Baby hospital trip
A few years ago, Baby Brocky #1 who was about 18 months old at the time was running a really high temperature and her breathing was very erratic and shallow.

Took her down to A&E to get it checked out asap, but as she was so tired and poorly wouldn't let the Triage nurse near her. The nurse in her infinite wisdom put down breaths per minute as the normal 20. A 3 hour wait later we finally see a Doctor. Baby Brocky #1 is even more upset now and won't go nowhere near anyone apart from Mrs Brocky or me.

After a lot of umming and ahhing by the Doctor (it's now about 11.30pm and Baby Brocky #1 is absolutely knackered, with no improvement), he decides the best thing to do is to give her some Calpol and send her home.

Parental instincts kick in and we refuse point blank, her breathing is still erractic and shallow and no amount of Calpol will get it sorted. The doctor leaves us his watch to time the breaths per minute and leaves us alone for 5 minutes.

When he comes back, we tell him her breaths per minute are actually 60. He panics and within 30 seconds she is hooked to up an oxygen nebuliser, with the senior pedeatrician in the room less than 3 minutes later apologising profusely.

When I can see she is stabilising, I go home to get overnight gear for her and Mrs Brocky. Got in and was getting her pyjamas out when I saw her favourite dummy in her cot.

That's when the scaredness came out and I had a chance to think about what might have happened if we had brought her back home. I sat down and cried non-stop for about 5 minutes with all sorts of horrible things running through my head.

She was discharged a couple of days later and although they wouldn't diagnose asthma until a few more hospital trips down the line, we knew what we were dealing with by then and took no crap from the doctors. She's fine now and hasn't had an attack for quite a while luckily, but I still get emotional when thinking about what might have happened
(brocky, Wed 28 Feb 2007, 15:27, Reply)