What can you even do?

I made a phone call today that very much reminded me of how unfair life is.

A woman I kinda know had her second child about two weeks ago. I know her because her older daughter is Cooper's age, and they go to daycare together, and completely coincidentally, the mom has a cool blog that I read. Well, at just two weeks old, her new baby contracted RSV (a common virus in kids, but not one you want a newborn to have) and is not doing well. So now new baby has been in the hospital for several days with IVs, oxygen, feeding tubes, etc... the little girl is having a very rough time. She might have pneumonia at this point, which is very scary in a newborn, as if the rest of it wasn't scary enough.

Of course I want to be able to do something but I don't know the family very well (although Cooper and her older daughter are friends), and I don't know what to do. How could you know what to do? So I called up another friend (M). Her little boy is very close to Cooper's age, and when her little guy was about 3 or 4 months he got an extremely rare and difficult to diagnose bacterial infection that very nearly killed him. He did eventually make a complete recovery, but it took months. I figured, if anyone knows what this family needs, it is another family that has been through a similar ordeal.

So I had to pose the question to M; given the situation, what can I do that will actually help? I'm not a close friend, so it is hard for me to feel like I can help in a personal way without being intrusive.

And then I realized that I might be bringing up really hard memories for M, and that maybe she didn't even want to discuss her whole experience from her little boy's scary illness. And so as I was talking, I started to fear I had done the wrong thing to call her about this. Luckily, I was wrong. She said that as it turns out she had just been over to the hospital yesterday to visit this other woman and her baby (it is, after all, a small town) and that while it was really upsetting to re-enter the infant intensive care area, and to have all those memories flooding back of tubes and monitors and oxygen tents and everything, it was also good for her to be able to relate and help another mom and baby.

After some discussion, M actually pretty much decided for me what I should do, and it is a nice gesture that M says will be really helpful. I'm glad I talked it through with someone that has been there. So that makes me feel good.

But at the base of it all, I'd rather I had never made this call. I'd rather nobody ever when through this, and even that nobody I knew could even fathom what it was like- and frankly, I don't ever want to feel like I could or should help someone out again. Because I don't want to think about how fragile our little babies and kids really are. It is damn frightening how unfair and unpredictable life can be.