Week 149: Babies, man
July 10, 2021
- Well, ok
- I’ll say this up front: baby C is fine. He’s healthy. He’s back to blowing me kisses and laughing at his sister. This week’s weaknote does cover a few days when he wasn’t, so if you don’t want to read about sick babies and hospitals then please come back next week.
- So as I said - he’s fine, there will be no lasting impact from this episode other than I have now eternally lost the “he’s really sick”/“no you’re being a hypochondriac” argument with Lachie, and I have aged by about ten years. We went in on Tuesday afternoon, and we got home on Thursday lunchtime.
- On Tuesday after a few days of intermittent temperature spikes, mixed in with being apparently normal, C had a febrile seizure. You can read about febrile seizures here if you like, they happen to around 1 in 50 young kids and it’s scary to see but not as dangerous as it looks. We got an ambulance to the hospital and stayed there for a few days, this kind of seizure doesn’t require a hospital trip in all cases, but because it was his first and because he was very floppy afterwards they wanted to get him checked out.
- Thank you to the woman who phoned the ambulance. Did I even say thank you? I don’t remember. I’m not sure I’d recognise you again but you had blonde hair and sportswear on and you did all the things I needed you to do and I couldn’t do myself. Thank you to Lachie. Thank you to my daughter for being so brave and quiet and getting into the ambulance even though she was scared. Thank you to the paramedics who got there in what felt like seconds. Thank you to the woman who told me it was a febrile seizure and her son had had them and he was fine. That really did help me in that moment. Thank you to all the patient and calm doctors and the jolly nurses who took care of C but also saw that I needed taking care of and did that too. Thank you to all the other staff at RACH who keep that place going.
- Our hospital room has a sea view.
- During the worst bit, while I was on my own, a nurse got me an egg mayo sandwich and some ready salted crisps. I combined them into an egg mayo crisp sandwich which tasted very good at the time but I’m not sure I’ll revisit.
- While we were in the ambulance I kept hearing sirens and thinking… gosh we must be following an ambulance. It was only when the paramedic said gently “I’ve put the sirens on to get us there a bit quicker” that I realised - oh no, you are in the ambulance. That noise is you.
- They did a CT scan of C’s head. He looked very small on that big machine. I had to sing him to sleep on the scanner bed so he’d be still. It was very dark in the room and I put my sweaty forehead onto his and sung Moon River until he became calm and fell asleep.
- Because of Covid everyone I interacted with in the hospital had a mask on.
- I was grateful for my own mask, honestly, because there were a few hours early on where I was so folded in on myself with worry that having a mask to hide a bit of my face provided me with a slither of dignity which I greatly appreciated.
- Babies, man.