Dave
wibbled on Saturday 07 November 2009 16:12

Stuart Noble wrote:

After a few minutes a nurse comes out and says to Grandad. "Now then
Mr Jones there's nothing wrong with the baby. You've called an
ambulance already this week haven't you, why did you call the
ambulance today."

Grandad replies "The baby was quiet for a long time".

Poor grandad I say. Where were the ****ing parents one wonders?

First, g parents are taking on more of the burden of looking after g
children these days and second, speaking as a g parent of 2 girls, you
won't get me to panic over a situation.
If you have children of your own, you will have had times where when
they were just home from hospital, you wake up during the night and
listen for their breathing. I know I did. If I could hear it, I went
back to sleep.

Ah yes. For some reason, the 1st is always the worst. They look so fragile
and you're scared to death that they will get all tangled up in the bedding
and kill themselves.

The 2nd kid: whatever...

Bringing up your own children teaches you what is serious and what is
not, if you are aware of symptoms of serious problems.

My daughter had a funny turn when she ran a massive fever in literally
minutes, went weird and started going comatose. Scared us nearly to death.
Fortunately the 999 operator was really good and knew the score. Told us to
expect convulsions (she did), told us how to handle her when it happened
and told us it should pass. It did. By then, the ambulance had arrived.
Hospital kept her under observation and said it was a slightly rare but not
unknown thing and to keep neurofen handy in the future as it was the most
effective over the counter drug at dropping a fever quickly.

Then there was the time she ate a peanut and we discovered she had a nut
allergy (the anaphalactic shock type). Seemed to spend a lot of time in A&E
and the local paedeatric unit those couple of years... Along with my son
who has a milk allergy that causes asthmatic attack type symptoms.

Won't catch me taking them to the doctor's everytime they have the
sniffles... We're just grateful that the things that are wrong with them
are avoidable and thus in every practical respect they are otherwise
totally healthy. Makes foreign holidays interesting though. "What's: do you
have soya milk, in Czech?..." And "Is your meal totally nut free? in
French". We tend to prep a few flash cards these days just to be sure.

I would hope, when I'm a grandad, I'll still have a sense of perspective
about these things.

The only time I have been scared, was when our eldest g daughter broke
her thigh, at the top of the bone, by falling on a bucket rim and social
services started to sniff around for child abuse. I was up and down the
country many times during that period (we live 266 miles apart.)

Perhaps it was because of that and chatting to the nurses that they
backed away. (I had a contingency plan to hijack her if they had started
to move in.)

Not pleasant. Can't imagine what that would be like.


--
Tim Watts

This space intentionally left blank...