Perhaps, possibly you may have noticed my lack of blogging over the past week. Considering I have pretty much popped in to say hello and bore you all rigid with something every day, I would forgive you for thinking I have lost the novelty factor.
Ha! Well you are wrong! My absence has not been anything exciting like a holiday or winning the lottery, but the bloomin' flu.
Last Saturday Aardvark began running a temperature and became very lethargic. She ended up peaking at 40 degrees and we had to strip her off and cool her down. She developed a cough and was very unwell indeed, this continued all over the weekend. So it was a round of getting fluids in her, making sure she was weeing and shovelling calpol down her.
I then began to feel unwell and by the time The Hubstacle had telephoned the nursery on Monday morning, I was down and out. The head said that 7 other pupils had been off with the same symptoms and there had been one confirmed swine flu. She told us this, not to panic us, but so we could better judge Aardvarks symptoms and adjust our treatment or getting advice accordingly.
Monday was Aardvarks 3rd birthday and the poor little girl couldn't even get off the sofa to play with her new dolls house.
We contacted the surgery, just to get some advice and were told to go in because of her age. We questioned this, as clearly she was showing flu-like symptoms, but in we went and were promptly given a terrible attitude by the doctor for being there! We came away with no more than we knew anyhow and we were confident that we could cope.
However on Tuesday she coughed so much and then vomited up blood clots - we went to hospital. The Doctor was wonderful, we were seen almost straight away and luckily all was well before we came home. The Doctor even rang at the end of his shift to see how she was.
This was the day Aardvark and I were at our worst and then Rhino started going downhill.
Luckily he seems to just be a little up and down, today we are all feeling better than the last few days but today has hit me just how ill we have been.
I maintained that the H1N1 vaccine came out far too fast and I was wary of it being injected en-mass to under 5's (back when the were giving it to all under 5's). For this reason, and that my children are both healthy we decided that they would not have the flu jab.
Since then, only people with certain health problems are given it and now all of a sudden people are insisting their children have the vaccine.
There has been a very sad case of a 3 year old dying over christmas. Aardvark is just 3 and it really hit a nerve with me but I stand by our decision. Flu - whatever strain, will kill people, it has always happened. People have died after having the vaccine (even though they were perfectly healthy before). People are still getting the flu and dying even after having the vaccine.
So many dilemmas to face and as a parent of young children all you want to do is protect them from harm, but what if you don't know where the actual harm is? What do you do for the best? How can you live with your decision if the worst happens?
I hope that whatever we have had, has built up Aardvark and Rhino's immune system and made them more resistant to these horrible viruses.
If you are ill at the moment, I hope you get better soon. x
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