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I think all parents have been frustrated with a sick child at one time or another. When my youngest catches something he gets sicker than the rest and stays sicker longer. Even when he was older when he was ill I’d have him sleep in my room with me. I would beg and plead with him every 20 minutes to eat part of a popsicle or drink some water so that he wouldn’t have to go in for an IV for the dehydration. (Don’t really admit them anymore, just have them come in for the IV). And make sure that he took his Tylenol every 4 hours on the dot to try to keep his temp down.
The last time he got really ill he was about 12, he was so weak he couldn’t get his head over the basin and would be sick all over himself and the bedding. I knew he couldn’t help it, but it was SO frustrating that I had to keep changing my sheets and bedding. I have 6 complete sets of bedding that he went through in less than two hours. I know this because the first set wasn’t even close to dry when I had to pull the last set I had off. Common sense finally dawned on me and I used flat sheets as draw sheets like they do in the hospital so that I only had to change one thing when he was sick.
I KNOW that the frustration was more about my concern for my son than the mess he was making, but by the sixth time I was in almost in tears. I am a trained nurses aid, but the beds we changed with patients in them were twin not king. And when it’s your son crying because the last thing he needs is to be disturbed when he’s sick… Luckily when I took him BACK to the doctor he was intelligent enough to understand I wasn’t complaining about having to change the sheets, I was concerned he wasn’t able to keep anything down, not the meds that were Rx’d to settle his stomach, not the Tylenol to lower his fever, nothing. This was the way I was expressing that much more was coming out that was going in. Even though they’d given him meds in the IV to try to stop the emesis it wasn’t working, he wasn’t taking anything orally not peeing and still everything they’d pump in he’d throw back up.
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I've been married for 24 years and have four wonderful children.
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