Worst Parent Award of 2012 goes to....

Sunday, November 11, 2012: I had one of the biggest scares of my life yesterday. Sitting at a family gathering I lost my concentration for a split second holding my 2 month old son, Avtar. I was holding him from his thighs; he was looking around as others were singing. I noticed my nephew walking towards me and I extended my free hand to hug him, in that moment Avtar leaned back, my arm lost its grip of his squirming body and the only thing I remember is trying to get a hold of him before he fell to the ground.

The fact that I am not that coordinated did not help. The worst thoughts came to my mind, what if he lands on his neck, on his head. I was literally just trying to get a grip of a small baby as his body twisted and turned going downward to the ground. I did not even know I also lost my balance my hands were the only thing I could focus on, as we both fell to the ground I managed to grab the back of his head and soften his fall. I breathed a sigh of relief but unknown to me the chair i was sitting on also was falling behind us. The metal chair had a round ball on either side and as it fell and I heard someone say “THE CHAIR!”. It was too late the chair brushed my hand and hit Avtar on his head near his eye.

I lifted him up and he was silent in pain taking a deep breathe he let out his painful cry, his right eye and head turning read and starting to swell up. Luckily like every Indian function there was a doctor there. The party atmosphere quickly turned into one of concern. Avtar has had a pretty rough start, he was delivered via an emergency C-section. He was diagnosed with respiratory distress syndrome and was placed on a respirator for his first week of life. After two weeks at the NICU he was sent home, and then suffered a Hernia. Just a week ago he had an operation to take care of that, and now he had fallen and had suffered this injury.

My wife was upstairs and we quickly took him to a room in the house as everyone was concerned. The family friend doctor examined him and everything looked ok, after about 15 minutes of crying he calmed down and began acting normally. As parents we just wanted to make sure so we took him to the ER, where they noticed that there was bruising in his left eye and referred us to John’s Hopkins Hospital where there was an opthamologist on duty. After a long night of checks and tests he was given an okay by the specialist. He had no internal eye damage, Jasmine and I were relieved and brought him home in the early hours of the morning.

As a parent it is the most sinking feeling when your child gets hurt, compounded on that is if your own doing! The whole night I kept thinking about that two second moment where I lost my grip of him, the thoughts that were going through my mind as he was falling and how I could have let this happen. Of course everyone in my family was super supportive, but internally you cannot let yourself go that easily. Anything can happen, and children are so precious. Even the next day I am still a little shaken up as I think about it, so I am doing what I always feel comfortable with, writing about it. Sometimes as parents we need a reminder of what is really important and something like this drives the fact home.

My brother in law summarized it best in a text he sent me last night while I was at the hospital : “It is something he (Avtar) will never remember, and you will never forget!”