There are a million sayings about following your intuition, especially when it comes to parenting. âTrust your gut.â âFollow your heart.â âGo with your first mind.â We need all of them and then some. Because in life, it seems, there is always someone or something trying to get you to act against what you know to be true.
If there was ever a time when you need to listen to your intuition, itâs when it concerns your children. There are countless stories of a motherâs concerns being dismissed or ignored by medical professionals only to discover that she was right all along.
Tessa Crane knew her son was unwell, but doctors insisted he was fine.
Crane, a 29-year-old single British mother, says she had concerns about her son Oscar from the time he was 7 months old, the New York Post reported. But doctors dismissed her as nervous and repeatedly sent her back home with no answers. In an interview, with the South West News Service, Crane shared her story.
By the time Oscar was 7 months old, Crane noticed changes in her son.
âOscar had a dramatic start to life, being born six weeks early by cesarean section, but he was generally a happy baby,â Crane said.
âHe became irritable and would cry nonstop. His head was swollen. His eyes were bulging and he was vomiting,â she explained. You would think these symptoms would be enough to alert doctors, but they werenât. Instead of a diagnosis for her son, Crane was written off as a ânervous first-timeâ mother.
Instead of diagnosing Oscar, doctors gave Crane a prescription.
Doctors were so sure that Crane was the one with the issue and not her son that they prescribed her anti-anxiety medication. But Crane works as a nursery manager and knew that her son was experiencing something unusual.
So she kept going to the doctor. In 2018, she and Oscar visited medical professionals on 20 different occasions. Things came to a head when she eventually rushed him to the emergency room.
Oscar finally got an MRI after an emergency room visit.
âI figured either Oscar really didnât like me and I was doing something very wrong or there was some medical explanation which would be found,â she told SWNS. It was the latter. Within 30 minutes of arriving at the James Paget University Hospital in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England, Oscar was given an MRI.
Sadly, Craneâs intuition was correct. He had a brain tumor. Oscar was airlifted to nearby Addenbrookeâs Hospital for emergency surgery. His first operation lasted 12 hours. Doctors were able to remove the tumor but complications from the procedure forced doctors to place Oscar in a medically induced coma for two weeks due to excessive cerebrospinal fluid gathering in his skull.
âOscarâs surgeon suspected there was a problem with his tubing, but when she went to change it, his head caved in and his skull crumbled in her hand,â Crane said of the ordeal. Oscar developed meningitis.
âHis whole head was full of infection,â Crane recalled. âHe lost his eyesight completely for a while and he lost feeling in the left-hand side of his body.â Oscar had to be fed through a tube and could no longer move or sit. Crane said it was like he reverted to being a newborn again.
Today, Oscar is 'exceeding expectations.'
Oscar would endure 10 more surgeries over the next four months before his body was able to recover from it all. But all of that was years ago. Today, Oscar is 5 years old and âexceeding all expectationsâ with the help of physical and speech therapy.
He does have some permanent brain damage. He lives with autism, a global developmental delay, and hypotonia or decreased muscle tone. But Crane is grateful for her sonâs progress and the life heâs able to lead. âNow you wouldnât know that had been an issue,â Crane said. âHeâs a little chatterbox now â what he says doesnât make sense but itâs fantastic to hear him.â
Today, Crane advises other parents to trust themselves and advocate for their childrenâs health if they have a sense that something is wrong.
