The good thing about hospitals is that they work with professionals capable of doing the best for sick people and what it takes for us to have the best possible health. The worst is that we are all human and sometimes involuntary mistakes of greater or lesser importance and severity are made.
A mistake, and that's why when my three children were born we never left them alone, because without bad intention, it can happen. It's what happened to Jennifer Melton, a 31-year-old American mom who they took the baby for a routine check-up and had it operated on, without needing it.
The baby was cut the sublingual frenulum
As we read in La Vanguardia, after a while they brought Nate and a nurse explained that the intervention had been very fast and that everything had gone well. She did not understand anything and her face should be showing it, because the nurse felt that something was not going well and went to look for the child's history to check if a mistake had been made. Alone with her baby, surprised and scared, she took it to realize, seeing a little blood in the child's mouth, which had been done, by mistake, an operation that he did not need.
She began to cry and felt fear, helplessness and terror, for having allowed her baby to do something she didn't need, without knowing what. Minutes later he received a call in his room from the doctor who had performed the surgery, apologizing for the error, showing his regret and explaining that the baby had barely cried and that it was not an intervention that would affect the development of his son no way.
And so it is, because my two oldest children have the same intervention done and it is a very short tongue in the tongue that helps to release it so they can breastfeed better and have no problems talking in the future. They, of course, did have a disabling frenulum. In the case of Nate, I don't know. I want to believe that some bridle had to have and that's why the doctor performed the intervention. Who knows if I didn't need it later.
But it is not the issue. He had a frenectomy and it was not indicated, how well it could have been any other operation.
"Go with him, don't leave him alone"
This is what my wife told me in each of the births, when they said that "we took it a little while". I really didn't need to tell me, of course I went with them, and not only to avoid anything strange happening, but also, above all for feeling that we were accompanying them, that we were not leaving them alone, that the children, in fact, are ours (which seems obvious but not everyone is so clear).
We are so used to giving our health, our lives, even our dignity, to other people, that it seems that we don't care if they take anything from us. The control of our work and our money is given to governments, the possibility of controlling ourselves and exploiting entrepreneurs, our body and pregnancies are given to medical professionals and when a baby is born, it is also given, as if while we were there the child was ours, but also theirs (or more of them). As if they could do what they wanted with them and they will not give them to us definitively until the day of discharge.
And then what happens, we think that this is normal and correct and when our child has to have a blood test or test, unimportant things that we could be present, we ask if we can enter with them.
And it is not a matter of power, but of duty. On the rights of children in a hospital, who have the right to be accompanied at all times by their parents, provided that their presence is not an obstacle in order to safeguard the child's health.
Never leave your children alone, even if they are going to make the intervention shorter or milder, just in case, and as I say, above all, because they are in their right.
