THE WIND & WAVES STILL KNOW HIS NAME illness that intense. It took the weekend, but we recovered without the girls getting sick. But I could not shake this feeling that danger loomed. Every fiber of my being was on alert. It had been so strong the week before that I’d called my doctor to ask if I could be suffering from postpartum depression. When everyone was well by Monday morning, we proceeded into our week normally. But Monday night, our son ran a low-grade fever. Something in my gut told me it wasn’t right. But my gut had always told me that about him, and countless doctor appointments and evaluations had proven me wrong for three years. Tuesday morning, he woke up without a fever and bounding with energy. We chalked that fever up to the normal immune system of a young child.
BY MARGARET PERNICI
D
o you know that nagging gut feeling? The inner voice telling you when to be on guard or when to open your heart, even when it may be hard? I always struggled with what to call that feeling, those gentle nudges you experience in life, guiding you in one direction or another. And I often ignored them, dismissing this gut feeling as anxiety or irrationality.
While God and the doctors were saving our son, I was being saved myself. But that changed the night of October 10, 2017. The weekend prior, while entertaining family and friends, I came down with a particularly nasty virus, eventually infecting my husband Michael and son Crawford and literally everyone else (after all, I helped to prepare the food!). When I realized the severity of the illness, I panicked, worrying about our two younger children–Leolene, who was one and a half years, and Eliza Grace, three months at the time. Eliza was too young to catch an
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That night, our son asked if he could make a pallet on the floor of our bedroom, so he could sleep nearby. It was an odd request. But our 3-month old was sleeping in a bassinet in our room, and we figured a little jealousy regarding the addition of his new sibling was setting in. It was also my first week back at work after maternity leave. But while I was laying his blankets on the rug, something took over my body. I had an intuition so strong to look in the direction of where he was playing that I literally couldn’t stop myself. I looked. “Margaret, did you see that?” There was no one there but me, Crawford, and a sleeping baby. But in an instant, I responded aloud, “Yes, I did see that.” Crawford had grabbed his right upper abdomen and winced. It was an odd thing for a young child to do. Something again, forced the words out: “Crawford, does your belly hurt?” “Yes, Mama, it does hurt,” he replied. I then proceeded to follow a strong intuition to do things I’d never done before. I laid him down on my bed and started rubbing his belly. I felt nothing. But something told me to dig deeper, so I did.
