Nipper Goes To A and E

We had a bit of an eventful start to this week. Nipper wasn't very well on Sunday and so couldn't go to nursery on Monday. He was fine but they have a 24 hour exclusion policy if your child has been throwing up. So, we were watering the veggies (must do a post about this as they are doing remarkably well!), me in my dressing gown and Nipper in his undies and welly boots, when he suddenly said that there was a bee in his ear and it was stinging him. Uh oh! I hoped that perhaps something had just buzzed loudly around his ear and made a big show of declaring that he was ok, there was no bee in his ear.

Well, there wasn't a bee, but there was a BEAD! A small pink one which, if I recall correctly, must have come off one of Miss Muffett's belts. I was tempted to have a poke around to try and get it out but then thought better of it. Rang the doctors and they said to take him to the hospital. Oh joy!

Knowing we'd be in for a long wait - we were hardly going to be a top priority - I made lunch and then packed drinks, snacks, books, cars and a couple of toys for Tiddler.

Trying to find somewhere to park was the first challenge. Even though the hospital has several car parks you're hard pressed to get a space but luckily we found someone who was just leaving. Next was the extortionate price for the parking - only slightly cheaper than getting a ticket for parking in the street in a residents marked bay! Having said that, when I was in having Tiddler one of the midwives told us not to worry about our parking ticket running out as we wouldn't be clamped. So I paid the minimum charge and decided to hedge my bets on that one.

There was a big queue for reception and a lot of people in the waiting room - most seemed to have leg and ankle injuries. Each person who came in the door was hobbling and hanging onto someones arm. Guess our 'bead in the ear' was going to be a nice diversion from the mundane then!

The boys were pretty good for the first hour or so. I had a stack of books about trains and tractors etc so Nipper was happy with them. But soon the shine started to wear off. Snacks and drinks followed but that was just a stalling manoeuvre and Tiddler decided he wasn't sitting in the pram for one minute more and Nipper took advantage of this to shoot off and inspect the automatic doors. No problem with that except that he wanted to know how they worked and so started pulling and pushing at them rapidly followed by running back and forth through them. All good fun for Nipper but mightily p*ssed off those in the waiting room.

Things just got better and better - Nipper joined in with a group of kids who were doing a 'maypole dance' around a column, got very excited by this and decided to be a 'rocket' which was closely followed by his dinosaur impersonation! Attempting to get him to come and sit down fell on deaf ears as I'm sure you can imagine. By this point I was getting huffs and tuts from various people so I snuck out and called Mr Earplugs and told him he'd have to come rescue me but given that he was an hour and a half away it wasn't going to happen very quickly.

Knowing how Nipper is I tend not to take him places where he's going to have to hang around for a long time. I do my shopping online at the moment rather than braving the supermarket, and if we go to the doctors or dentist I generally turn up just a couple of minutes before the appointment and hope they won't be running too late. I thought Nipper wasn't doing too badly really until the chap opposite said that he couldn't hear the doctors calling patients names because the kid was making so much noise (he wasn't making that much noise really and the doctors were barely poking their heads around the door which was around the corner from the waiting room).

So I wondered what to do? We couldn't go anywhere else or we'd miss our turn. I didn't think Nipper was doing too badly given that we'd been there nearly 3 hours by now. No other young kids were waiting to see the doctors so there were no other bored kiddies for the patients to focus on. So I rather loudly declared that Nipper was autistic and was doing the best he could given that we'd been waiting for 3 hours! That shut everyone up and nobody huffed or tutted or even met my eye after that! Funny how if you have a 'reason' everyone is much more sympathetic or perhaps it was just embarrassment.

Well, we finally got in to see the doctor who said that he didn't have the relevant instruments to get the bead out and so we'd have to come back the next day for an appointment at the ENT clinic! And if they couldn't get it out Nipper would have to have a general anaesthetic! Arrrggghhhh! Couldn't someone have decided that a bit sooner!!

So, Tuesday morning we did it all again! This time Mr Earplugs came too and we attempted to use the hospital's drop-off zones so hubby could park up somewhere while we found the clinic. First drop off zone was full of parked cars so no room to drop-off. Second drop-off area had the gates shut. Couldn't work out where the 3rd drop-off point was as it just looked like a huge car park with no spaces. We just plonked the car in the middle of the road and all piled out in the end. Mr Earplugs ended up half a mile away before he found a space and had to run back to make our appointment.

Except it turned out that we didn't have an actual appointment at all - it was a turn up and wait clinic and because I'd been told I had a specific appointment I hadn't brought the toys, snacks, books, kitchen sink! Bl**dy H*ll! This clinic had a supposed childrens waiting area. Great! Went into it and there was nothing in it bar a couple of chairs. It was basically just a holding cell to keep the kids locked up and Nipper was most unimpressed. Luckily we only had to wait for a hour for our turn so Nipper had only got to the 'rocket' impersonation stage! We were in and out of the exam room within about 5 minutes, the offending bead having been plucked out by a teeny tiny prongey tool.

And, get this, the nurse told me not to let him play with beads any more! Yeah right - I let my child play with beads, which his baby brother could choke on, so that Nipper can stick them in his ear and have us waste 2 half days fannying around at the hospital!!

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Just wanted to add a big thank you for all the supportive and helpful comments following my last post - I really appreciate them. I've started a new blog to chart our asperger's journey so will be posting any asperger specific stuff over here.

Nipper Goes To A and E