We took this picture right when we got the Mt. Hermon site, and from here we eagerly went directly to the sledding slopes to begin our day of fun in the snow.
The kids all sledded down the hill for the first time, and after a few minutes, I didn’t see ds9 come up. I asked my husband to find him and make sure he was okay.
He brought him to me a few minutes later, and told me that ds was complaining about being cold. He had taken off his gloves and was refusing to put them back on. He needed to sit down, and was breathing heavily and coughing.
I told my husband to stay with the other kids, that I’d take him somewhere warm and buy him some waterproof gloves. (I hadn’t been able to find any in kid sizes when I shopped in the local stores but was sure they’d sell the somewhere at the site).
I took just a couple of steps with him, when he fell face down in the snow and began violently seizing.
I bent over and frantically turned him over, but my mind and my voice were paralyzed. Inside I was screaming for help but I couldn’t make a sound.
His face was white and his eyes were rolling back in his head. From what seemed far away, I heard someone asking if I needed help. I wanted to scream ‘yes!’ but I couldn’t even look up.
She asked several times, and after what felt like a long time (but was probably less than a minute) I managed to raise my head and nod in response to her question.
“What do you need? Who should I call?”
I was trying to think what to say in Hebrew, and nothing came out. I was completely blank. After what felt like a long pause, I eked out, “My husband”.
As soon my husband got there, words poured out of me, explaining that ds just had a seizure and I don’t know what’s wrong.
Ds by that point was screaming and saying his stomach hurt him, and not letting us touch him. My husband was able to convince him to have a piggyback ride, and took him to find medical help.
When the paramedic checked ds9 out, he told us that he’s okay, and that what he experienced was the response of the body when it gets too cold – it seized to warm itself up.
I had never heard of something like that.
We sat him down inside under a warming heater, and called all the kids together. After quite a bit of time inside, he said he wanted to go back on the slopes.
We bought all of the younger kids waterproof gloves and went back out, where I kept a close eye on him. He was fine for the rest of the day, and they all had a great time.
After the trip, I kept having flashbacks of the seizure: him falling face down, his body seizing visibly through all of his winter layers, my inability to speak.
I kept thinking, “What’s the matter with you? Your child needed medical help and you couldn’t get yourself together.” I had so much self-condemnation, night after night, day after day, as the scene of my lack of response replayed over and over in my head.
After five days of feeling like I was torturing myself, I finally decided that I need to tell myself a different story. The interpretation that I had given the events of the day were causing me emotional pain.
I thought through all of the events that had happened, and chose to focus on the equally true alternative perspective: that I responded to the person who asked what I needed, that led to my husband coming and getting my son help.
After retelling myself this story (with more detail) a number of times, I added in one of my six Leadership Parenting tenets: compassion. Compassion for myself.
I did the best I could through an understandably terrifying scenario – we had just spent three hours driving to the top of a mountain. I was the driver and my body was tense from the hours of driving without directions. We finally got there and the seizure happened less than fifteen minutes later, on a mountain where I felt completely alone, where I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have any resources, where it was so cold and my clothing so bulky that I felt physically immobilized, in addition to emotionally immobilized.
Compassion is a tool to help us moving from self-shaming to forgiveness and even appreciation. Can I be compassionate to myself about having been faced with the combination of factors that emotionally overwhelmed me in that moment?
And most importantly, instead of telling myself that it was a failure for me as a mother, can I be compassionate towards myself and accept that my terror came from my deep love for my son?
I generally respond well under pressure and emergency situations, and if it had happened to someone else, undoubtedly I would have had an effective and helpful response.
Compassion for our own shortcomings isn’t a first reponse for most of us. But this is where we can restore inner calm, rebalance and love ourselves and everyone around us just a little bit better. And this has been really helpful for me in moving past feeling traumatized, to being able to think positively about myself in relation to these events.
Ds9 doesn’t remember the seizure, but he clearly remembers the deep cold he experienced; we know that because he’s appreciatively told us many, many times: “Thanks for helping me when I was cold.”
Avivah
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