08.17.06
So I kind of dropped the ball on the whole pediatrician thing. The thing is, my kid hardly ever gets sick. Which pretty much means she hasn’t seen a doctor since her 2 year check-up. It occurs to me – hindsight being 20/20 and all that – I should have somehow prepared her for visiting the doctor. I could have checked out a book from the library, or gone to pbskids.org and walked her through the interactive “Elmo goes to the Doctor” story. Or even bought her a play doctor kit for her birthday. But I did none of these things. I organized the heinous Birthday of the Bees instead.
Perhaps not my most shining moment.
I knew my girl’s vaccinations were all up to date and there wouldn’t be any shots this visit so I didn’t think there’d be anything for her to freak out about.
Whoa. Except that I didn’t take into account that getting her height and weight would be a phenomenal pain in my rear end. I’m not even sure what spooked her – the new office, the new nurse, or the fact that she was happily engrossed in playing with the new toys when her name was called. Doesn’t really matter. It quickly became apparent that once a 3 year old isrendered completely uncooperative by fear for whatever reason, there is no way to slow down, back up, and start over. Done is done.
The nurse asks her to step on the scale. My usually cheerful, charming girl eyes it suspiciously, then says, “No. I don’t want to.” Mm-hmm. All righty then. We’ll try for height. I position her against the wall under the little height bar and her legs turn to cooked spaghetti. Then she worms away and runs back to the toy area. I retrieve her. She gets away again. I retrieve her again. The nurse rolls her eyes and makes kind of a disgusted face. Oh yeah, that’s helping. I start to feel a little offended because what does she want me to do? And, I’ll admit, I was a bit embarrassed. Here’s a kid that’s quite capable of higher thought and has a well-developed sense of humor, but none of that’s showing. She’s acting like an out of control brat. A part of me wants to give her a sharp wallop and hiss, “Knock it off!” because at this point my child is not cute and she certainly is not charming. She is going to be stubbornly impossible for the rest of the visit. I try for 1 minute to reason with her, to tell her we’re just going to show the doctor how good she’s growing, but she’s having none of it.
The nurse has a new tactic. We put my girl on the infant scale long enough to get her weight. Then we wrestle her flat on the exam table and mark the paper cover at her heels and head. My daughter, of course, is a screaming, kicking, flailing banshee through all of this. Thankfully the nurse now goes away. We’re alone. I could give her a wallop, but really, what’s the point? Punish her for embarrassing me? Eh. I’ll live.
When the doctor comes in Little Miss climbs on my lap and buries her head between my neck and shoulder. She pretty much stays there quietly right up until the moment her doctor wants to listen to her heart. No way is she going to make anything about this visit easy. I can’t imagine how the doc could even hear her heart past all that screaming, though I suspect he got a great listen to her lungs. Hell, he probably got such a great listen that his eardrums were permanently damaged. She screamed through the peek in the eyes, peek in the ears, split second peek at the throat. Belly check. Whew. We all survived. The doctor, bless his heart, seemed nonchalant about the whole thing. “She’s 3,” he said, and I was thankful someone else understands. I think being 3 is like having Jekyll and Hyde disorder. When the atmosphere is good you have a rational miniature adult. When the atmosphere is not so good you have a perfectly contrary little monster.
Later in the day I saw her out in the yard talking toherself. I said, “What are you doing?” She said, “I’m pretending to have my check-up.”
“What are you pretending about your check-up?”
She stared at me with serious blue eyes, “I’m pretending to be good!”
Maybe the upcoming visit to the eye doctor will go better than the visit to the pediatrician. Yeah, right. Somehow I doubt it.
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