Parent Extremis

According to last month’s British medical journal The Lancet, premature babies are less likely to die of a common scourge of preemies, necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), if they are given probiotics - good bacteria.

Most babies born naturally will soon develop bifidobacteria in their large intestines, including B. infantis, B. bifidum, B. longum, and B. breve. These vigorous micorganisms can fight off germs such as E. coli, Klebsiella, and even Salmonella. Such germs are suspected of helping to cause NEC.

Unfortunately, as soon as my son was born, they began pumping antibiotics into his bloodstream. The doctors weren’t familiar with long labors, and assumed that his high white blood cell count was caused by infection, when it was apparently caused by stress. So they proceeded to wipe out his good bacteria with the latest medical science, which was too far behind the times to know much about intestinal flora. Every subsequent test showed my son had had no infection. But once you start a course of antibiotics, you have to stay the course.

Several days later, when we asked our doctor why our healthy newborn son was still in the hospital, he replied with a principle: “We have to treat the hundred children who don’t need it in order to save the one who does.”

The same principle was used to explain why he was whisked away to the nursery as soon as he was born. If you believe, as many natural childbirth people do, that bonding in the first hour of life is critical, that means that one hundred children are needlessly damaged on the outside chance that one of them might not survived if he or she weren’t damaged.

And it meant that, when we finally got home, I had to squirt probiotics into my son’s mouth with a syringe, to cure him of a sort of diarrhea typical of people who have recently been dosed with antibiotics. He began to perk up in a couple of days.

It reminds me of what my grandmother told her physician as she was approaching 100: “What do I owe my long life to? Staying away from doctors.”