Friday, March 13, 2009

Mommy decision tree

A good Mommy worries about her child. This goes without saying. However, if this Mommy was already pre-disposed to worry, when it comes to the child the Mommy anxiety-meter will overload causing a complete analysis-paralysis.

The symptoms that Finn was showing on Friday related to his current case of baby-plague included deep circles under his eyes, something that we had not seen previously. Coupled with his incessant snot and malaise, this was enough to have Mommy immediately thinking "sinus/ear infection". The problem was that the Mommy was also sick. The brain fog from that along with her incredible innate worrying capabilities was enough to send her into uncertainty-lock while trying to figure out what to do about it.

In the end, after 14,000 phone calls/emails/IM's to me to discuss, she brought him in to the doc who determined that while he had some minor inflammation in his ear, intravenous antibiotics and/or a sinusectomy would not be necessary. I'm glad she was worried and I'm glad she took Finn to the doctor, but we probably could have gotten to that decision point a little quicker.

So in an effort to help reduce the time-to-doctor next time around, I went way back in my brain to my days as a project manager and developed a flowchart for her to use next time this happens. Hopefully this will be of use to you too.


Forgive the sloppiness. It's been a long time since I've done one of these. As Kitty is a much better project manager than me, I'm sure she can help get this into Visio as soon as she gets better. Of course, she'll also probably be compelled to create a "Daddy stop watching baseball since everyone knows that spring training games don't count and the World Baseball Classic is meaningless and help me out with the baby tree", but I'm actually looking forward to that. It can only help.

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