Hospital Dash

Horrible week last week. Jambeans woke up with breathing difficulties, vomiting and fever in the wee small hours of Tuesday night. After a couple of hours dithering we decided to do the hospital dash. I did the hospital with J. Daddy stayed to look after Felix and try and get enough sleep to last for both of us. Waited for triage with the usual round of drunks and weirdos. Two of them were crashed out on the floor, and I tried to shield the rest from Jambeans' view. Triage came pretty quickly. I saw the nurse tick the "high priority" box - the equivalent of Defcon 2 - and even though I'm sure that's pretty standard practice for a minor with respiratory distress, it was bloody scary nevertheless. As was the on-call registrar's need to "rule out pneumonia." I'm just a lay-person. These words scare me.

So they attached her to the SATs machine via a crocodile-clip type thingy you have to keep on your finger. Then put her on oxygen, followed by 3 bursts of Salbutamol, all via a mask which Jasmine hated and kept pulling off. They also put some weird cream on the backs of her hands and sellotaped it down. It numbs her hands slowly, or something like that, so they can take bloods later. They also gave Calpol, and took her temperature regularly. Mainly just at the point one of us was about to nod off. Then we went for a chest X-ray. And just when things were beginning to settle down they asked me to administer some steroids which tasted revolting and she tried her damndest to spit out.

It got to 5am. Jasmine and I had been awake since midnight and I had only clocked about 2 hours kip. It was beginning to hurt. We had a quiet stretch just then, after the X-ray - perfect for a few zzzzs. That's when I discovered that Salbutamol makes you crazy. As in bounce-off-the-wall-crazy. Jasmine ran round the room jumping, whooping, playing with the hot water tap and pressing every button on every bit of machinery she could find.

After that Jasmine was on a dose of Salbutamol every 2 hours. It was horrendous. Jasmine was poorly and needed her mummy. She was also manic, and in a public place, so I couldn't take my eyes off her for a second. We got to the children's ward around 7am and I basically had to push on through with her till we got home in the evening.

We got home and my brave, beautiful, darling little girl was on the mend and was being brilliant in the face of adversity. Her Mummy was a quivering, moaning wreck and had aged about 50 years in that short space of time. I'm still recovering.