When One Mother’s Intuition Saved her Grandchild

When One Mother’s Intuition Saved her Grandchild

One of the many nice things about moving to Kiryat Moshe is that now almost every day I see our old friends and now neighbors, Noam* and Einat.* Josh went to yeshiva with Noam when Josh first came to Israel 25 years ago. B”H, 13 years ago we danced at Noam and Einat’s wedding, and 10 years ago Josh and I were kvatterim at the bris of their oldest child, Yehuda, who is now the oldest of their five children.

About two months ago, Yehuda started feeling weak. Doctor after doctor sent him to test after test, but could find nothing. About a month ago, Yehuda became so weak that he was unable to walk. He was hospitalized, but still the doctors came up empty-handed, and he was sent home weaker than ever.

Noam’s mother doesn’t have a medical background, but after Yehuda was discharged, she did some research and realized that Yehuda’s illness sounded like rheumatic fever, a rare complication of a common strep infection. Then the grandmother moved heaven and earth until she found a doctor willing to test Yehuda for it. She finally found a doctor who said, “I really don’t think that’s what this is, but if you insist…” And she did, so he did.

And the doctor discovered that Noam’s mother was right on. Out of the many tests prescribed by the many doctors who had seen him, not one had thought to prescribe a simple strep test.

B”H, because of the grandmother’s insistence, Yehuda was hospitalized and put on medication. It turned out that the rheumatic fever had already done damage to Yehuda’s heart. But because they caught it on time, the damage was minimal, and Yehuda will be returning to school part time IY”H this coming Sunday.

I recently got together with an old student of my husband’s (who b”H, graduated to become a devoted JewishMOM reader:)) who wanted to tell me about an excellent parenting class she took last year. She shared a bunch of interesting ideas from the course, but the course’s central premise was that we mothers have lost faith in our ourselves. We turn to all sorts of experts to help us raise our children, but have lost our ability to trust our own instincts. We have lost the once widely-held belief that while experts can be helpful, we as mothers know our children better than anyone else.

A few years ago scientists discovered that the cells of the children we carry within us remain inside our bodies for the rest of our lives.

On a medical level, those remaining fetal cells can help to fight diseases in the mother and keep her healthy. On a spiritual level, these cells represent that we carry our children, no matter how old they are, inside of us…

Just like a mother’s intuition.

One comment

  1. I really appreciate this article (and all of your articles). Shavua Tov!!

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