Tag Archives: sick

My top 10 tips for parents for when your kid is sick.

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  1. Dont do laundry. Forget laundry. Buy new clothes, online if you have to. Only do laundry when you absolutely feel up to it or its absolutely necessary. Better yet, have someone else do it. Remember, Its not going anywhere!
  2. Have many beds. When a bed is puked on, peed on or worse (!!) in the middle of the night, don’t bother, clean the child and move beds. Deal with any disasters in the morning (although wet stuff should obviously at least be tipped off the bed).
  3. Own many sheets (see above). If you ever had to change 3 beds in the morning and expect to change them again in the day, you will know you need more then one extra set for each bed, ESPECIALLY if you are a follower of point one. Although this may be one of those “absolutely necessary” moments.
  4. Ipads, TV, phones, heck, any screen you can find. There. are. no. screen. rules. when. ones. child. is. sick. Oh yeah, thats for the mum…… you can apply this to the child also. 😉
  5. Pizza is a nutritionally adequate dinner when you need it to be. If you are gluten free and god knows what else free, you will learn to batch cook and get stuff from the freezer. Rice spaghetti with batch cooked bolognese anyone?
  6. Getting dressed is for losers. Pyjamas rules. If you MUST, then fine, wear day clothes that are presentable enough for the DHL guy (who is delivering your new clothes), but there must be no buttons or zips anywhere.
  7. Ice lollies. Get those ikea ice lolly makery things and freeze juice. Kids will LOVE these even when sick (and they will think you are a superb parent for supplying them).
  8. Keep plenty of medications on hand. Having moved back to Europe I have learned two things, pharmacies in most places don’t deliver, and they are usually closed at times when you most need medication. So unless you want to drive (in pyjamas) to the one open pharmacy at midnight thats 1 hour away, keep everything you need at home. Plus extras.
  9. Hospital runs never happen calmly. If there is even the slightest chance you may end up in one, pack in advance. Otherwise you will end up in there with uber ugly slippers (the other mums WILL laugh at you) and whatever strange stuff your husband / friend / neighbour can come up with to bring you 1-2 days later, usually stuff from the “I am donating this to the red cross box because it no longer fits me” pile. I speak from experience here. Just pack ok?
  10. Chocolate. Yes. It really IS the answer sometimes. I don’t even like chocolate so much. But sometimes. it fixes almost everything. Go ahead. Calories don’t count when your kid is sick 🙂

-Linda

 

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Everything happens for a reason…. right?

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Not going to update you all on speculations. There are many. When I asked our doctor if they would find it this time the reply was ‘we are not letting you go til we have’. Feels good, reassuring. I cant wait now to find out, I cant wait so that we can help her.

This last pneumonia scared the living daylight out of me…. at one point we had 12, yes twelve doctors in our room, from ICU, pulminology and immunology, all trying to figure out what to do with this tiny weenie little girl who kept going lower and lower with her oxygen levels.

She didn’t speak for 4 days, then on the 5th day small words came. Day 6, finally sentences. Im in bits now. I wasn’t then. I was the calm and collected super mum, always am. After… thats another story. Day 8 we went home. We have enough medications on the dining room table to run a small clinic.

So now what? We wait, we wait for test results on the IGG subclasses (other fancy terms no parent ever should need to learn!), then once we have those we go to Rabka, another hospital in the mountains, but with more advanced diagnostic methods, they may need to see the inside of her lungs (how the hell this happens I have no idea, Im scared to ask).

Then after that, unless we have a 100% diagnosis at that point we are off to Krakow to the immunology hospital there, who have diagnostic tools that they don’t have here.

Whatever is going on with pumpkin pie, its not her celiac. This crap, its something else. No stone will be left unturned, but the belief is that its her immune system, something I have been saying for a couple of years now.

I do believe everything happens for a reason, and if this is what we have been sent to deal with then so be it. We need to try to make the best of it and do the best we can to make life as “normal” as we can, for celiac kid, but also big brother who always ends up coming second.
And no matter what we are going through, there are always people who have it far far worse. Complaining wont help.
We are still lucky. We could be the far far worse people….

-Linda

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3 pneumonias in 9 months

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I mean seriously, enough already???!!! How many steroids and breathing aids do we need to use for all this crap to stop??!! Poor Celiac kid just cant catch a break, why??!! If I could take all these pneumonias from her and have them instead I would, only I don’t know how anyone who’s had 3 pneumonias in 9 months can even function?? Yeah, so the pneumonia came before my post earlier (I didn’t want to rain on my own parade), and we caught it so super early she was able to continue with school with just one day off, but still, she must be absolutely exhausted! How can anyone grow and live and function when all their energy goes to fighting bloomin’ pneumonias? On top of the pneumonias poor kiddo now has bone pain from having been on steroids so long. Can we take her off the steroids? No, because then we would be looking at more pneumonias then 3 in 9 months… we cant win here, and poor kid can hardly walk down the stairs properly because her legs hurt! Im tired of seeing doctors and getting second opinions, and Im even more tired of every bloody doctor having a different opinion, who are we supposed to believe? This is our child’s life we are talking about! Now the latest dr. didn’t want to prescribe the tablet that really helps her, because she wants her to see another allergist, another doctor says she can take the tablet long term no problem, yet another says it should only be used short term. So who am I supposed to believe? I know the tablet helps her, I know that, because every time she comes off it she gets sick, so just prescribe it please! I don’t want my kid to be on every medication under the sun, but we need to stop these pneumonias! Not all people with pneumonia survive so seriously just give us the darn tablets! Never mind then the money we fork out on all these doctors visits… bah… its very very lucky we can afford to, not all are so fortunate.

Anyway, rant over. If anyone knows of an exellent paediatric pulminologist in Wroclaw or nearby, please let me know!

-Linda

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