What If...?

What if may be one of the most dangerous questions of the grief journey.  What if we had taken Henry in sooner?  What if we had insisted on more tests?  What if when I thought I was having indigestion (but was actually having contractions) with Brady I had gone in sooner?  Asking these questions is dangerous...it serves no purpose and simply makes one question the unanswerable.  Therefore, I typically try to steer clear of what if's.

This morning, I was doing my normal morning Internet browse, and I came across an article titled "Breast-feeding may prevent 19% of childhood leukemia cases, study says."  The word leukemia caught my eye, and I read the article.  Of course, the study, at best, suggests an association between breast-feeding and lower cancer risk.  It was not an experimental study, but rather interviews with mothers of children with leukemia and mothers of children without leukemia.  And in reading a related article, the link between breast-feeding and AML (the leukemia Henry had) was even more tenuous.

As a relatively well-educated woman, I know that breast-feeding has many advantages for both mom and baby.  When Henry was born, we both struggled with nursing.  In addition, he was incredibly jaundiced, having gotten himself stuck on my bones on his way out and requiring forceps for delivery.  When he was a few days old, we went to the doctor to get his jaundiced checked.  Normally, it's not a problem when it takes mom and baby a few days to figure out the nursing thing.  Newborns don't need much in the way of nutrition, and the little they might get from nursing is usually sufficient.  Henry, however, needed more...he needed more fluid so that he could flush the jaundice from his system.  Therefore, I switched to pumping and supplementing with formula.  It wasn't what I had originally planned, but it was the way I felt I could get Henry what he needed.  He still got breast milk, and got some of the advantages from that, but he also got formula so that he was getting enough food every day.  I pumped until Henry was about 5 months old, and during that five months he got about half breast milk and half formula.  Again, not my original plan but what I felt was best for both Henry and myself.

I know in my head that by not exclusively breast-feeding for six months I did not give my baby leukemia.  Just like I know that had we taken him in sooner, they would have given him oxygen and sent us back home.  But as moms and dads, we always second guess, and although I know in my head I did what was right I felt a bit of a stab in the heart reading the title of that article.  Yet if I've learned one thing (and heaven knows, I've learned much more than that), it's that as parents we adapt and adjust to meet our child(ren)'s needs, and we do what we feel is best for them.  And that's really all anyone can ask.