I know that reading the title of this entry is not very pleasing, but holding the pail with one hand and your nose with the other is even worse. Thus began the week with Jasmine sick with some sort of stomach bug on Sunday. She was puking all night and it broke my heart to see her go through it. The first time it happened we had to change all the bed coverings since it happened in bed. After that I tried to go to bed but was woken up a few hours later with another incident. Second bed sheet change later and at this point the house is smelling... we have lots of laundry this week. By Monday she was feeling slightly better but no school for her.
We have this reference book on childcare (doesn't every parent?) but it only went up to age 5 and Jasmine was 6. Oh well, I decided to risk it and read up on vomiting. If you try to read into every detail of this type of book then you can get very panicky very fast. You'd end up in the emergency room every week. Looked up Vomiting in the index and I noticed the sub-index had the word "projectile". Hmmm, I don't recall Jasmine's head spinning around and the bed elevating so I guess it's not "projectile". I should double-check in any case.
Lets see: Pyloric Stenosis
This is a congenital condition in which the valve leading from the stomach into thr intestines won't open up enough to let food through. As a result, the baby may vomit with force, a phenomenon known as projectile vomiting.
Ok I guess it's not that. Further digging and I realize that it's only serious if acompanied by fever and if it lasts for more than 24hrs. While I was reading Merlyn decided to turn to another source of information, the new provincial telephone health system called Telehealth Ontario. What a crock of shit this is. I can't believe our tax dollars are going into this bloody thing. It's just a bunch of nurses with no decision making capabilities saying it may be this or it may be that and just to be on the safe side... go to a doctor. I think the whole purpose is to prevent people from flooding our already crowded emergency rooms. This is the second time we've called them for help and the response has been pretty useless.
Tuesday afternoon rolls around and it's Alexander's turn to increase the laundry load, only one bed cover change for him though. Twentyfour hours later and he's back to normal now. Merlyn and I hadn't been up in the middle of the night for a long time. We've forgotten what it was like to have sleepless nights with babies crying, diapers that needed changing, bottle feeding... This latest vomit fest reminded us how vulnerable and needfull the kids still are.
Ok I promise to stop talking about pukeing. Well, until absolutely necessary.
