I was having a fairly normal day at work on Thursday until 4.30 pm when my phone rang. I rattled out my usual greeting in a cheery sing-songy voice and got the following reply: “Jo? Hi it’s the nursery here. Ruth isn’t very well – can you come and collect her?”
I dashed out and practically run over to the nursery building. Inside, I was greeted by some very worried carers and R wrapped in a towel, puking every so often, completely white and listless. Apparently she had eaten and drunk as normal, but at 4pm had been napping, woke up and promptly projectile vomited. In fact she vomited another 7 times in the space of 90 minutes.
I don’t remember much about the drive home, apart from calling dh to ask him to get an emergency appointment with our GP and realising that I was doing about 45mph in a 40 zone.
Dh had managed to secure an appointment. I collected him from home and we dashed round to the surgery. We had to wait half an hour to be seen, by which point I was going slightly mental. R hadn’t been sick for about three quarters of an hour by this point, but she was still very pale.
The GP eventually deigned to see her and promptly told us to go to paediatric A & E at the hospital. After a quick detour home to pick up the changing bag and a feed for G, we went to the hospital. We were seen pretty quickly by the triage nurse and given a solution that I had to administer to R every ten minutes by mouth with a syringe.
By the time we saw the doctor R’s colour had returned and she was enviously eyeing up G’s feed. She even laughed as the doctor examined her. R was diagnosed with a severe stomach bug/virus (she hadn’t eaten any ‘new’ foods and no-one else at nursery had the same symptoms) and we were sent home with a bottle of neurofen.
It’s amazing how quickly babies go down with an illness and equally amazing that they can recover so quickly. Once again I had cause to be thankful that the girls weren’t born early as they may well have admitted R and put her on a drip had she been poorly as a newborn. I’m also grateful that G didn’t catch the bug. In fact, I was expecting to have a bad night with R after such a horrible day but after a small feed and the neurofen she passed out and it was G that decided to wake at 1, 2.30, 3, 4 & 5 with teething pains.
On Friday R was back to normal and wolfing down food and milk as if nothing had happened. I had to work at home as R couldn’t go to nursery and that obviously meant G couldn’t either but I was just grateful that she was ok.
It’s funny how you go through the motions at the time and deal with the situation but afterwards you reflect and think ‘Bloody hell!’. I guess something like this was bound to happen at some stage. Babies and children get ill, it’s an inescapable fact and there’s no point blaming anyone or trying to trace it back. These things just happen.