A few months ago, our eight-year old began complaining that she couldn’t see properly. Purple blotches were floating in front of her eyes, she said, that disappeared only when she squinted.
Then a couple of days ago, she began blinking hard, squeezing her eyes shut and then widening them dramatically whenever she was trying to read or concentrate.
Some mothers are alert to every twinge their children experience, and have the pediatrician on speed-dial. Others pay almost no attention in the vague belief that most complaints don’t amount to much. These last (ahem) only begin paying attention when the symptoms have mounted, and then they panic, usually on a Friday night.
“And we’re worried, because the squinting came on so suddenly,” I told the doctor over the phone, having rousted her from her dinner.
There was a pause, into which I silently poured fearful diagnoses culled from a bout of Internet searching.
Then the pediatrician asked an odd question: “Is your daughter anxious about something?”
“What? No. I mean, yes, actually she is a bit, but that’s not—“
“These symptoms are very common in a child who is feeling fretful.”
“But when I Googled the symptoms—“
“Ah. Google. Listen, I am not worried. You should not be worried. We’ll talk next week.” After a bit more along the same lines, the doctor rang off.
Do I have a medical degree? No. Does our pediatrician have astonishing and long-proven powers of diagnosis? Yes. Was that enough for me? Of course not: I had Google and a guilty conscience about ignoring the child’s perplexities – plus a lifetime of hearing about medical mysteries solved only when a plucky parent insisted on having that one extra test, that second opinion. So, sneakily, I made another appointment.
Every mother has scores of these stories. We over-react to some small ailment, waste our time (and the doctor’s) and live to laugh about it. Sometimes we under-react, and even shout at a child who’s uncharacteristically recalcitrant, only to realize the next day, to our shame, that the poor thing was coming down with a high fever.
But what haunts us all, to a woman, are the tales of when it’s all too real – not merely fever, but something worse. Every mother has probably at one time or another spent hollow, frightful hours wondering whether her child is going to be okay. That’s what it means to be us.
Whenever the subject of illness comes up, my father-in-law likes to point out that, “Conception is a death sentence.” While I can’t argue with his logic, there’s something ghastly about its inexorability. It’s bad enough applied to oneself, but certainly not a concept mothers wants applied to their children.
So all this was seething about in my uneasy mind when we arrived at the eye doctor’s office. On a clipboard, I wrote down in vivid detail all our daughter’s difficulties: The colorful blotches, the dramatic squinting, a sensation of dryness that made the poor darling rub her eyes, which then made things blurry, etc.
While I was doing this, the poor darling looked about interestedly and rubbed her eyes.
By the time the doctor ushered us into the examination room, I had superstitiously brought myself around to the idea that if I could just talk lightly enough, even jokingly, nothing could really be wrong.
But then the doctor glanced at the child and said soberly, “Ma’am, would you step outside with me for a moment?”
My heart lurched. I followed him out.
“I’ve read through your description,” he told me, indicating the clipboard, “And I should tell you that I’ve seen these symptoms before.”
Oh man. This was it.
“I will examine her carefully, but I have to tell you that these are the exact symptoms of a girl who wants glasses.”
I goggled at him — and laughed with relief. “Really?”
Really. Apparently girls between the ages of 8-11 often get the idea that their eyes are going wonky, in part because that’s the age their peers start actually needing lenses, and glasses, as any schoolchild can tell you, are way cool.
So these suggestible creatures take to rubbing their eyes, which produces visual blotching, which encourages squinting, which, sooner or later causes their mothers to Google, panic, and start phoning doctors.
“Her eyesight’s fine,” the doctor confirmed, smiling, a short time later. “Funny, isn’t it? We see this all the time.”
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
