Silent tears hit hospital white sheets. The young Pakistani mother holds the mask that brings moisture, oxygen and medicine to her little girls lungs as she struggles against the slime that threatens to suffocate her.
On the walls of the childrens wing in the Akershus University hospital near Oslo, bright art shines. Highly skilled and trained personel runs and bikes through the corridors, mobiles in strongly colored paper tremble in the wake of their passage.
This place should be cheerful.
A doctor makes her second attempt at finding a vein in the arm of my 14 days old girl. No luck. The veins in her head are easier to locate.
Anna cries at every touch. Breastfeeding, the favorite activity in her short life, does not interest her. Sometimes she forgets to breathe, and we must stroke her chest to remind her.
Four days ago I slept fitfully at the same place with another child. Aleksander, my oldest, came to me after bedtime, crying. Every breath hurt.
At the hospital, they put him through every conceivable test. X-rays, ultrasound, EKG, CRP, culture growth, urine testing; nothing was found. Aleksander, who without flinching gets tackled on the soccerfield, cried.
The next morning he was fine.
The Pakistani girl keeps struggling. Anna turns grey. Her CRP indicates an infection; a tube in her nose brings breastmilk to her stomach while the IV in her head provides antibiotics and saline.
In a quiet room of the hospital, my body clenches. Tears flood my eyes.
I take two deep breaths. No time for tears.
Back in 1997, my wife woke me in the middle of the night. Something was wrong with the five-month old fetus inside her.
A few hours later she miscarried in this hospital.
Back then, I wrote a song to the little girl that left us.
Flowers
© H.R.Ueland 2006
There are still flowers in the garden
There is still beauty in the world
I'm sure that butterflies will some day flutter
Even though this baby's cries will stay unheard
The sun will rise again tomorrow
The moon will silver from the sky
And my neck will still be bent with sorrow
For the tiny child whose thoughts will never fly
I hope you're safe from grief and sorrow
I hope you're comfortable and warm
I hope that in a distant, far tomorrow
I will meet this child and hold her in my arm
This song can be downloaded at http://www.haakon.nu.
Be well. Take care of yourself. Take care of your loved ones.
[My Anna got home from the hospital after a week. Her condition steadily improves. She was probably infected with the Coxsackie-virus - google it, esp. if you've got kids. You do NOT want your kid to get this without knowing the symptoms - it can seriously damage the heart and the brain unless treatments starts very early. And not only can it be fatal - it is a highly contagious condition, infecting through air/surfaces. The treatment is fluids and oxygen.]
Haakon Rian Ueland wrote this article for the Mensa International Journal. More articles can be found at http://www.smartsoftware.org, in addition to totally free mobile content (ringtones, themes, backgrounds & 3gp videos) for all cell phones. Anna, his youngest child, is a bright, beautiful two-year-old. Aleksander still plays soccer. Isak, the child in the middle, can assemble an Ikea-table in less time than his parents, even though he is seven years old. The Pakistani child was gone from the hospital one morning.
Haakon also has other sites: http://www.i-q.com for great Flash-games & IQ-tests and http://www.haakon.nu where you can download his personal songs.
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