Updated: 3 days ago
Well Isn't That Something
by Amy Kennedy
As a child, I took two doses of bubble gum pink sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim every day. One with breakfast and one with dinner. This thick, sulfuric liquid was more commonly known as Septra, and my mom would sing the lyrics to The Searchers’ “Love Potion No. 9” as I brought the small, clear plastic medicine cup to my mouth and tossed it back. It smelled like turpentine and looked like India ink. I held my nose, I closed my eyes. I took a drink.
The daily antibiotics were for my congenitally deformed kidneys. The valves separating my kidneys from my bladder were always open, allowing urine to flow backward through my urinary tract. This defect translated to chronic kidney infections, which meant high fevers, back pain, and a terrifying tendency to pee blood. It’s a somewhat common disorder that most kids grow out of, me included. The medical term is vesicoureteral reflux, which my pediatrician simplified to kidney reflux. My family just called it “Amy’s bad kidneys,” a term that became heavier after my youngest son was born with one of “Amy’s bad kidneys.”
We brought him home from the hospital with his ten tiny fingers, ten tiny toes, and a prescription for amoxicillin. Twice a day, I put a small dot of the thick, pink liquid into his wet, gummy mouth while humming “Love Potion No. 9.”
One year later while wrapping up an appointment at the nephrologist’s office, the doctor asked me, one hand on the exam room door, “Is he sleeping okay? Antibiotics can cause sleep disturbances, especially in young children. Nightmares, insomnia.”
I made a joke about him sleeping like a baby and told the doctor we’d see him in three months. But as soon as we got home, I put my son in his bouncer and grabbed my computer. I scrolled through study after study with similar titles. “Antibiotics and the Nervous System,” “Psychosis Resulting from Sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim,” and “Amoxicillin, Dopamine Dysregulation, and Night Terrors.” Then there were the Reddit threads—also peer-reviewed. “Batshit crazy bactrim nightmares,” “Antibiotics and wtf dreams,” and “Holy shit, these augmentin dreams are bad.”
I called my mom.
“Do you remember all the nightmares I used to have?”
Her soft, dark laugh was one I now recognize as a parent. Of course she remembered my nightmares. She’d lost more sleep than I had because of them. Her side of the bed was closest, so I ran to her whenever I had a bad dream. On the worst nights, I’d wake up unable to move or speak, the nightmare sitting on my chest, standing right next to my bed, or perched in a corner. It was always the same gray figure with a gaunt face, his mouth a gaping, lipless hole, hanging open in a silent scream.
My mom turned on lamps, changed my wet pajamas and sheets before surrounding me with fresh blankets and stuffed animals. She’d rub my back until I was asleep again. Now I can see her sitting on the corner of my bed, exhausted and checking the time on a digital alarm clock. I can see the moment she conceded it would make more sense to stay awake, get a head start on the morning, pack lunches, fold laundry, empty the dishwasher. Plus, there was all the worrying to be done, trying to figure out why I was having so many nightmares. My sleepwalking was getting worse, too. More than once, she found me curled up on the bathroom floor.
“Did you know that Septra causes nightmares? They did some studies in the 90s. It has something to do with dopamine levels during REM sleep.”
My mother grew up in a mountain church, one that believed demons were as real in the world as the red oak pews lining the sanctuary or the choir director who polished them every week. She’d talked to her sisters about my nightmares, my aunts who still went to a church where they laid hands and spoke in tongues when the Spirit moved them. It was the church my dad wouldn’t let us visit except for funerals and weddings. The church my mother left behind when she got married.
During my nightmare years, my mom started praying a new prayer with me before bed. It was a quiet, pull-the-door-closed-behind-you prayer. She’d ask God to protect me from the demons trying to corrupt my mind, those thieves of the Devil who wanted to steal my soul. It was a prayer that I continued to pray long after the nightmares stopped, when my kidneys worked, and I didn’t need the Septra anymore. I prayed it after my mom stopped saying my evening prayers with me. I prayed it until I eventually quit praying altogether. But it’s a prayer that still crosses my mind when I’m tucking my own children in bed.
"Well isn't that something,” my mother says.
AMY KENNEDY writes about climate change, ecological grief, and parenting during a mass extinction event. Her work has appeared in the Southeast Review, Burnaway, and Dark Mountain. Her book Vanishing Points: Words for Disappearing, received an Antenna Press Publishing award, a DeGroot Foundation Courage to Write grant, and a 2024 Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Arts grant. She is working on her next book, All’s Well that Ends, with the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop Book Project. Amy is a proud graduate of Appalachian State University and a Loyola Institute of Environmental Communication Fellow. She lives in Charlottesville, VA with her family and two dogs.