Children’s hospital

The children’s ward is a heartbreaking place. It is also a place where you want to throttle the noisy, recovering kids who keep everyone awake all night and who run around disrupting poorly patients all day. Discharge can’t come quick enough for these ones.

Across from William’s bed is a young teenager who is a long-term, regular patient who has no visitors during the day and no-one to stay with him overnight. His parents visit for a little while in the evening and the rest of the time he is alone. He hasn’t talked to anyone except the nurses while I have been there. It’s sad. I smile and offer DVDs. He smiles back but he probably thinks I’m weird.

Next to William we have had a variety of patients, many of them surly teenagers, responding to orders from their parents to stop texting or to turn their music down with that lovely teenage response: ‘whatever’. Being sick clearly doesn’t make them any nicer to their parents. However it does serve to remind me that small children, although hard work, do generally love their mothers big-time and aren’t afraid to show it.

William is struggling to get any sleep which is not ideal for someone who needs rest in order to recover. Matthew, too, is not getting much sleep which is also not ideal for being on childcare duty during the day while I am at hospital with William and the baby. And as I am at the hospital all day, the laundry piles and household dirt grow like a boil waiting to erupt. No-one wants to do laundry, except when it’s not getting done and its sheer volume starts taking over the house.

Still, William’s swelling is starting to subside and I remind every doctor passing that we want to be at home as soon as they think William is well enough, because I’m a pain like that. And anyway, even if William’s not well enough, Edward’s ‘flu-laden crying is going to get us discharged pronto.