little teeny tiny babies under five pounds. They weren’t set up for children at all in the emergency room department. They went and opened a storage room just to get a little incubator for the baby. I was very upset, but we knew that she was breathing. We knew that she was doing okay and they were monitoring her upstairs. I knew they had a birthing unit and the pediatrician that was on call came down to check on our little one, and she said she’s doing okay. Let’s monitor her and then we’ll see what we can do to get her to the pediatric hospital, which is about 40 minutes away.

 

I was beside myself and all we could do was pace, pray and hold our little one (when the doctors would let us get close enough to her to hold her). After being in the emergency room at the hospital that we were at, they were able to get us an ambulance transfer. My husband was not able to go with us. We got into the ambulance and I rode with my little one as she was in this little incubator, almost like a little class box with all of these cords and monitors hooked up to her so that they could transport us via ambulance. My husband was able to go back home, grab us some clothes, and check in with my best friend who we had called on the way to the hospital to go over with our four other children.

 

We reached the next hospital and it was a fury of madness. There were people everywhere checking on her, getting her situated and getting her out of that little incubator into their setup that they had at the hospital. There were cords and monitors everywhere, and she was just sitting there so peacefully and so quiet, and I was a devastated mess. After about an hour or so, the doctor came and said, “We’re going to put her on the regular floor because after you have come out of the NICU, they don’t take you back to the NICU. We’ll just get you into a regular room.” So they set us up in a regular room and they monitor her for the next seven and a half days.

 

We stayed in the hospital. We had a few decelerations and a few scares along the way where she stopped breathing again. After those seven days, they said, “This is just something that happens with preemie babies. Sometimes, they forget to breathe.” So they were like, “We can’t do anything but we think she’s going to be okay. You’re going to follow up with your pediatrician every two weeks so that they can do an hour of monitoring to see how she’s doing.” So we were able to do that. After that occurred, we haven’t had any incidents since then.

 

She is now a 7-year-old, rambunctious little one, and we cannot be more thankful. It was the scariest night of my life to look over and my little four pound baby was turning blue and limp as a noodle. So thankful to be able to tell my story, and so thankful that my husband was aware to notice that she had stopped breathing or it could have been a different outcome.

 

 

Story #16

The week of July 25th, 2022, I experienced one of the scariest parenting moments so far in my journey as a mom. I have a daughter, her name is Riley, and she has just turned 17. She had been away for overnight trips with my mom and dad and friends and things like that, but she’d never been away for an entire week. So when she asked her dad and I if she could go to this camp in Kentucky, kind of gave us pause, but we realized she’s growing up and we thought it would be a great opportunity for her. So we said, “Sure, we’ll take you down.” So I drove her down to Kentucky from Ohio on the 25th of July, and it’s about a four and a half hour trip, so not horrible.

 

Once she got to camp, she got in line to sign up and pay for her snacks and meet her counselors, and then they would bring out this giant baggie and ask her to drop her phone in there. I just thought, “Well, that’s kind of silly. If she can’t communicate with me anyways, I’m not going to leave this phone here.” So I just decided to take it home with me, so that’s what I did. Even though I was nervous about her being gone and so far away, I was really excited for her. I knew that she would be right in her element. She loves nature and being with friends, and I knew she’d be growing closer to God. So I was excited for her.

 

But by Wednesday the 27th, things had changed. I was no longer really that excited and I just wanted her to come home. She was in Clay Hole, Kentucky, which is located right beside Buckhorn Creek. In fact, when you try to get in and out of camp, you have to cross the creek on this really small bridge. On Wednesday, the news started reporting that Kentucky was getting slammed with severe storms, hail, thunder, all the things, and I remember thinking, “What a bummer.” It was because she’s finally away and she wanted to have this great time and it’s just pouring the whole time. The camper relies on good weather for games and campfires and things like that, so I was just disappointed for her and disappointed for the other campers.

 

But also my dad was calling every hour and asking me if I had talked to her, like, “Have you talked to Riley? Is she okay? Can you call the camp and check on her? Why didn’t you just leave her phone there?” So I was starting to get nervous. I mean, my dad, he wasn’t really a worrywart at all, so I knew things must be getting serious. The camp had been trying to update us on their social media and let us know that everybody was fine. But then, by Wednesday night, late into Thursday morning, there was no communication from the camp on their social media. It was radio silent. So I hadn’t talked to Riley since I dropped her off and I had no idea if she was okay or if she was scared how she was handling the floods. I honestly didn’t even know if camp was surviving. Surviving. I mean, in my head, I assumed she could just climb up if things got bad. She was on a mountain and there were cabins way up in the mountains.

 

So it made sense to think she’s fine, she’ll just climb. But with dad in one ear and the news in the other, I just wasn’t really sure anymore. Finally, a friend sent me a video of some flood footage and I saw Riley in the background laughing and surrounded by friends, and I was so relieved. I just felt like I could finally breathe. Finally, she was able to borrow somebody’s phone on Friday morning and give me a call, and I quickly heard, “You should have left my phone. They gave them back to us so we could call our parents,” but cell service was really spotty, so I’m not sure she really could have called me anyways.

 

Driving down to pick her up on Saturday. There were a lot of things in the trees. We saw propane tanks and washing machines and there were electrical lines across the roads, falling trees. We even saw people walking the creek looking for loved ones and pets and belongings. But the flood event– it was said to be the deadliest natural disaster in eastern Kentucky. More than 80 years, the storms dumped up to 10.4 inches of rain in parts of Kentucky. I remember Riley saying that she could see the water just almost touching the electrical lines because she was that kind of high. The night of the storms, their tree fell on one of the cabins and it was the only one on the property that was made out of brick. All the other ones were made out of wood, so we’re still seeing miracles.

 

The camp had bought all of their food the weekend before, which they don’t normally do, so we felt like that was a blessing too. They didn’t run out of food. In the end, the experience bonded the campers that were there for that week. My daughter grew so much and she learned so much. She did tell me when she got home and started hearing stories from friends and the counselors who lived there, that they did a great job protecting them from how bad it really was. Like, she had no idea until she got home how bad it was. She’s been going back to that camp every year for weeks at a time and counseling, so it changed her life. But even though it was really scary, it changed it in all the good ways.

 

 

Story #17

I was taking a walk along the main street in our town. I was pushing a stroller with my toddler daughter in it. My five-year-old son was behind me and he was lagging behind. I turned around, he was maybe 20 feet behind me, and he was twirling around in circles. So, I told him, “Hurry up. Come here.” I generally trusted him pretty well. He was a pretty cautious kid and pretty responsible, but he was twirling in circles, getting himself dizzy as he did.

 

When I called him, he looked at me and stopped and started walking towards me, but he was so dizzy from his twirling that he started staggering to the side, and he kept staggering directly into the street. There was a car coming straight toward him. Luckily, he fell down. He was in the street. He fell down. The car was probably five feet from him as it passed, and I was in a complete panic. I ran back to him. I scolded him. I probably cried. I was very upset. I pictured what might have happened there. So, I made him hold my hand all the way the rest of that walk home. Probably for about six months, anytime we were in a parking lot or near a street, I would make him hold my hand. But the good news is now he’s 24, doesn’t need to hold my hand anymore.

 

 

Story #18

In 2020, my husband and I became pregnant. This would be our second little girl together. He also had two little girls from a previous relationship, so this was going to make four girls in the house plus myself. Everything was going well with the pregnancy. At about 10 or 12 weeks or so, I had my first ultrasound. Everything was fine. Then, I did have an appointment at about 16 weeks where they offered a blood test that looks for certain genetic disorders or neural tube defects. Well, a couple weeks later, the doctor called me and said it actually was flagged for a neural tube defect. She assured me, “It’s just a screening. It’s not a diagnosis. Try not to think about it. In two weeks, you’ll have an ultrasound at a bigger hospital, and they’ll be able to see what’s going on.” I spent these two weeks of course spiraling and looking into everything that I could about neural tube defects and just so worried.

 

At 20 weeks, I went to the hospital to have that ultrasound done – this is in December of 2020, so there were COVID restrictions and my husband was not allowed to go in with me. The ultrasound tech did the ultrasound, and she told me afterwards that this baby– she has concerns and that the neural tube did not close the top of her skull and that it was not going to be compatible with life. Of course, I’m hysterical at this point. So, they do go get my husband for me and they bring us into a genetic counselor room where she kind of talks to us and tells us that it’s something called cephalic neural tube defect. Top of the skull does not close, the brain doesn’t form, it’s not compatible with life. It’s a fatal diagnosis. She kind of went over our options with us. I could keep carrying the baby. It’s not harmful to the mom, but the outcome is going to be the same, whether she’s born now or later.

 

My husband and I decided we were going to wait until after Christmas to tell our kids because it’s maybe a week before Christmas or so. So we waited until after Christmas and then we told our kids and, of course, they were devastated too. We decided we were going to go have this baby at about 22 weeks pregnant. I got admitted to the hospital and I gave birth to her on December 30th. She was teeny tiny. She was little over seven ounces. She was stillborn and we had to say goodbye to her. That was the hardest thing in the world– leaving your baby at a hospital, knowing the next time you got her, she was going to be cremated in a little base and something I don’t wish on any parent ever. We just miss her so much and we named her Ruthie.

 

 

Story #19

I thought my child was kidnapped. This happened a few months ago, probably around February. We live in New England. I was at the grocery store and my husband texted me and said that our son was going to go down to the park. He’s a pretty good kid, pretty reliable, we didn’t have problems letting him go over and hang out with friends and stuff. I didn’t think anything of it until I got home. It was dark and I was like, “Why isn’t he home?” So I tried to call his phone to tell him it’s time to come home because it’s dark. His phone was ringing inside the house. So then, I realized he didn’t have his phone with him. My husband gets in the car, drives over to the park, which is right around the corner to grab him and he’s not there. So then I’m like, “Where would he go? It’s dark outside and it’s freezing.”

 

I get his phone, I call the friend that lives over by the park, they haven’t seen him. So then I started texting all the people on his phone – anybody that he had recently been texting. He’s got group texts when he plays, like, video games online with other kids. These people don’t know me, but I’m thinking, “Maybe he told them that he was going to meet someone.” This is where my head’s going – like he met somebody online and it’s not really a kid, it’s a grown person. They’re going to kidnap my kid. Nobody has seen him, nobody has talked to him.

 

There’s nothing in the text of him meeting anybody. So I’m in complete panic mode. My husband’s driving around. He drove all the way to the other side of town – not a very big town, but we’re an island. There’s only two roads in and out of town. He drives to the other side of town, nothing. He doesn’t see him. He comes home. My husband is, like, almost catatonic. I cannot believe that this is happening. He’s gone. So he gets back in the car again. I’m getting ready to call the cops. I’m calling parents of kids. I’m on his computer looking at his computer, like, who’s he talking to?

 

My husband goes back over to the other side of town. When he is on his way back, he sees our son walking down the street in the dark, wearing a black jacket. My husband said that his fear was that maybe he had gotten hit by a car and was laying on the side of the road. I was angry when he called me and told me that he found him. I was angry. But when my son came home, I realized how upset he was. He realized, when he got over to the other side of town, he didn’t have his phone. He knew he was in big trouble, and when he saw how scared me and my husband were, he really felt bad that he scared us like that.

 

So we all learned a lesson. Joseph doesn’t leave the house without his phone anymore. That is the scariest thing that has ever happened with my child.

 

 

Story #20

The scariest moment in my child’s life was the day that my daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. We were out of town visiting family in High Springs, Florida. After breakfast, we decided to go swimming. About 15 minutes later, Skylar started to cry and complain about a stomach ache and a really bad headache. She was a little over 2.5 at this time, and she had stomach and bowel issues in the past, so we just assumed that it had something to do with that. I left and was going to Walgreens to get medicine when her aunt called me and said that she had started to throw up everywhere. I turned around and came back to the house.

 

With how pale she looked and how she was acting, we decided that it would be best to take her to the emergency room because something definitely wasn’t normal. The closest children’s hospital was in Gainesville, Florida, which was about 40 minutes from where we were staying. Her aunt drove us. When we got there, they told us that she was not allowed in the back or in the waiting room with us because it was March 20th, 2020, and the whole world had basically just shut down because of COVID. I explained all of her symptoms to the triage nurse and they took her back right away. I mentioned her previous bowel issues and that maybe she was just really constipated. They did all of the basic things – blood pressure, heart rate – and they asked her to go to the bathroom and a cup. We waited for what seemed like forever.

 

Finally, a nurse came in and said the sentence that I won’t ever forget, “I’m so sorry, but your daughter has diabetes.” They would have to prick her finger and draw some blood to make sure. But with how high her sugar was in her urine, they were confident that it was diabetes. She also apologized to me because she said that she was talking about her test results with another nurse and was baffled as to what could be going on with her. The other nurse asked if they had checked her sugar level in her urine and checked for diabetes, and she said she hadn’t. She said that she was sorry and that it was a lesson learned for her and her future patients that she will always check their sugar level.

 

At that moment, I couldn’t think of anything else. My mind went completely blank and I couldn’t focus on what she was saying. Diabetes? What in the world? She’s only two! How can she possibly have diabetes? Was her diet really that bad? Did we do this to her? The only people that I knew that had diabetes were my mom and my grandpa. In my naiveness, I didn’t fully realize that they weren’t the same. Once the nurse left, I was thinking, “Okay, she has to take a pill every morning like my mom does, and we’ll keep a close eye on what she eats. We can handle that.” Then I did what you’re not supposed to do, and I started Googling toddlers with diabetes and all it brought up was Type 1 diabetes. I had no idea just how much our lives were about to change.

 

The nurse came back in to draw blood, and Skylar was not having it. She was crying and she was scared. She had no idea what was going on because we couldn’t get her to calm down. They called in a child life specialist to try to keep her calm and distracted with books and toys while a male nurse wrapped her up like a little baby and laid on top of her so that she couldn’t move. She absolutely hated it. She cried and screamed like. No parent ever wants to hear the child scream. It was absolutely heartbreaking to this day. She’s almost eight now. If you try to hug her too tight, she starts to panic and yells. I don’t like it.

 

They came back and said that her glucose level was 513. She just had sugary waffles and syrup for breakfast, so no wonder it was so high. A normal glucose level and a non-diabetic can range anywhere from 70 to around 100 or so. Her A1C test, which shows the average blood glucose over the last three months was 11.1%, meaning that her glucose levels were around 270 every day for months. A non-diabetics A1C should be below 5.7%.

 

She was eventually admitted to the hospital to stay overnight to monitor her sugar, to make sure that she doesn’t go into DKA or diabetic ketoacidosis. Because of COVID, only one parent was allowed to stay with her. We live in Jacksonville – over an hour away from Gainesville – and her dad had to stay home that weekend because he was working and they wouldn’t even allow him to come to the hospital to stay overnight with us. They barely even allowed him to come the next day to meet with a child endocrinologist to train us on how to properly care for a child with diabetes.

 

I remember once she fell asleep that night, all I did was cry. I cried for my child. I cried for the normal childhood life that I didn’t think that she was going to be able to have because of the restrictions that I thought Type 1 diabetes would bring. I cried because I was so scared and I thought that my child’s life expectancy would be cut short. I cried because I was now alone in a hospital room not knowing a single thing about the lifelong disease of Type 1 diabetes and how to properly care for her.

 

The amount of information that they gave us the next day was unbelievably overwhelming, and you only have a few hours to learn everything and they send you home after you administer your first shot of insulin without their help. It’s been five years since that day, and it’s definitely a day I will never forget – the crying, the screaming, and the amount of mom guilt I had – because I thought that it was our fault that we had caused it. It was absolutely awful. Since Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, you’re more prone to develop other autoimmune diseases. Since being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in October of 2023, Skylar was diagnosed with celiac disease, which means that she has a gluten intolerance in eating foods with too much gluten, causing severe stomach pains. In May of 2024, she was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, meaning that her thyroid gland doesn’t produce enough of the thyroid hormone.

 

Skylar is able to live a normal childhood. She’s able to eat what she wants minus gluten, as long as she has dosed the proper amount of insulin to cover the carbs that she eats. I will forever be grateful for that second nurse who suggested that they check her sugar levels for diabetes. Type one diabetes, especially in toddlers, most of the time gets misdiagnosed as a stomach bug or the flu because it is not always common practice to check glucose levels. If we hadn’t taken her in that day, the doctor said that had we waited any longer, she might not be with us today, and we are so thankful that she is.

 

 

Story #21

My son Neil, he was in fifth grade at the time. I got a call at work saying that he had some type of seizure in school and stopped breathing. I got very weak and I went to my knees, first of all. When I got it together, I asked where they were taking him, and I got out of there as soon as I could and drove like a bat. I actually beat the ambulance to the hospital. When they opened the back of the ambulance that he was in, he was sitting up on the gurney and he mouthed the word “Mom” from across the parking lot. Of course, I lost it at that point.

 

Lots of tests were taken and it took a long time because it made him sick that he had a grand mal seizure, which is the strongest, and it made him have a terrible headache afterward. When they went to do the CAT scan with the dye – it’s called contrast – that made him sick with having that headache. So it took a while. They had to give him a break and then try again.

 

The pediatric neurologist asked me if he had a recent bump on the head or anything. Did he fall? He did. He got hit with a baseball in the forehead area. He’s a sports guy and he was practicing baseball and he hit a pitch that ricochet off of the porch and hit him in the forehead. I put ice on it and I watched him very carefully for signs of concussion, and there was none, so I did not take him to a doctor or emergency room. I mean, with two children in elementary school, I’m used to calls from the nurse on bumps and bruises, so I didn’t think it was necessary to take him. Well, six months later, it caused this big seizure and it was the opposite side – the blow to the head was on the left and the seizure was on the right. There was definitely damage to an area in his brain. They could see it on the test results.

 

Fortunately, it did not affect his intelligence or his grades. He was permitted to still play sports, just not contact sports. He had to take anti-seizure medication. Being in fifth grade, when children have seizures, they get hurt because they fall off a bike or out of a tree, something like that. It’s better safe than sorry with taking medication. There was an incident around the time of his getting his driver’s license that he had stopped taking that and the doctor wouldn’t sign off on his physical to get his driver’s permit until he agreed to start taking them again, and he did.

 

Then, when he turned 18, he stopped taking them for good and they didn’t think he’d ever have another seizure and he didn’t. It was due to the blow to the head – once and done, thankfully. Neil is 40 now and he will now and then say, “Ah, I wonder if I would have a different personality if I didn’t have brain damage,” or “I wonder if I liked different food if I didn’t have brain damage.” I don’t like to think like that because I think he’s pretty cool the way he is and I would like him even if he wasn’t my kid.

 

 

Story #22

It was 1998 and my son was turning 7. We were having a birthday party for him at a karate place, which is what we did back in 1998. The party was just going to be cake and ice cream. So before heading over to the karate studio to set up, we decided to stop and get lunch at McDonald’s. My daughter was 5 years old and we were standing in line waiting to place our order. All of a sudden, when I turned around, she’s on the floor, her arms were out to her side, her eyes were wide open, and she’s completely unconscious. Of course, I thought she was dead and I completely freaked out and I started screaming, “Call 911!” because I didn’t have a cell phone – it was before I got a cell phone.

 

Anyway, the staff at McDonald’s calls 911. Before the police officer shows up, my daughter miraculously wakes up and she seems okay. She’s a little disoriented, but she’s seeming to be okay. The cop walks in and I’m trying to explain to him that maybe we don’t need an ambulance now. I can take her to the hospital myself or whatever. When the ambulance pulled into the parking lot and my daughter suddenly passed out again, that police officer picked up my daughter like she was his own child. He just scooped her up and took her right to the ambulance.

 

It was seconds we were in that ambulance and heading to the hospital. When we get there, she goes through all of the tests that they would give her, like a physical exam. They do blood work and they give her a CAT scan. In the meantime, her father arrives at the hospital. So we’re just standing around waiting for results. We had met the ER doctor who had done the physical exam on her, and he was very nice. He seemed very knowledgeable and had a great bedside manner. He walks back into the room and this is an hour later or so, and he just kind of blurts out, like, “Well, I’m really sorry to tell you this, but your daughter has a tumor on her brain and it’s about two millimeters right now. So we’re going to send you up to the big hospital. We’ll send the scans so that they can look at them and then they can come up with a treatment plan for her.” I was, like, absolutely floored. I couldn’t believe that this guy who had such great bedside manner was in there just offhandedly sort of telling us that she had a tumor and now he’s sending us away to be treated at the big hospital. As you can imagine, I was physically ill hearing this news just beside myself.

 

We get in an ambulance or transport ambulance that takes us up to Worcester. They give us the scans to take and we get there and hand over the scans and, oh, it felt like a couple hours later that it was so long ago. I don’t really know how much time passed but, when the doctors came to see us, there were two doctors who came in, which made me really scared. They actually said that she did not have a brain tumor and that pediatric patients, when they have a CAT scan, can sometimes have something that looks like a tumor, a bubble. They might have a bubble around their brain because everybody has fluid around their brain. When you’re a little kid, I guess there’s potential that there’s a bubble in there and it looks like it could be a tumor. In any case, these two doctors were absolutely confident that there was no tumor and I was absolutely not taking that for an answer because I couldn’t believe that one doctor would say one thing and then these two doctors would say something completely different. So I demanded an MRI, which they denied and told me to follow up with our primary care physician, to which I also asked for an MRI and she said no. But I asked so many times that she finally relented and we got an MRI for her, which did confirm that she did not have a brain tumor.

 

I can’t tell you the relief I received by getting that MRI because I didn’t have any faith in the medical team at either hospital at that point. I just couldn’t believe either one. So the MRI was what helped me sleep at night. So my daughter is fine and I don’t wish this kind of thing to happen to anyone else.

 

Scott

You know what I really love is that all of these stories came up as a result of asking the question in the Facebook group. We heard 22 stories here today, but there are like 60 or 70 in that Facebook post. Lots of interesting stuff, and yeah – pretty scary.

 

Our Tuesday question in the group this past week was this – What’s the nicest thing a stranger has done for you? So if you’ve been on the receiving end of some act of kindness from someone you didn’t know, we’d love to hear about it. Join us over at WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook

 

And if you liked this episode, we’ve done something like this before – back in October of 2021, in the Facebook group I asked people to share their stories related to giving birth. Then I asked for some of them in audio format, and we put together a whole episode of those stories – that’s episode 91 if you want to check that out.

 

Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.

 

No listener story this time, since the whole episode is listener stories.

 

We’ll be back next week with all new episodes on Tuesday and Friday. Stay safe, and I’ll see you then.