Hospitals are no place for babies

It's been seven months of prettty easy sailing so far, I guess it had to happen sooner or later. On Monday night I was leaving work and got the dreaded call to hurry home, my wife was concerned about Sophie.

Sophie is never ill, there's the odd bump when she suddenly forgets how to sit, or is too ambitious with the crawling, but never anything serious.

Until now.

I knew something was wrong when I came home and instead of the frantic wiggling and giggling I get each night when I open the door, there was a listless glance, then she turned away. That was about the worst feeling ever. I'm expecting something like that when she's a teenager, but there should be a lot of time yet when she thinks Dad is just the greatest.

The new, listless Sophie was a really strange experience. Over the past seven months, we've really got to know her and she's developed a real, chirpy personality. Always talking, dribbling and trying to move about. To come home to a daughter who is like a zombie, just staring and moving slowly was to come home to someone I didn't know.

When she was born we read through the baby books and decided to buy a digital thermometer. Right now, we kind of wished we hadn't, because it was reading over 38 degrees celcius. With the thermo strips there's a bit of leeway (if I squint I can make the reading go up or down), but with a digital thermometer, the numbers were staring me in the face. Looking at the book again, it said 39 degrees meant an ambulance, so 38 is pretty bad.

We called up the hospital and they said to come on in. We got there, did our initial check and sat down to wait.

And waited.

And waited.

An hour isn't a long time when you're doing something fun, but when there's a sick baby to look after, time starts to drag. We started to do silly things like measure her temperature every five minutes. it got to 39, then back to 38.6, then back up to 39.1, then back down again.

The paediactician finally came to look at Sophie. After peering in the ears, checking the eyes and resisting Sophie's attempts to spit out the tongue depresser, she told us didn't know what was wrong.

Next up were the blood samples. As if poor Sophie wasn't unhappy enough, they put a needle in her foot and took out what seemed like half her blood supply. They then wrapped up her foot, keeping the needle in, just in case they needed more samples.

An hour or two later the samples came back fine, they still din't know what was wrong. So we sat down to wait again. I'm an active person and have never thought that doing nothing was the best thing to do, but all our hoping and wishing must have worked.

Her temperature started to come back down.

4am in the morning, we've done nothing, and her temperature started to come back down.

So that's it. A pretty lame story compared to what some parents have gone through, and, knowing Sophie, she's going to put us through a lot worse yet. But for the moment, that is bad enough, and a definite remnder that life with a baby is not all smiles and cooing, and that even the regular crying ain't so bad when I compare it to the night I spent with her at the hospital.