Pet Hate

The one thing I dreaded most, even more than the kids getting sick and has never happened until today was to have one of my children hospitalized. Muffin woke up last night at 2 am gagging, choking and upchucking. It wasn't his usual, indigestion or cough till he threw up fits. He spasmed, gasped and choked out puke. And it wasn't a one time occurence. It happened at such great regularity I found myself being able to tell time with it and was able to predict when he was going to throw up again. It was every 15 minutes. 3 hours of that and 12 upchucks later, we take him to the emergency. By then, he is so weakened by his puking and inability to keep anything down, they decide to ward him. And that's when a wave a panic threatens to knock the wind out of me.

I know many of my mommy friends have gone through this before and until today, I could sympathise with the ordeal but I was never one of the club. Now I am and it sucks. The child is limp, he is put into an open ward with 5 equally sick children ranging from a two month old infant with glasses to a 14 year old who basically clipped off a raw blister with a dirty pair of scissors and got a terrible infection. The bathroom was down the hallway and the only tv was in a lounge across the hall. His cot is bare except for a single sheet and a single tiny pillow.

Thankfully, he is too exhausted and sick to notice any of this.

I fight the suggestion of putting him on the drip. I worry that it would traumatise him and upset him and that it would be painful. The times I've had a drip, I've hated it with every fibre of my body and I didn't want to subject my two year old to that. It was a battle I lost because he couldn't keep milk or water nor rehydration salts down.

If I only had to deal with him, I think it would have been alright. But then there were Evan and Jordan who were still off school, bored and wondering why Mommy wasn't home. So in order to spend as much time as I could with them and with Muffin, Packrat and I spent the day driving back and forth from the hospital every couple of hours to swop places and duties.

I have never been so thankful that the hospital is a 5 minute drive from my house.

While I write this, Packrat rings to tell me that Muffin has been moved to the single room we requested for. At least that's one thing that I don't have to worry about. He also updated me on the fact that he hadn't thrown up the soup I gave him before I left to go home. He did poop a lot and messy! I pray tomorrow will bring better news and more healing for my little one.

My friends and I agreed, we would willingly subject ourselves to ten times the amount of suffering that the child goes through if only it would spare them from it. It really sucks to see them suffer.

Before the drip

 After the drip kicked in. 

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