fear and panic

[ms. bing]

i'm not even entirely sure how i feel talking about this now, even though it's all over. i guess i am looking for some advice and perspective, since i seem to still be reeling.
on mondays i have a night class, so i drop eva off about 10 or 11 am at daycare and dad picks her up. i don't see her again until about 9pm, and then it's only for a half hour before she's asleep. tuesday morning i have class and we get up and leave the house by 9am. so i've always had a little anxiety about not spending enough time with her on mondays, and on tuesdays i'll spend time talking to her and playing with her to make up for it.

yesterday i picked her up from daycare (tuesday) and her teacher told me she thought eva was having trouble going potty and might be constipated. i said ok, and thanked her for the head's up. eva seemed fine to me all the way home. we fed the cat and dogs and ourselves and then eva said she had to go potty.
she got on the potty and started crying just uncontrollably and talking about how much it hurt. that's when i looked and saw the blood in her panties.
you know those little scenes in the movies when the moment stops and you hear the breathing and the heart beat and the big revelation gets a chance to hit home? that's how i felt right then. i think my heart stopped.
i took her inside and laid her on the couch to look. she would barely let me look because it hurt. she looked really irritated, i couldn't really tell anything. so i started asking her exactly what happened.
now doing this kind of an interview with a little girl with a really good imagination and a bad mood is like trying to get the directions to the holy grail from a crazy street person. we went through several different stories, including one where she got bit by a rattlesnake, and i asked her very, very gently if different people at her school might have touched her there and hurt her. she looked at me like i was crazy. i asked her if she was playing a game with that part of her body with her friends. she told me she and a little girl were bouncing on a rubber snake and she slipped. finally she blurted out "my friends didn't do this, i did it to myself!"
so i packed her up at 8pm last night and took her to the emergency room.
they didn't seem to think there was any trauma to the area. they said she had a sever bladder infection and a yeast infection.
i'm still asking myself how this could have happened to my little girl so quickly. she was fine. how did this happen? i still don't entirely have the initial fear out of my mind. those parts of a little girl are so sacred, and while i'm not one of those parents who treats it like it's a "bad part", i have explained to her that of all the parts of her body those are hers alone, and for nobody else to touch without permission.
still, i have fear and guilt born from not being able to be with her every minute. how do i work through this myself and file it away as one of those things that happens to little girls? i'm just, i don't know, freaked out i guess.

[Cruise Director]

Unfortunately we live with predators and have to be weary of every move they make. Children can fall victim to them at any time and to make matters worse, we have to leave our children with other people for long periods of time.

You have the right emotions going. This little girl is your entire world and being a protective parent is not just a good thing, but an expected thing. There are lots of "could haves" and "may haves" going through your head creating the worst scenarios available. Trained medical staff telling you it's merely an infection can help alleviate those fears but not entirely. They will still be in your mind.

You're a good parent, Bing. It's good that Eva has a mommy to watch over her. :)

[ms. bing]

just to update:
turns out that while her infections were caused naturally because she is a little girl and recently has become responsible for much of her own post-pottying hygiene, the story about the other little girl and the rubber snake has something to it. apparently it was during this play that she got the injury that really aggravated the area and made it painful to go potty, and that the injury was inflicted maliciously by the other little girl. this came out because i got the paperwork for the second disbursement of my last student loan, and i was making out my budget. i asked eva if she would be ok with changing schools after christmas, or if she wanted to stay at the same school.
she told me, very pointedly, that she wanted to change schools.
i talked to her a while about what she didn't like about her school, and while she told me she liked her teachers and had a couple good friends, there were two little girls in particular who were always mean to her, and were ganging up on her. one of them had caused the injury to eva's private parts because eva told them she didn't want to play with them anymore.
now i know that kids lie because they don't want to get in trouble for their part in things, but this time eva copped straight up to her part of it. she told me that one girl hit her and she hit her right back, and that's when one pushed her down and the other hit her private parts repeatedly.
monday i will go there and raise high holy hell with that school. one big reason is that when she first started there the teacher-student ratio was kept below the state limits by a school imposed limit, but now there are more and more students in those classrooms because the director told me they are trying to stay private and unaffiliated with any larger group, make improvements, and not raise their rates. eva told me that the teacher took away the toy the other girl was hitting her with, but i guess he didn't think it was serious enough to report it to me or check to see if eva was hurt. and there is one good reason why that happened: he didn't see it. he was too busy because there are too damn many kids in that room. granted, they are at the state limit, but the state limit is too high and anyone can tell you that. there are too many kids in that room for two teachers.
so i will go to her school on monday and tell them what she told me. i'll tell them that i am planning to take her out of there after i graduate because she doesn't want to be there anymore. and i'll tell them that they need to talk to the parents or monitor closely that other little girl because behavior like that is learned, and she may very well be the victim of some kind of abuse at home. and i'll tell them that there are just too many kids for those teachers to watch.
a couple years ago i had a similar problem with a daycare that eva was in right after we moved here. in that case, however, i came in and actually witnessed a teacher neglecting a little boy, a baby, not checking him when he fell and instead yelling at him that it was "his fault for climbing up there after she told him not to".
today i ran into a girl who used to work there and found out that daycare was closed down less than a year after i reported them.