The following story was written just 1 month after the birth of my first son, Jack.
As I write this I’m in the company of someone new! Claire and I had our son, Jack Thomas Padilla, on July 15th. He made quite the splash in our lives requiring an extended hospital stay for treatment for his Jaundice, from which he’s much improved. Other than this he is healthy and strong and for that we are grateful. :)
Our two hospital stays were dramatically different, and I took away a lot of inspiration for DPT, what to do, and what not to do in healthcare,, and I’ll share those with you next month.
This month, I want to share with you the now comical series of unfortunate events that led up to Jack’s arrival. These events made the question “are you ready for a baby?” seem like a casual evening stroll in February. I think it’s an important thing to realize that problems and challenges are truly only ever a matter of perspective. A challenge that seemed big, once overcome looks smaller in the rearview mirror, and each subsequent larger challenge makes it look smaller and smaller, sometimes making it so that you wonder how you ever saw it as a problem in the first place.
It all started when we bought our new home in Gilbert. Claire was 8 months pregnant, so we were down to the wire. The house passed inspection with flying colors. One week into living in the home, the AC went out completely beyond repair, this was just as temperatures were peaking for the first time this summer. We powered through, hats off to Claire being a trooper at 8 months pregnant in a house above 80 degrees at night.
We scheduled the AC replacement at earliest availability, which was 2 days after we would be returning from Claire’s baby shower in California. We were lucky enough that we could stay with my grandmother those two nights, so we thought we saw the light at the end of the tunnel. But the light ended up being a train!
The week leading up to the baby shower I got sick with something that made me wish I had Covid. It tore through the entire DPT staff in turns, nobody testing positive for COVID but each person needing to stay home at various points, our team was tested and proved solid :) That same week, embarrassingly enough, I hit a parked car in the Trader Joe’s parking lot and we had another bill coming our way to repair their paint.
The day we left for the baby shower however, whatever I’d caught got Claire. She started to feel lethargic but was determined to power through. She made it through half of her baby shower on Saturday before the fatigue overcame her and the rest of the time was a struggle. She turned in early that night, but felt better the next day. Now our only remaining hurdle was getting back to AZ and making it through 2 more days without AC…LOL. The next day, Claire had a funny feeling and 20 minutes later was in the throes of food poisoning. Shortly followed by both of her parents having food poisoning. I’ve never seen someone so happy to be sick, as her mom was when she got sick, because it meant the baby was safe and it had nothing to do with Claire’s pregnancy. If you’ve ever had food poisoning you know it’s the worst you’ve ever felt all at once.
Once we made it through that night, we traveled back to AZ thinking that it had surely been rock bottom. We went to pick Fitz (our dog) up from the daycare we left him at to find that while he was a good boy, he was no longer welcome at this particular place. He had gotten anxiety when kenneled at night, and broke out, tearing through the bars of the cage, as well as defacing their wooden door. Poor guy. The worst of it, which we discovered days later, was that in the process he had broken two of his canines down to the root, requiring tooth removal!
At least the AC was getting fixed, right? On Tuesday we got our brand new unit installed and Fitz had his tooth removal. Life started to get pretty normal! But a week later, Fitz’ gums were infected, so in he went for surgery number two. And two days after that? The AC had a meltdown and needed to be replaced again. Luckily we had “Benefit Air” on our side and they managed to replace the entire unit in a day, can’t recommend this company enough.
This was all in a matter of two weeks! The first two weeks of Jack’s life there have only been four things to worry about…pooping, eating, changing, sleeping. This we can handle! I’m sure there are many challenges to come, but knowing they will all eventually look like minor hiccups helps us approach them with good humor.
If you’re going through a particularly stressful time, the best advice I can give is to make sure you still carve out time each day for yourself, even if it’s just 10 minutes of meditation or movement. Know that “This too shall pass,” and equally, the really good times shall pass and you’ll encounter challenges, so soak every moment :)
