baybeasts

A few weeks ago, Owlie over at Enough Grows posted about the fright she had when Piggywig went missing for a little while, and she posted this quote:

Making a decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
Elizabeth Stone

Our hearts got a serious out of body experience on Friday.

For a while now, bean has been worried about Loey’s head, that he was turning it more in one direction than the other. I have been, not dismissive, exactly, but not terribly worried either - he was still turning it in both directions, and we had an osteopath appointment (just for a general post-birth check-up) lined up for a few weeks time so I figured she would fix any small issues there might be. So I kept talking bean down, encouraging her not to worry about it too much.

Then, on Thursday, bean took Loey to her work for a visit. Two things happened: one of the midwives there commented on how he always has his head tilted to one side; and bean asked one of the obstetricians what might cause a baby to have a high deflexed head in labour, and he replied that it could be something horrible like a goitre or a sternomastoid tumour (a what? you ask).

In the slow time that is baby time, it was Friday evening before we talked about these things. First of all we had a scan through the 500 odd photos we’ve taken since Loey was born (ah the curse of the digital camera), and noticed that he has indeed been holding his head tilted to one side pretty much since he was born. We were a bit gobsmacked that we’d never noticed.

A bit later, bean decided to have a feel in his neck, to see if there were any scary lumps.

There was.

Our hearts left our bodies and lurched through the floor.

On his left side, there was (and still is) a hard lump, a bit like an olive, midway between his ear and his shoulder. A frenetic half hour of phone calls later, we managed to squeeze in to see our local GP immediately (who stayed late to see us). She had a feel in his neck, looked us in the eye and told us not to worry, it’s nothing too terrible - his neck is in spasm, and the lump is a big knot in his neck muscle. Apparently it is quite common in babies, and will just take a bit of physio and/or osteo treatment to fix, with stretching exercises.

In that moment we felt the sweetest of relief - I think we had both been fearing the terrible c word, and it was wonderful to hear that his life was safe, and so were our hearts.

Later, when we got home, we consulted Dr Google, as one does, and discovered that his condition is called Congenital Torticollis, which just means a twisted neck present from birth, and that it often presents with a lump, called, you guessed it, a sternomastoid tumour. It is almost always fixable by non-surgical means - physical therapy and stretching. And it is also commonly associated with the kind of labour that bean had (we never ended up posting the birth story - we’ll get to that soon). If it’s diagnosed early, the outcomes are very good. If it’s not, it can lead to all sorts of problems, but let’s not think about that, because we got onto it early.

Saturday morning I rang the osteopath’s office and left a rather frantic message - to my utter astonishment and relief they rang back within half an hour offering us an appointment with the best osteopath in the clinic at 5pm Monday (it normally takes three months to get an appointment with her). We are so relieved.

But these days in between have been hard. I feel gutted that I didn’t take bean’s concerns about his head seriously. And when we look back at the photos, his little head tilted to one side - we thought it was so cute, and now we feel appalled that we didn’t notice that it wasn’t just a coy quirk, but a constant condition. And we won’t really feel relaxed until we’ve seen the osteo and have the exercises and more reassurance that if we follow them to the letter (which we will) that he will be fine.

Our poor hearts. We’re picking them up and cramming them back inside but they have got so big with love for him that they don’t fit anymore.