Every parents nightmare

What started off as a cold and a slight cough, quickly developed into something more serious.

As a result I’ve had a really big bought of mummy guilt. Last week, M, had a runny nose and a cough. She went to nursery as normal, but on Tuesday she wasn’t herself.

Tuesday evening, I was convinced that I’d keep her home from school the following day, but when she woke Wednesday morning, she was quite chirpy and more than happy to go to nursery so I took her.

When I picked her up and we got home, she was unnaturally upset. I made a doctors appointment straight away and the GP prescribed some antibiotics for a throat infection.

Personally I suspected tonsillitis as the girls are quite prone to it.

As soon as I go to the pharmacy to get M’s antibiotics she was sick. She was sick again when we walked through our front door and she went down hill from there.

The following day I kept M off nursery, but she wasn’t able to keep her antibiotics or any liquids down.

In the morning, my husband suggested taking her to A&E, but I didn’t see much point as we’d been to the GP the day before.

Around 3.30pm though, M was sick with bile and blood. We took her back to the GP who sent us to the children’s ward in our local hospital.

This is where the mummy guilt kicks in as I wished I’d listened to my husband and gone to the doctors that morning instead of waiting.

Anyway when we got to the hospital the doctors immediately put M on a drip to get some fluids into her and then took some blood from her.

The blood revealed that she had an infection and a pretty bad one. Infection markers are usually around 5, and yet M’s was 237. It was bad. They needed to take some more blood though to try to find out where the infection was.

They started M on antibiotics. I stayed overnight in the hospital with her, whilst my husband went home with R.

I don’t think M, nor me, slept much that night, but the next morning she was definitely looking a bit brighter.

The doctor came around and explained that the blood tests would test M’s brain to see if there was an infection there. Meningitis was mentioned, but as M didn’t have a rash, we were hopeful this could be ruled out and there was talk of a possible urine infection so we needed to get a urine sample from M for a dip test.

When we eventually managed to get M to wee, the nurse tested it, but it was ok. I kind of wanted it to be a urine infection so that we could rule out anything more serious, but it wasn’t.

My husband and R arrived back around 8am.

Around midday I took R to the playroom for a while and whilst we were there, there was also a little boy there who had lost his legs as a result of meningitis. All sorts of thoughts raced around my head at this point.

M slept really well that night, as I did I. When she woke up the next morning, she was a lot brighter and managed a bite of toast and a good drink of water.

She woke up at 6am and managed to stay awake until around 11.30ish, which was amazing considering the previous two days she’d just slept all day and was pretty unresponsive.Throughout the day she ate a bit more, half a banana, a bite of a jaffa cake etc, and she was starting to drink more water, apple juice etc and keep it all down.

Her temperature had also returned to normal too. She nodded off to sleep a few times, but during the times she was awake we played with a few toys on the bed and I read her a few stories.

A bit later in the day the doctor came to take more blood and the results came back within a few hours. Her infection levels had gone down from 237 to 40, so that was a massive improvement. This was a new doctor we saw who was a lot more forth coming with information than the previous doctor. He told us that M had a really bad case of gastroenteritus and that one of the blood cultures they were still waiting for, was for sepsis.

That word just makes me panic. Sepsis. Blood poisoning – potentially life threatening. The results didn’t come back that day, so we had to wait until the following day.

My husband and I decided that I would go home with R that night as I’d stayed the previous two nights, so my husband would stay with M. I think R had been missing me at home, and M definitely wanted her daddy as she’d beenmissing him.

I did’t actually realise how tired I was from the toll that the last 72 hours had put on me until I sat down in the car to drive R and myself home. Suffice to say I had an early night that night, but it was very strange not having Nigel, my husband at home with me, and it was even stranger when I was putting R to bed as I glanced at M’s empty bed.

The following morning I rang my husband around 6am and he told me that a different doctor had woken him up at 11pm asking if he wanted to go home.

11pm at night! When my husband advised that M wasn’t well enough to go and that we were still waiting for blood results, the doctor became more insistent  which naturally agitated my husband. Why would we want to wake M at 11pm after everything she’d been through because the doctor wanted to turf us out.

I appreciate the bed shortage, I really do, but asking us to leave that late was just out of order.

When R and I arrived at the hospital, M and my husband were sat in the play room watching tv.

M managed to have some breakfast which was good and she definitely has more colour in her face. She was also drinking more too.

Around 11am, the consultant came to see us and explained that they didn’t need to take any more bloods and that the other blood results were all ok.

He explained that what started out as a cold, caused M’s to inflame which caused her to be sick and resulted in her high temperature, drowsiness and unresponsiveness. She’d developed gastroenteritis which was viral, but a really bad infection.

Looking back now, M did have a cold the week before. She had a cough and a runny nose. I’m amazed that R didn’t get ill too and I’m ever so grateful for the NHS and the care they took over M.

The second night in hospital I broke down. I was petrified that we were going to lose M. Mainly because they’d mentioned brain tests and meningitis.

Life is so precious and the past few days has reminded me exactly of that.