Please be Patient, the Doctor is In

For a boy who hardly makes any trip to the doctor's office, gabe has been doing more than his fair share of trots there these few weeks, and for all sorts of reasons.

He came down with a weird, red rash all over his body one morning. No accompanying fever or other symptoms. Turns out it's due to a virus. It was gone within a day but we still got to pay for the consultation and medicine.

One fine morning after I took him off the toilet bowl when he was done doing his business (yes, we've been poo-training him), I got more than startled to find it stained red, much like someone just poured a cup of ribena into it. So off to the pediatrician we went and he was diagnosed with constipation. Apparently, I had failed to notice the small but persistent signs for the last few weeks and the situation aggravated to this point. We had to give him a special sugar syrup to loosen his stools, go aggressive on the fibre in his diet and make the boy drink, which is one of the most tiring things I have to do. You see, gabe is bad at drinking. We have to coax, force, disguise, negotiate, do all sorts of things just to get him to take three sips. Anyway...

He came down with a bad bout of flu a week later. My personal method of dealing with gabe's flus is to last it out and unless it gets really bad, or if it affects his sleep, I would keep medicines out of the way. And if I were to medicate, it'll usually be self medication since I'm familiar with the few that he's been prescribed with thus far. But this one was bad. So off to the doctor's we went. Much to my dismay, we had to drug him for a week, but it all went off eventually and I took home more knowledge about his medicines and how/ when to administer them.

Two to three weeks later, which is today, we saw the doctor again! For the last two days, he has been giving me three soiled diapers a day, versus the daily trip to the loo for his downloads. The queer part was that the stools were progressively more watery with each incident. I wondered if that was diarrohea, since I'd never met with a situation like this before. On day two, he started to develop a low grade fever. Derod and I decided to take him to the doctor's the very next morning. Turns out, even if we didn't have that intention, the incidents following that morning would get our butts up and going: gabe woke us up just as the sun rose up the horizon with a big soiled diaper and after his morning milk feed, gave us two others within an hour. The diagnosis: gabe caught a virus and it should self-resolve but we have to last it out for the next three to four days. Meanwhile, we have to hydrate him with like a litre of fluids a day (I almost fainted) and we busted our pockets purchasing the prescibed fluids, which gabe fought to push away after just one sip. Apparently, he caught this virus from where children gather. The doctor named the possibilities of childcare centres and playgrounds.

When gabe was between six and ten months old, a friend commented on us washing his teether-toy when it dropped on the sidewalk where we had lunch, and on us wiping the high chair gabe was on (the wet tissue turned out pretty black). I thought about whether I was being too picky about cleanliness but decided that it was reasonable for two reasons. One, my son is a fingers-sucker and those little hands find themselves in his mouth after touching the world. Two, when we we young, there weren't such things as hand-foot-mouth disease, rotavirus and all sorts of other stuff you'd only encounter when one enters the realm of modern day parenthood. But as gabe grows older, I become more relaxed in this aspect but to rid him of the fingers-sucking habit is still the goal yet to be achieved.

Anyway, we ask for you to please pray that the little boy will recover soon and that we'll be rid of those doctor's visits. It's lucrative to be in anything that involves children (consultations, clothes, education, etc) so if you are considering a career change, why not place this on your list?