Worst day, right here.

— Neil Lee (@neilio) March 6, 2013

I’ve thought long and hard about whether or not it was a smart idea to write about this, but in the interests of being, at the least, a cautionary tale I’m getting this out of my head. Besides, as Nora Ephron’s mother used to tell her repeatedly, “everything is copy”.

The tl;dr version of the story is: I broke my baby.

Baby Let’s Play House

Before I go on, I should provide some context.

My wife and I were expecting our second child, a boy, due in the beginning of March. To our great surprise, The Baby Now Known As W decided March was too damn late and decided that the end of January was a more appropriate time to jazz hands his way into the world.

(That story, and the story of the roller coaster ride that immediately followed W’s birth will have to wait for another confessional.)

To say we were caught off guard would be, as the cliché goes, an understatement. We already have a 5-year-old son and had kept all of his baby things (and I mean all) piled up in a chaotic heap in our shed, lugged between two different moves in a mix of not wanting to let go and ironic laziness.

Knowing that we had a second son on the way put the HOLY SHIT fear in our eyes, and I proceeded to move almost everything that was in the shed into the house in a fit of “Let’s Get Organized!”

Our basement looked like an episode of Hoarders had collided with Teen Mom.

We managed to get most of the pile sorted and put away when W decided to make the scene. The house was still a disaster, but slap my ass with diaper cream were our onesies and swaddling blankets PRIMED.

Cat’s in the Cradle

W came home after a stressful 2 & 1/2 week hospital stay to much happiness, and we settled in to adjusting to the new normal. It’s amazing how quickly the memory of how to take care of a baby comes back, even after five years. Our reawakening muscle memory, coupled with the fact that W seemed to be a mellow, laid-back baby helped ease the transition.

I was actually quite enjoying having a baby to take care of again, and no, that’s not the Stockholm Syndrome talking.

Now I should introduce our other player in this story: our geriatric cat Raj. We’ve had Raj for 14 years, and as far as we can assert he’s at least 17 years old. If Gilbert Gottfried were a cat, he’d be Raj: whiny, annoying, and petulant. And yet he could be friendly and warm when he needed to be.

Throughout his life Raj has been, well, leaky. The amount of our personal belongings he’d soiled throughout the years is embarrassing to admit; a normal human being would have put him out of his misery a long time ago. But normal? That’s for boring assholes! So we kept him.

Baby Got Back

Necessity turned our living room into Baby Central, with a Pack ‘n’ Play, two infant car seats, a swing, and the rest of the accoutrement required to care for a child crammed in. I had been standing by the stereo trying to find some suitable baby soothing music when I noticed Raj climbing into one of the infant seats.

The thought of Raj decimating an infant seat with his power urine flashed through my mind and I came quickly around the couch to try and pull him out of the seat. At some point my foot caught on something (a swing? the couch? my own left foot?) and I suddenly realized I was falling.

With W in my arms.

I wish I could say some deep-set daddy ninja reflexes kicked in and in microseconds I swivelled my body to protect W, but the truth is my sleep-deprived mind didn’t even remember I was holding him until I was close to the ground. By then, it was too late.

My elbow smashed into the ground, and W bounced out of my arms and onto the hardwood floor. He immediately started shrieking in this horrifying way I had never heard before.

Writers like to describe extreme moments of stress as having a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. I would describe the feeling you get when you realized you just seriously hurt your own child as getting tackled by Terry Tate while someone shoves a small organ-sucking black hole through your anus.

We immediately picked W up and brought him to the bassinet, where I pulled off his sleeper to see if I could see any broken bones. All the while, W shrieked.

Not finding anything obvious I made the decision to bring W into Sick Kids hospital. Toronto East hospital was closer, but anything major got transferred to Sick Kids at some point anyway and I wanted to get the best care as quickly as possible.

I jammed some diapers and wipes into a bag, called a cab, and put W into one of the infant seats. He quieted down a little but was still whimpering, and I noticed a large bump starting to form on the back of his head.

By the time W and I got to the hospital the lump on W’s head had gotten noticeably larger. I rushed into the emergency triage area and after a short wait W was seen by a nurse. Seeing my crestfallen face, she tried to reassure me, saying, “you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last parent to drop your baby.”

This was a refrain I heard multiple times while at the hospital. It’s not exactly reassuring to know there are other people as dumb as you are, but I suppose any solidarity is better than none.

Doing It All For My Baby

Sick Kids is renown for a reason: they provide some of the best, most effective child health care I’ve ever seen. In the two nights and two days we were at Sick Kids W had the following tests arranged and performed:

1. Head ultrasound
2. Head x-ray
3. Head CT scan
4. 4 rounds of blood work
5. Vitals taken 16 times
6. Extensive eyes/opthalmic evaluation
7. Head MRI
8. Full body x-ray

All through, the staff at Sick Kids were amazing, especially the nurses and doctors in the neurosurgery ward. Kind, patient, caring, thoughtful: these are the qualities you want in any health care system.

These qualities were even more evident after we found out W had severe skull fractures running along both sides of his head.

One huge piece of luck was the CT scan showing W as having just minor bruising on his brain, and just a small amount of blood from the break. Doctors were confident no surgery was needed (to our immense relief), but the skull fracture was bad enough that they wanted to keep W overnight for observation — apparently if anything disastrous was to happen, it’d happen within the first 24 hours.

I stayed with W for two nights while my wife ran around taking care of our other son, getting us fresh clothes, expressing milk for W, and trying to keep our spirits up. I tried to busy myself with the new routine of caring for W while talking to doctors, but the question we were almost too scared to ask was, is there permanent damage?

We spent much of the hospital stay worrying ourselves sick waiting for the test results. The CT scan looked promising, but only an MRI would be able to give us conclusive information how how much damage there was to W’s brain.

Confirming that there was only very minimal bruising and blood on the surface of W’s brain that should heal completely was a relief beyond words.

Baby, scanned for $847.63

The night of the accident the neurologist on call, a jovial, bushy-bearded Scottish man with an accent thick enough to cut haggis noted off-handedly that, “there will be questions in the cold light of day, so I’d prepare for that.” I didn’t realize what he meant until much later, after an unusually long and detailed Q&A I did with the “Pediatric Scan team”. I realized the word “scan” in their name wasn’t a verb, it was an acronym. “SCAN”: Suspected Child Abuse or Neglect.

Knowing there was any suspicion at all that I had done this to W on purpose was sickening, but it was explained later that hospital protocol required that any head injury be investigated by the team. Still, unsettling.

Baby Come Back

Home.

— Neil Lee (@neilio) March 7, 2013

So now we’re home. The post-injury care for a baby with a skull fracture is surprisingly straightforward - do what you were doing before, but don’t trip and drop your baby this time, dumb-ass. We had expected the hospital to mount some kind of elaborate head protection gear on W’s head, but infant’s skulls are surprisingly resilient and within 3-6 months it should be like nothing ever happened. The only outward sign that the accident occurred is a cone-shaped swelling at the back of W’s head which is disturbingly pliable. I’m told his head will return to a more spherical form in a couple of weeks.

Conehead aside, W is his normal, gurgling self, and I’m extremely thankful knowing he’ll remember none of this as he grows older. We’re still on guard for developmental issues, but everything we’ve been told points to a full recovery.

The after-care from Sick Kids has also been exemplary, with a detailed explanation of what tests were done and what the results were, as well as multiple follow-ups appointments. They’ve also given us a dedicated phone number to call if we ever had any questions at any point, day or night. “We’d rather you phone us than sit at home and worry, so don’t hesitate to call.” Amazing.

So all’s well that ends well? I guess the coda is still to be played out as we watch W grow and starts to hit development milestones. I can’t let myself think too much about the “what ifs” or I’ll go insane with worry, so I instead clean our house up, organize our crap, and remind myself that life is about learning from one’s mistakes.

I’m paraphrasing here, but I remember reading a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt that went something like,

“Learn from other’s mistakes, because you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”

As you've probably heard by now:

Link to Mathowie's post

Update 12/18: In perfect Facebookian fashion Instagram has back-pedalled and promises to clarify and improve the more frown-inducing bits of their new Privacy & Terms of Service. The steps below still stand (though some have said Instagram removed the ability to change your username, YMMV.

Of course, Instagram provides no way to bulk delete photos, and if you feel motivated enough to delete each one individually in the app (which is your only option), it rate limits you (read: blocks you) if you try to delete more than 10 in an hour.

This is called “not making things easy”.

Here's how to delete all of your photos but retain your username, just in case.

1. Back up your photos first, if you want. I used Instaport.me, who I'm sure will be getting a LOT of use over the coming weeks.
2. Log into Instagram in your web browser and edit your username: https://instagram.com/accounts/edit/ - save the changes.
3. Delete that mofo: https://instagram.com/accounts/remove/request/.
4. Go back into the Instagram app and create a new account, using your old username.

Done and done.

Oh, and if you want to find my Instagram photos (and subsequently, me), I'm on Flickr at flickr.com/neilio.

Yesterday, I dropped a bomb on my Twitter account and unfollowed everyone I was following in one massive purge. (If this is something you’re considering, ManageFilter is what I used. Worked great, and was free.) I also went into my Google Reader account and unsubscribed to all of the 200+ feeds I had there. After 24 hours of following just five accounts (all newsy feeds) I started slowly adding people back.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and based on what I’ve read, others are as well. Andre Torrez wrote a fantastic post on this called “We Met on the Internet” in which he noted that Paul Ford recently unfollowed everyone he was following, too. That got me thinking that doing something similarly dramatic might be good for me as well. So here we are.

“I’ve been posting about this a bit, but I think my time off pushed me even further along to where I was going. I won’t say ’off Twitter’, but I feel like focusing more on things around the edges of Twitter.”

Here’s the thing: I’ve been on Twitter now for five and a half (!) years, and as Twitter has grown and expanded and “gone mainstream” so has the feeling that I’ve let it get away from me a little. Twitter used to be a fun diversion to pop into here and there to keep up with a small cadre of friends, and feel connected. In many ways it’s been a life-saver; almost literally.

Once Twitter started to switch from being about people I knew to being about, well, everything in my life (products & services, comedic relief, inspiration, the weather, co-workers, etc.) the more time I started spending on it, and the more trying to keep up with it all started to feel, well, like work. I missed the intimacy of the early days, but I suck at being disciplined enough to avoid burying myself.

The other thing I should mention that looms large over a lot of my social network usage is, let’s be frank, my neurotic sense that at any point I could be missing out on something amazing. In ye olde days when blogs were the main way to mine the zeitgeist I really liked thinking that I knew what was happening. If you read the right blogs, you could almost convince yourself that you were down with it.

Now, it’s impossible. There’s just too much amazing, interesting stuff going on, available seemingly all at once, and impossible to consume fully. Twitter exemplifies this embarrassment of awesomeness perfectly, and its bite-sized servings belied me into thinking it was a trivial part of my online life. I was wrong.

---

One of my favourite things about moving homes is getting the opportunity to go through all of your accumulated things and forcing yourself to say, “is this in, or out? Does this have value in my life or no?” I’ve moved a lot in the past fifteen years (over a dozen times, with four of those moves between cities) and each time the pile of things I brought along with me got smaller & more focussed.

I realized recently that while I do these kinds of purges a lot in my so-called real life, I’ve never really thought about how I’ve let my digital life sprawl larger and messier. So I did what anyone does when things get messy: I cleaned up.

It’s taking me a while, but I feel like I am getting closer figuring out how to let the parade march by and go happily along my way. -- Andre Torrez

Writing this down really helps no one but me, but it’s useful to get into words things that have been banging around in my head. We’ll see how long I can avoid getting back into old habits, but for now I’m really enjoying the relative quiet.

I started using Prismatic a few weeks ago to try and bring some sense to the fire hose that is Google Reader & Twitter. So far it's been pretty decent at finding interesting articles, but the lack of a mobile / iPad version is kind of annoying. At any rate, the experiment continues.

In the distant possibility that this may be of use to someone else, here's a tiny list of the keyboard shortcuts I've found so far.

• j/k - Move up / move down the article list
• s - Share this
• o - Open this (go to the original web site)
• b - Add this to favourites
• f - When it's visible on the page, put focus into the Find text field.

As I find new ones I'll update this list.

Five years ago at the very moment I'm writing these words R and I were crammed into the back of a cab as it insistently pushed its way down College Street. Alanis Morriestte was playing on the radio (You Oughta Know, if you were wondering) and the wah-wah sounds of the College street hipsterati ebbed and swelled around us. I remember the cab smelling like a cross between the most intense curry dinner you've ever eaten and a pair of old adidas shorts full of farts.

I never felt more overwhelmed and terrified.

Five years ago at the very moment I'm writing these words I was standing in front of what felt like the slowest human being on earth. I was waiting for him to complete R's hospital registration so I could join her upstairs. Our doula and midwife were with already up there so I knew she would be fine, but it took all of my strength to not reach across the counter, grab the slowest human being on earth by his slowest human being neck jowls and yell, "WHATISWRONGWITHYOU HURRY. UP."

Five years ago at the very moment I'm writing these words I was caught up in the slipstream between my old life and new life. It almost seems offensive to trot out the hoariest chestnut there is, that "everything changes once you have a child", but too late, there it is. Jonathan Coulton's observation that parenthood is like becoming a vampire seems about right:

"... your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood."

Once in a while I try to remember what life was like before The Boy and it's very, very difficult. It's only been five years and yet it feels like he's been in my life forever.

I am the luckiest man on earth.

It's a bit odd how quickly the new, strange thing became old, routine, automatic. After 5+ years of limiting myself to 140 characters, trying to remember what it was like writing long, rambling sentences for my old personal site feels like trying to remember what life was like before my son was born: hazy; incomplete; absent.

Squeezing out even a weak-kneed paragraph like this one has felt like trying to overcome some kind of poetic constipation. This writer needs an enema¹!

But! There's this new, refreshingly simple thing and this building pressure to get something meaningful out (enough with the poop imagery!), so here we are.

I can’t believe I just compared writing to pooping.

Keys

There's this great scene in Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape where James Spader explains that he can only ever have one key at a time. This means he can have a car, or a home, but not both.

“I just like having the one key, it’s clean.”

If there was one word to describe my goals in 2102, it's “simplify”. Seems a bit precious, really, but it's something that I’ve been thinking about a lot these days. I don’t want my life to be just one key, but as a lodestar it has its usefulness.

What would be my “one key”?

^[1]: With apologies to Jack.