Why I’m Hypervigilant About You Washing Your Hands When You Visit Our Home

Florence Nightingale proposed a correlation between hand hygiene and general health, well-being and mortality. Germ theory wasn’t around at that point, but she implemented hand hygiene practices to spectacular effect. Regardless of whether you are 6 weeks, 6 months, 6 years or 60 years old, hand hygiene is one easy way to help you and your family stay as healthy as possible, decrease transition of bugs and live as long a life as possible. Therefore, I will not apologize for asking you to wash your hands when you come into our home.

The fact that our boy is an extremely low birth weight preemie plays a role in this, but to be honest, you should be practicing good hand hygiene in your own home, when you are out and about and all times in between. If you quickly grab some milk for me on your way over, here’s a list of what you might touch, (and who knows how many people have touched them before you): your car keys; car door; steering wheel; shopping trolley; wallet; that packet of crackers 20 other people have picked up, decided against buying and put back; your card; the card machine; the cashier’s hand as they pass you your receipt; the milk carton; my front door handle; my bathroom tap.

I’m sensible about hand hygiene at home — not because I’m a nurse, but because I’m a person who wants the risk of germ transfer to be as low as possible.

This has then been multiplied by a thousand since bringing my son, Oliver, home. We are now, in the words of the moms who have requested this topic, a bunch of parents who are to others, hypervigilant to the point of ridiculousness, and to ourselves, hypervigilant in a usually medically necessary, always psychologically necessary way.

We worry because we have seen it, felt it, experienced it. Because we have lived in the hospital, and like when you move out of home, you don’t really want to move back.

We check our baby’s temperature more regularly because febrile convulsions in a kid who has already potentially experienced lack of oxygen could be bad news. We look at our baby’s chest, check their breathing, look for in-drawing, listen for wheeze or crackle, because respiratory infection in a kid with a chronic lung disease can be fatal. We hear the cry, or see the lip color change, or feel the hard, distended belly and we know it’s time to get in the car. Time to go back. To be seen. Checked over. Then come home, or stay in. Make a change, or leave things to progress.

The days you come home again and breathe a sigh of relief were not you being an overprotective mother. They were you making sure this time wasn’t the time you missed it.

Because you can’t afford to miss it.

You worked too damn hard to get here.

They don’t always know why it’s different. Why a baby who’s not a preemie can get a cough, go off food for 24 to 48 hours and bounce back, and a preemie can get a cough, go off food for 24 to 48 hours and lose piles of weight, need an NG tube and then struggle for weeks trying to feed orally again. A baby who’s not a preemie can get a cold and need two nights in hospital on some nasal flow, and a preemie can get a cold and end up in ICU for a week on CPAP and potentially the vent. It is different.

We are hypervigilant. Because if we aren’t and we miss it, the consequences do not bear thinking about.

So come along to hospitals and doctor’s visits with us. And breathe with us when they say there’s nothing to worry about. We will do the same for you, as these are our children. It’s not overprotective; it’s parenting. It’s not over the top; it’s love. It’s not over-exaggerating; it’s surviving.

I’m off to wash my hands now. Meet you there?

Follow this journey on Charlie and Oliver.

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