I will never forget that Saturday in Madrid.
My son and daughter-in-law asked me to look after their two-month-old baby while they ran some errands. I gladly agreed — I was looking forward to any opportunity to spend time with my first grandchild. When they arrived, he was fast asleep in his pram, wrapped in a pale blue blanket. A quick goodbye, the door closed… and suddenly it was just him and me in the flat.
At first, everything seemed perfectly normal. I warmed up a bottle, checked that the room wasn’t cold, and settled down on the sofa, holding him in my arms. But after a few minutes, he started crying. It wasn’t the cry of a hungry or sleepy baby. It was a cry of pain — desperate, piercing, and it made my heart ache.
I tried everything: I rocked him, hummed softly, as I once did to my own children. But the more I tried to calm him, the more he seemed to suffer. His little body tensed and arched with discomfort. Something was wrong. This was not ‘normal’ crying.
Thinking it might be colic, I held him close to my shoulder and gently patted his back. His crying only got louder. A knot of anxiety tightened in my stomach — my instinct told me I needed to check.
I gently laid him on the bed and lifted his clothes to check his nappy. What I saw took my breath away. My hands trembled, and a wave of horror washed over me. The baby was screaming, and I was trying my best not to panic and think clearly.
‘My God…’ I whispered, unable to believe it at first.
His cry instantly brought me back to action. Without hesitation, I wrapped him in a blanket, held him as gently as possible, and ran out of the house. A minute later, I was hailing a taxi.
We sped along Castellana, but every red light seemed to last an eternity. I stroked his forehead, whispered to him, tried to do anything to muffle the pain in his voice. Hearing his desperate sobs, the driver sped up.
‘Hang in there, señor. We’re almost there,’ he said quietly.
At the entrance to the emergency room of the San Carlos Clinical Hospital, I threw open the doors, almost suffocating. The nurse rushed towards me when she saw my face.
‘This is my grandson… he’s been crying for hours… and I noticed something abnormal… please help him,’ I managed to say.
She gently took the child and led me to the office. A few seconds later, two paediatricians appeared. I tried to explain what I had seen, but my nerves prevented me from speaking coherently. I was asked to wait in the corridor.
Those minutes were some of the longest of my life. I paced back and forth, unable to find a place for myself, crushed by fear and guilt. How could I not have noticed earlier? How could everything have gone so wrong in such a short time — while he was with me?
Finally, the doctor came out. His face was serious, but without any alarming harshness.
‘Your grandson is stable,’ he said. ‘You did the right thing by bringing him in so quickly.’
He explained the reason: severe irritation in the nappy area, exacerbated by the fact that he was not sitting quite right, and an allergic reaction to a new soap that his parents had probably recently started using. What had frightened me so much turned out to be inflamed skin with minor superficial bleeding due to friction.
‘It’s not dangerous, but it’s very painful for such a small child,’ he reassured me.
I was overcome with immense relief… and then a new wave of anxiety. Had my son and daughter-in-law really not noticed anything? Did they understand what was going on?
When I was allowed to see the baby, he was already calmer. His skin had been treated with a special cream and protected with a soft bandage. I held him close to me — relieved, but shaken to the core.
A few minutes later, my son and daughter-in-law rushed into the hospital, pale and breathless. I told them everything as calmly as I could. They were terribly ashamed and frightened, but the doctor reassured them again: such allergic reactions are unpredictable even for the most attentive parents.
We thought that would be the end of it… until the doctor returned, looking more serious.
‘There’s something else we need to talk about,’ he said.
My stomach clenched.
He led us into a small consultation room and explained that during the examination they had discovered an incipient inguinal hernia — quite common in newborns, but painful if not noticed in time. Fortunately, there was no strangulation and urgent surgery was not required, but careful monitoring and observation were necessary.
My daughter-in-law’s eyes filled with tears. My son looked devastated. The paediatrician gently repeated:
‘No one is to blame. The main thing is that Grandpa reacted quickly. Thanks to that, we discovered everything in time.’
Only then did the tension begin to ease.
When we saw the baby again, he was sleeping peacefully. My daughter-in-law hugged him close and cried — out of pure relief. My son squeezed my shoulder.
‘Dad… thank you. We don’t even know what we would have done without you.’
I could only smile. Sometimes it seems that the role of grandparents disappears when children grow up. But moments like these remind us how important we still are.
We left the hospital almost at midnight. Madrid glowed under the streetlights, and the cool night air gradually lifted the weight from our shoulders. We talked about what needed to be changed: choosing a gentler soap, making sure the nappies were fitted properly, signing up for check-ups.
What began as a terrible day became a lesson for all of us. A lesson in attentiveness, instinct… and the fragile complexity of caring for a tiny life.
And while the baby slept in his mother’s arms, unaware of the chaos his tears had caused, I realised one thing:
He will never remember this night.
But it changed us all.
If you’ve read to the end, I’m curious:
which part stuck with you the most?
