what a week!
What a week it’s been! It started with Paul’s parents coming for a visit from Victoria, which was great! Love seeing them and we wish we lived closer so we could get together more often. Of course you try to pack a lot in to a short visit and end up wearing yourselves out. Lots of dinners and lunches with 12 or so family members. Tuesday was Melbourne Cup and we had a big family lunch at my sister’s. It was great - I even won $66.00 without knowing anything about the horses!
That night around bedtime, Emma and Jack were playing roughly and Emma smacked her head hard on the kitchen floor. Much screaming and crying later, she finally calmed down. I was still a bit worried though, and then she started vomiting. There was no blood on her head or anything from the fall but you start to ever so quietly freak out once there’s vomiting in a child after a head injury. There is a great phone service called Health Direct so I called them and answered a ton of their questions and everything was alright and we knew what to watch out for. We wanted to put her to bed as it was getting late but there is a worry about going to sleep right after a bump on the head (as it could cause complications if there was concussion) but after further checking by the nurse on the phone, we were advised to put her to bed but wake her after an hour and get her to walk and talk to check her neurological signs. To get to the point, she ended up totally fine - another little vomit when we woke her and then back to sleep and all was well. One drama over with.
At the same time as all this, Paul started to have a problem with his eyes. They were extremely bloodshot and getting quite sore by Melbourne Cup day (Tuesday) but it was manageable, and then got a little worse on the Wednesday. He took a day off work and went to the GP on the Wednesday. He had swum on Monday night so he figured he may have picked up something at the pool, or he had a problem with his contacts or something. The doctor agreed and gave him some eye drops to put in and said it should clear up soon.
So he puts the drops in every few hours and is surprised that his eyes seem to be getting worse. He now has a massive headache the entire time and he is extremely light sensitive, to the point that we have to close all the blinds and cook, eat, dress, everything in darkness. He is now spending all the time in bed, or sitting miserably in a darkened room. His eyes are getting worse and he is starting to wonder if putting the drops in should be killing so much. Ever notice how when you are sick, your judgement is off? So he didn’t quite get that he was slowly going downhill and that maybe something was going wrong. I was busy with the kids and housework and trying to leave him alone (he is one of those people who doesn’t want to be fussed over when sick) so I missed it at first too.
On the Thursday afternoon I happened to see him putting the eyedrops in. He was in real pain, but (with impaired judgement) thought that Doctor knows best. I saw him put one drop in and really have to steel himself to do the next drop. He had to do 5 drops in each eye and it was taking over 10 minutes because he was dying each time. I got really alarmed and he told me that it felt like his eyes were on fire and that every so often someone was jabbing them with pins. His headache was massive by now and one eye had really swollen up. He just wanted to go to bed, so I organised dinner for the kids and then checked again after that.
I asked him if he thought we should go to hospital and he agreed. So I put Jack and Emma to bed and left Sam in charge, and I drove him to Casualty. This was about 8.30pm by now. Of course it was full of people and we ended up waiting about 3 1/2 hours to be seen. We thought that an eye problem would get us in quickly but it turns out that they assumed something like Conjunctivitis despite having not seen him, and didn’t triage us as urgent. I passed the time by describing the bogans and their injuries to Paul who could only sit in silence with his eyes screwed shut and his head down. We waited and waited and waited. Finally we were seen and Paul was taken for a few eye tests and things, before the doctor told us that it looked very likely that Paul had suffered an ALLERGIC REACTION to the eye drops that were supposed to fix his (initially very minor) eye infection.
He was given new eye drops and he has slowly, slowly been improving since. It’s now been a week since the initial problem and it should have been only a few days of discomfort, instead of this big problem. What a drama! By Sunday he was slowly coming back to normal, though he was still hugely light sensitive and of course the whole week he hasn’t been able to read, watch TV or go on the computer. His headache is only today starting to subside and he watched a bit of telly last night and tonight.
He is now having a lot of trouble sleeping at night - at first we thought it was due to sleeping so much during the day, but then we realised he has had almost no sunlight for 5 days now! No wonder his body clock is confused!
Photos above were taken about ten days ago (before all the dramas). I had just gotten a haircut and wanted to take a few self-portraits with the tripod. I kept having people wanting to get in on the photo shoot! Love this family!
Where’s Sam in these photos? Where he always is - holed up in his room. Teenagers…
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tags: eyes, family, hospital, illness, kids, love, visit, week
Argh! Glad the family lunch went well out of all of that! Emma probably just worked herself up so badly to make herself vomit, rather than it being concussion, then!
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