Malpractice

This week has not been the most stellar in the encouragement of a fragile mother's ego.  As mentioned in prior posts, heading to the pediatrician and seeing the low-hanging x on the growth chart is bad enough, as well as the inordinate amount of needles that go into the tiny arm of your child in the first few months of their lives.  This trip takes the cake.  My usual pediatrician is out on maternity leave, and we are faced with the choice to stay with the current practice or follow her to her new practice when she returns.  The gods of karma must have been reading my mind as I was treating this visit as a means of making this decision.  Within moments of the new doctor coming in the room, I was asked which formula my breastfed child of over a year was drinking and then accused of underfeeding and improperly cleaning the nether regions of my son.  If you have had the joy of watching my child eat, you will realize that there is no satiating this child.  He can put down a plate of sweet potato, chicken, peas, and rice. And then reach longingly for your plate and then you are greeted with grunts of displeasure when you choose not to share with him as you know he may just explode if he eats more.  He failed to gain any weight at this check up which is why the evil doctor wanted to side with caution on his development. But she chose not to listen to our pleas that he was a very active child, was difficult to weigh on the scale due to all this movement, and must have had a Stevie Wonder moment in ignoring the size of both parents standing there in the room. And to add insult to injury we were accosted with the fact that my son was anemic moments later.  He had blood drawn at this 9 month check up to save him from being a complete pin cushion at this visit, and the results yielded that he needed to be put on a multivitamin with iron to bump him up a few points.  Apparently the numbers were not good enough as the evil doctor sent us back down to the lab where the nurse recognized us from the last visit and then seemed taken aback with the enormous amount of blood and tests that needed to be drawn from a one year old.  3 vials and lots of tears later, we walked out of the office with our paperwork on how to fatten up our child and a prescription for iron drops in our dejected hands.