"I can remember exactly when it started..."

"I can remember exactly when it started: the day after our friends' lovely wedding.

 

We had had a great weekend. Our new baby had a tiny pretty outfit and had behaved perfectly for the ceremony and the drinks and the lunch. Everyone had admired her and said how good she was. Then it began. About half past three on the Sunday she began to scream. I had never heard noise like it. She was six weeks old and up till this point had been pretty straightforward. She wasn't a good sleeper, but she was alert and cheerful, grisly sometimes, but nothing we couldn't handle.  On and on she bawled, but we couldn't work out what was happening - was she in pain? No sighs of teething, was it her tummy, what? It's awful not being able to comfort your baby, but I held her tight and tried and tried to calm her. After two hours I decided something was seriously wrong; she just wouldn't stop.

 

So we rang NHS direct. They called back promptly and over the screaming I tried to explain what was going on. The tired-sounding doctor established she hadn't got any symptoms of illness or trauma, but I kept shouting at him hysterically: "there is something wrong with my baby!" He wearily suggested that it might be colic. "I don't think so", I replied, scornful of his trite explanation, it was clearly much more serious than that. "So take her to A&E to have her checked out". Erm, was it that bad?

 

I couldn't tell anymore, I was crying almost as much as the baby. We ran upstairs to speak to our landlady - a grown-up would surely know. Down she came to the flat and gently took the baby from me, speaking to her softly and kindly, "What's wrong, little girl, what's wrong?". She put her over her shoulder and patted her and the little one shuddered and gasped, hicupped a bit and went quiet. She snuggled into her neck and relaxed. "I think it is colic," our landlady said.

 

It was colic, as far as we could tell, either that or some existential crisis at the state of the world, and the crying didn't stop until four months. It seemed like nothing helped, so we holed up for that winter, hardly seeing anyone, never going out, listening to our baby cry. By the spring things were getting better - but by then her teeth started to come through..." (Marjorie, London)

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