Thank God for washing machines. Ours has been on continuously for the past week and a half. Our baby got a tummy bug which resulted in endless throwing-up and - ahem - accidents the other end. Within two days he'd run out of all his clothes and was in a vest with the heating turned up to keep him warm while we frantically hung washing on every available radiator round the house. The bedding went the same way - our travel cot was pressed into use while the cot mattress was washed and dried sloooowly. Our own supply of clean clothes dwindled but his clothes took priority over ours on the radiators.
I'll give NHS Direct a nod here as they were unfailingly kind and helpful - and reassuring which matters most - on the phone when I rang. Although their first line of questioning, for meningitis, does make your heart stop for a moment and have you muttering prayers of 'please don't let it be that' while you're on hold for a nurse.
As the baby got better, my husband got worse, his own tummy bug exactly mimicking (in milder form) the pattern of illness - feeling better, then worse, over and over again. I stopped saying 'he's on the mend' after a few days of being proved wrong.
By the way don't call an out of hours doctor unless you are willing to be called in to see them. I rang NHS Direct for the last time just to check it was usual for a tummy bug to drag on for more than a week and whilst they were kind as usual they suggested I call my out of hours doctor just to be on the safe side. When I did (by this time it was 9pm and the baby had been asleep for two hours) they insisted I should bring him in. "What, now?" I asked. "Yes." I considered refusing (it seemed to me what he most needed was uninterrupted sleep) but when a doctor tells you to bring your baby in to the hospital where the out of hours surgery is... you sort of have to do it. So I called a taxi, got the baby out of bed (husband lying in bed feeling horrible), took him to the doctor who looked him over and said he wasn't dehydrated and to carry on as I was - we got back to bed by 11pm.
And then work loomed. Now that I'm back at work for two days a week initially it became clear the childminder was not going to be an option as the baby was still too ill and equally I could not, after only one week back, bring myself to cry 'ill baby' and not be at work. So I left a still-poorly husband with a still-poorly baby and the two of them mostly sat in bed with toys and telly (and plenty of spare clothes and towels for accidents) and were poorly together. Thankfully they were both reaching the tail end of the illness. Meanwhile on my second day at work I spent the day fighting off low-level nausea and as soon as I was safely through the work days started to feel vile myself.
So now my husband and the baby are back to normal and I'm at the tail-end of it all. It's been a week and half of household illness.
And there are still about 6 loads of washing in the laundry basket.
I'll give NHS Direct a nod here as they were unfailingly kind and helpful - and reassuring which matters most - on the phone when I rang. Although their first line of questioning, for meningitis, does make your heart stop for a moment and have you muttering prayers of 'please don't let it be that' while you're on hold for a nurse.
As the baby got better, my husband got worse, his own tummy bug exactly mimicking (in milder form) the pattern of illness - feeling better, then worse, over and over again. I stopped saying 'he's on the mend' after a few days of being proved wrong.
By the way don't call an out of hours doctor unless you are willing to be called in to see them. I rang NHS Direct for the last time just to check it was usual for a tummy bug to drag on for more than a week and whilst they were kind as usual they suggested I call my out of hours doctor just to be on the safe side. When I did (by this time it was 9pm and the baby had been asleep for two hours) they insisted I should bring him in. "What, now?" I asked. "Yes." I considered refusing (it seemed to me what he most needed was uninterrupted sleep) but when a doctor tells you to bring your baby in to the hospital where the out of hours surgery is... you sort of have to do it. So I called a taxi, got the baby out of bed (husband lying in bed feeling horrible), took him to the doctor who looked him over and said he wasn't dehydrated and to carry on as I was - we got back to bed by 11pm.
And then work loomed. Now that I'm back at work for two days a week initially it became clear the childminder was not going to be an option as the baby was still too ill and equally I could not, after only one week back, bring myself to cry 'ill baby' and not be at work. So I left a still-poorly husband with a still-poorly baby and the two of them mostly sat in bed with toys and telly (and plenty of spare clothes and towels for accidents) and were poorly together. Thankfully they were both reaching the tail end of the illness. Meanwhile on my second day at work I spent the day fighting off low-level nausea and as soon as I was safely through the work days started to feel vile myself.
So now my husband and the baby are back to normal and I'm at the tail-end of it all. It's been a week and half of household illness.
And there are still about 6 loads of washing in the laundry basket.
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