Patient Name: Date Of Birth: (Mo: Fill & Download for Free

I lost my first born son in 2016 at the age of 6.5 months. He was a perfectly happy, healthy, easy baby but I always had this “feeling” that he wasn’t meant to be here a long time. When I was pregnant with him, I would go for long walks and sadly sing to him… almost as if I was grieving his imminent loss.On his due date, my OBgyn recommended an induction because “if we wait, there’s a high chance he will be stillborn” due to some abnormalities with my stress test. So i went in for the induction, narrowly avoided an emergency c-section when his heart rate kept dropping, and finally after 28 hrs gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. When he was lying on my chest right after the delivery, I was so shocked that he had made it. I was convinced I was going to lose him.Once we were back at the house, I had several dreams and premonitions… one reoccurring dream was that I was with him in the bathtub and I fell asleep and when I woke up, he had drowned. I picked him up and he was cold and blue… everytime.Once he was 4.5 months, we started him part-time in an in-home daycare and over the next month ramped up to longer days. The plan was to stay with this daycare temporarily because the woman wasn’t licensed and also, i just had a funny feeling about her. But she told us she was a nurse, she was reasonably priced, flexible and local and she loved our son (supposedly). So we were trying our best to find another situation, but we just couldn’t figure out a better one quickly enough with how competitive it is to find a good nanny and daycare.When he was 6 months, I gave notice at my job to be able to work 20 hours/wk at a closer clinic to have more time for my son. The very LAST DAY of my full-time job, I went to drop off my son at daycare in the morning, and I said to her, “I just want to make sure that you are putting him in the crib at all times.” She looked at me and hesitated before saying, “yes of course.” I’m thinking, Wait, what was this hesitation about? And clarified “and nothing in the crib but a fitted sheet right?” Again, some weird awkwardness before she said “Right.” Why did I have a pit in my stomach? I shook off this funny feeling, said good-bye for the last time to my sweet, precious, trusting baby.As I drove to work, I remember thinking about how proud I was of myself to have re-emphasized my expectations for a safe sleeping environment. My mistake here, and the one I’ll regret for the rest of my life, was to listen to her words and not my body’s reaction to them. Gut feelings always trump words.At work, I had such a great day with lots of ligh-hearted joking and good conversation. I remember talking with a patient whose son had some sensory processing issues and thinking about how hard that must be and how grateful I was to have a healthy baby. I remember wanting to FaceTime my son that day at lunch just to make sure that he was in the crib like she said. I had never thought to FaceTime them before. I stopped myself… she said he was in the crib, so that’s that. In hindsight, I was stifling my intuition and afraid to trust myself.Around 2:30pm that day, my boss came frantically rushing into my office yelling my name and throwing her cell phone in my face. It was my husband. “(P) is not breathing! (P) is not breathing!” He repeated over and over. I asked how long. He said “I don’t know. Awhile.” I tried to keep it together as i walked to get my purse and thought “I knew it. He’s gone. That part of my life is over.”My co-worker drove me to the hospital as we were stuck in Bay Area traffic for over an hour while I tried to call the daycare woman (who wasn’t answering her cell phone) and 911 so they could tell me which hospital my son was being taken to. I’ve never felt so powerless in my life to be stuck in traffic while my precious baby needed me to be there. It felt like the world was conspiring against me as cars wouldn’t allow us to pass them on the shoulder of the road. They had to get home more than i needed to get to the hospital. People suck sometimes.Once we finally got into the hospital, I forced my way into the room where my son was on life support. He looked like he weighed 5 pounds. He was so tiny and I thought, why did I think he was old enough to be taken care of by someone else? He needed me… I felt like I failed him. Even though I had these premonitions, like we were always going to lose him, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had trusted in my own judgment and pulled him out of his daycare.I hate telling this part but i guess you’d like to know. We found out from the detective and the autopsy report that the nanny had accepted an extra child that day, and because this other child was fussy (and mine was not), she put my child in her bed and the other one in the crib to sleep for a nap that day. She said she heard (P) crying and left him and thought he fell asleep. But when she went to get him, he had rolled facedown and had suffocated. I’m told this is rare for a 6.5 mo old who was rolling confidently. There’s some speculation that babies who pass away from situations like this might already have a brain abnormality and are more vulnerable to when their airway is obstructed and they need to move their head out of the way. So it’s possible it would have happened in another situation but… well, it didn’t.So did I get over it? Well I’m sitting here sobbing as I’m writing this. I have another boy (17 months old) who cracks me up every day and who I love beyond words. But I wish that he had his older brother here. I wish I wasn’t always thinking worst case scenario… Every time he falls, I’m expecting him to hit his head in the perfect way and have a brain hemorrhage and die. I wish I could leave him in daycare (we use a large licensed center now) for more than 5 hours without almost having a panic attack that I need to go get him. I wish I could remember every detail of my firstborn without mixing him up with my son now. How do you get over losing a child without dissociating from them? How do you remember them without feeling the heaviness of their last day?So i think the only way to recover after a loss is to know that our control over other people is an illusion. I could (and have) beat myself up for my actions but that’s not what this life is about. I think we all have a destiny and my son played his part in making sure i reach mine. I know that I am a different person because my son was here and maybe I’ll live my life differently because of him. I hope he’s proud of me. And I hope one day I can remember him and breathe easy. I love you Pax.****Edit****Thanks for all of your lovely comments. One comment in particular reminds me of the most important aspect of my story: acknowledging the signs that our loved one is still with us. A few days after my son passed, I had a dream that he was in a bassinet with harp music playing and he was laughing and playing, letting me know he was okay. It was such a vivid dream unlike any other I’ve ever had. Then, a few months later, when I was about to fall asleep, I felt him take over my body. This one is harder to explain but it was like he was saying, if you don’t just want to see me, you can FEEL me. I also have had several experiences when I was at my lowest, where I happen to walk right into sunflowers (the flower that reminds me of him).Most recently, my friend gave me a book that she had never read named Pax (my first son’s name) and I knew that I’d find the name of my second son in it. Sure enough, the name Phoenix was a big theme in it.. so that’s my 17 month old’s name. Anyway, I obviously forgot to mention all the signs that give me hope, so I guess I was feeling a bit sorry for myself when I wrote this. Many thanks to Patricia for reminding me!

As a Western man living in the Philippines, I can say it happens all the time. You just have to ignore them… or deal with them with extreme discretion.Let me just reprint here a Facebook entry I wrote a few years back, March 6, 2017:Last weekend I was visiting a tiny rural island near the large island where I live, and when I went out cruising on the motorcycle I’d rented, on one rural strip of road I passed some high-school girls, two sitting on a swing by the side of the road, one out of uniform standing beside them.The age of consent in the Philippines is 18 and it is strictly enforced, most especially against white foreign males—I’ve seen stories in the news about them getting jailed and deported over it—and unlike in my country, where students normally start kindergarten at five and graduate high school at about 18, in the US-established educational system in the Philippines it’s a year younger; they normally start at four and graduate high school at around 17.A few are in school older than that, but on the whole about 99.99% of all girls you see wearing high-school uniforms you can assume are 17 or younger—which means eyes off, hands off, thoughts off. If they wave at you, say hi or throw kisses at you when you pass by on a motorcycle, just ignore them, act like they’re not there—or at most just give them a quick wave back to be polite and continue on your way; at least that isn’t prohibited by Philippine law, just politely waving back when someone waves at you.Trucking slang in the U.S. calls under-age girls “jail bait”; well, we foreigners in the Philippines should call the under-age girls here “deportation bait.”Under-age Filipina girls, on the other hand, though they don’t think of themselves as “bait” for the purpose of intentionally getting male foreigners deported, often do seek foreigner boyfriends, and many of them seem to know that if they’re younger than 18, the foreigners will reject them because of it—so they often fib about their ages, not realizing the seriousness of what they’re doing, and it’s our job as foreign residents (those of us who don’t want to be imprisoned or deported or both), either just to ignore them, or in some cases, trick them into getting their true ages out of them by accident, if we can.Once I found myself texting with a girl whose friend had given her my number. She told me she wanted to be my girlfriend. She said she was 18. I started texting with her about other subjects for a while, then later asked her when her birthday was. She texted back the month, day and year. I switched the phone to calculator mode, typed the figures in... and she was 14. (Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, the young thing....) I set the date of her birthday four years into the future and told her, “When this date comes, text me again, and if I’m still available, maybe we can talk about it. Not one day before that though.”The schoolgirls on the swing waved at me as I passed by, smiled and called out at me, “Hi!”In spite of my normal rule, this one time I decided I was going to do a little intellectual exercise on myself: first see how old they’d tell me they were, and if I didn’t believe them, see if I could trick them into revealing their real ages.So I turned around, went back to where they were and stopped off the road in front of them.“Hi,” I said to them in a bright, vibrant tone of voice.Sitting and standing there, they smiled shyly and replied, “Hi.”“My name’s Keith,” I said. “What are your names?” (Still no violation of Philippine law, just speaking....)“My name is Nicole.”“You?”“My name is Michelle.”“And you?”“My name Angelica.”For their sake I’m changing all their names here (“Nicole,” “Michelle” and “Angelica,” the three most common feminine names in the Philippines, according to Google).“What school do you two go to?” I asked them (the two on the swing were wearing the same uniform).“Luciano Rama High School.”“And you?” I asked “Angelica” who was standing.“Immaculate Conception. I not wear my uniform now.”“How old are you?” I asked the first girl (“Nicole”).“I am eighteen.”“And you?” I asked “Michelle.”“I am twenty.”“And you?” I asked “Angelica,” the one standing beside them out of uniform.“I am twenty-one.”I turned to “Michelle,” the one in the middle. “You know,” I said to her, “I don’t think you look like you’re twenty. I think you look like you’re maybe sixteen or seventeen.”“No,” she insisted, “I am twenty. Really. I really am twenty.” She ran her thumb and fingers across her cheeks and chin. “I have… young face.”“Hmmm....”I asked the first one (“Nicole”), “Do you have a boyfriend?”“No, I have no boyfriend,” she replied.I asked the same of “Michelle.”“No, I have no boyfriend too.”I gestured to “Angelica” and she said, “No, I no boyfriend.”I asked “Nicole,” “Have you ever had a boyfriend before?”“Yes, I have boyfriend before, but not now.”“How old were you when you were with your boyfriend?”“Fifteen.”“And how long were you with him?”“Eight months.”I asked “Michelle,” “Have you ever had a boyfriend before?”“Yes, I have before, but we break up.”“How old were you when you were with him?”“Fifteen.”“And how long were you together with him?”“I am with him four month.”I asked the same of “Angelica.”“No, I never have boyfriend. But someday... maybe.”“Well, there’s no hurry. You don’t need to find one at too young an age.”“I know.”I asked “Nicole,” “Do you want to find a new boyfriend?”“Yes, I want new boyfriend.”I asked “Michelle,” “Do you want a new boyfriend too?”“Yes, I want.”“And what kind of boyfriend do you want to find?” I asked “Michelle.” “Filipino or foreigner?”“Any is okay—if he nice.”“And you? What kind of boyfriend do you want to find? A Filipino or a foreigner?”“I want foreigner,” “Nicole,” replied.“And how old do you want him to be?”“Oh, maybe thirty and older.”“Is it okay with you if he’s old enough to be your father?”“Yes, age doesn’t matter. How old you?” she asked me. (They’re accustomed to hearing and repeating that saying, “age doesn’t matter”; that’s why they always get the grammar right when they say it.)“How old do you think I look?”She looked at my face carefully. “Maybe... forty?”“Wow! You’re pretty good at guessing people’s ages!” I replied. (I didn’t say I was forty; I only said she was “pretty good” at guessing people’s ages. “Pretty good” is just an opinion; how far off she may be and the opinion of her still being “pretty good” at guessing ages is up to the choice of the person speaking....)I changed the subject and we talked for a while about a few other things. After a while I noticed they were wearing their student IDs on ribbons around their necks. I pointed to “Nicole’s.” “Is that your student ID?” I asked her.“Yes.”“Oh, I’ve never seen a Filipino student ID before! May I see what it looks like?”“Yes.” She picked it up in her hand, took it out of its hard-plastic little case hanging on the ribbon around her neck and handed it to me.As soon as I took it and started to look at it, I think that was when she suddenly remembered it had her birth date on it—because that was when she suddenly decided to fess up, rather quickly: “I am sixteen!”I looked at it: “Date of birth: May 25, 2000.” (The date this happened was February 21, 2017.) That was nice of her that she just decided to fess up at the last second as soon as she realized I was starting to read it.I handed it back to her and looked her in the eye. “You know,” I said, “you could get a foreign man in a lot of trouble by lying to him about your age. You could make him go to jail or be deported from the Philippines... or both. Did you know that? Is that what you want? Is that what you’re trying to do?” (Oh, I was never interested in her to begin with, but I just thought it would be appropriate to inform her of that.)She looked down at the ground with a shamed look on her face.Maybe there might be some who have hostile intentions against foreigners and who might, in fact, want to do something malicious to them if they could. If I thought that were the case, I might have considered it a better idea not to inform her of that power they hold in their hands. But I could tell by the innocent looks on these girls’ faces that that wasn’t what they had in mind to try to do. These were just innocent schoolgirls, like so many in this country, who considered flirtation and the prospect of a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship to be “romantic.”I turned to “Michelle.” “May I see your ID?” I asked her.She quickly grabbed hers in her hand, stuffed it down her school blouse, clamped her hands tightly over her collarbones, wrists crossed, and shook her head no. (Red flag! If she has an ID and refuses to let you see it... all right, you may then conclude something fishy is going on in Denmark....)Now that there’d been enough time for them to forget exactly where we’d left off in the earlier part of the conversation, I went back to the subject of “Michelle’s” past boyfriend at her school.“You said you had a boyfriend before, but you broke up with him, right?”She nodded her head.“And you said you were together with him for four months and then you broke up?”“Yes.”“How long ago was that?”“Last year.”“Last year?”“Yes.”“Last year. You know what I think?”“What?”“A while ago you told me you were fifteen when you were together with him... for four months. Now you tell me it was just last year when you were together with him. You know what this makes me think? It makes me think that you’re sixteen too, the same as her.”“Angelica,” the girl out of uniform who was standing beside the swing, chuckled. “I have to go now,” she said.“Yes,” I replied. “I think I have to go now too.”I started up the motorcycle and went forward a little. “It was nice meeting all of you,” I said. “Good-bye now... sixteen-year-old... schoolgirls. Have a nice day!”They waved at me. “Good-bye,” they said.I mean, really, I would have just taken one glance at the school uniforms they had on and that would’ve been the end of that. But that day... I just wanted to try that little intellectual exercise, that was all. Succeeded.I headed back to town and went back to my American friend’s restaurant. Time for a beer. Kirin and a Cerveza Negra... blended together into a luscious brown ale like the kind I always prefer, but isn’t available in the Philippines so I have to blend them together myself to get the flavor. (Yes, I’m old enough to have a beer....)Question: What would you do if an underage girl made a move on you and asked you out?Answered MO APR/6/20 1:37 pm (GMT+8)Other stories in the islands:Keith Hardy's answer to Do doctors fall in love with their patients?Keith Hardy's answer to What is it like in the Philippines in the midst of Super Typhoon Haiyan?Keith Hardy's answer to Have you ever had to assist anyone who had boat trouble or got shipwrecked in front of your property? (Asked as: If you are swimming in the ocean and are attacked by an American, should you punch it in the nose, eyes, or gills?)Keith Hardy's answer to Would you eat a fish if it had arms and legs?Keith Hardy's answer to What was the last thing a Trump supporter said to you?Keith Hardy's answer to Your last text that you sent is now what will be on your gravestone. What's it gonna be?Answers about Philippine culture:Keith Hardy's answer to Why do Filipinos love eating rice?Keith Hardy's answer to Can you go a month without eating rice?Keith Hardy's answer to Why do some people drink ice water at every breakfast?Keith Hardy's answer to Can anybody give me examples of metonymy from English poems written by Filipino poets and kindly explain?Keith Hardy's answer to Does Cebuano have grammatical gender? If so, where is it used?Keith Hardy's answer to What is the craziest thing you've seen at the security check in an airport?692

A hot muggy summer in the city, my mother insisted I get an IUD. I hate birth control, loath it really, but I did it to please her.I did my research on all of the types of IUDs there are, and went in for a consultation.I had a lot of questions, namely about the hormonal impact it would have, maintenance, risks. I have never been pregnant, would that be a problem? Of course not they said. The doctor hadn’t put one in before but she assured me it would be fine. Then I put on a gown and it was time.They opened me up. She gasped slightly during the procedure, which followed with excruciating pain. I stared at the ceiling tiles and the printed clouds over the fluorescents. Afterwards I put on my clothes as quickly as possible, and biked over an hour home with a Tylenol.[1]Two days later though, it still was very uncomfortable. I had trouble working even though I really really needed rent money. Minor bleeding.On my lunch break I worriedly called my doctor.“It’s just cramping because you’re young. You will be fine.”Two weeks later in the back of house at the restaurant, I doubled over in pain, and then eventually had to curl up into the fetal position. Knives pierced me inside. I had visions of Rosemary’s baby. My manager made me go home, so I called again and she sighed. “Yes, come in.”I took two buses to see her across town. At the office they pulled out a tiny flashlight and a speculum.She went white. “Why didn’t you tell me it hurt this bad?”“But,” I stuttered, “I did.”I had to go see a surgeon immediately. I begged someone to take my shift and then got an expensive scan with NO EXPLANATION of what was going on. The doctor had fear all over her face, scowling, knit eyebrows that blamed me. As I cried in a vinyl chair in the corner of an appointment room, she got angrier, her face turning red as we waited for the surgeon.The doctor had torn my inner wall, letting the IUD free to wander among my organs. I had to have surgery to take it out immediately.When I told my mom what happened, she rushed to the hospital and we spoke with them together.The surgeon told my mother is was normal and I should have reported it sooner. I answered I called within 2 days. My mother is a nurse practitioner and asked her pointed questions about how this could have happened and why they didn’t tell me what was going on? Did they think there could have been a better way to explain what happened? I had records of the exact dates and times we spoke. The surgeon became very condescending to my mother to shut her up while the doctor literally hid behind the surgeon unable to look at me.I missed my first week of my sophomore year of college for surgery. The scar still pisses me off.Cowards, the lot of them. Bullying an 18 year old and lying to her and her mother about their mistake.Doctors need to start listening to women. Even female doctors.This was a particularly brutal story and it embarrassed me for a long time. I never told anyone about it until a friend had the SAME THING happen to her.I want to note that I have seen doctors on many occasions with real, awful symptoms. Like mono. Like infection after a surgery. Like a weird hereditary disorder that reoccurs like clockwork. The thing is, I had to fight to get each one of those diagnoses, even if I’m fainting in public, my hand doesn’t work and I have lesions.If I tell them in an articulate manner, I don’t cry, and I don’t do a ton of research beforehand to ask the right questions, I am often dismissed. I have to negotiate for attention. No, I’m not okay. I’m a stoic bitch that was taught women need to be stronger than men, each other, their own bodies. My pain and emotions had always been secondary in my existence, and after so many mishaps with not making a big deal, now I make a big deal.It’s put me in a paradox where I need to be destroyed and distraught to get a professional I am paying to listen to me and also simultaneously know about everything that they might have done so I can make sure it’s not some bullshit. It’s just not my MO.I can’t even imagine what it’s like for minority patients, people with any disability, or children in vulnerable positions. Pre-emptive wellness starts with listening; we are overrun with treatments for symptoms that probably started out with requests for help. A patient can’t spell out a diagnosis.On Quora there are thousands of stories riddled with misdiagnoses and medical mishaps. A doctor is an expert, not a god. They are human. Make sure that you get the treatment you need, even if it means seeing multiple experts. After all, if you’re in the states you're picking up the tab.Here’s other accounts if you’re interested in reading the same story, but with a different protagonist. Oh, and all of those people also weren’t believed.My IUD Punctured My Uterus — but My Doctors Didn't Believe MeAn IUD Perforated My Uterus and I Had to Have Emergency Surgery to Remove ItWoman's IUD punctured her uterus and wound up lodged near her rectumFootnotes[1] IUD Insertion Can Be Less Painful. Why Doesn't Every Doctor Tell You That?