A chaotic hat-trick

Monday was one of those days that was so chaotic that it deserves a special mention in dispatches - a sort of high water mark of bad days. Even by the standards of our family, this one was bad. It would definitely be better if some of us had stayed under the duvet that morning.

In the foreground that morning was the state of Julie's younger brother, Duncan. He had gone down with flu the week before but by Monday morning he was into day five of the fever with no sign of improvement. His temperature hit 40C again the night before and I was beginnning to feel seriously uneasy about the situation. But he had already been seen by an emergency doctor and I was not keen on dragging him back again if I could help it, so I put in a call to the GP surgery first thing on Monday morning to ask my GP to ring me back. While we waited on this, I settled him on the sofa downstairs looking pale and drawn. I'd spent a lot of the weekend busy with Julie, so to cheer him up, I sat with him and put on the latest Pirates of the Carribean film. Meanwhile my partner drove off to work as usual.

The reason I was free to nurse a sick child was that I was off sick myself, with an illness that has been grumbling on in the background of our lives for months. Normally this complicates everything - I can't drive, eat, sleep, work or sit in a chair - but just for once it was a godsend because now I could care for a sick child. On Monday I needed to take things easy anyway because I was preparing for a CT scan and was drinking a contrast medicine - a fluid that turned out to upset my tummy, so I was not going anywhere very fast that day.

Half an hour into The Pirates of the Carribean the phone rang. But it was not the GP - it was the school nurse. Julie had gone into school from the hospital to start her second week. It had been too much, she had self-harmed, and though the nurse had patched her up and kept her calm, it needed stitches. Another trip to A&E. I could hardly leave one child with fever to take another child to A&E, even had I been well enough myself; there was no one from the school; their father was in a meeting and could not be reached. I phoned Julie's hospital unit - they were busy and had no one free immediately but would phone me back. It looked as if Julie would just have to sit tight in the school nurse's office until eventually someone reached her.

This was not the first time this sort of chaos has descended on our family - though it was a particularly bad example. It's impossible to escape the feeling that you are missing something - some magic source of support that would make it all so much easier. After the event people always say "But you should have phoned me!" - but at the time, in the middle of the crisis, there are always a hundred reasons in your head why you should not phone them. It is a working day, or they are on holiday, or actually you're not sure you should put someone else through that experience.

It all panned out in the end of course (because it had to). My partner Joe, unluckily for him, came out of his meeting just in time to draw the short straw: so he drove back to pick up Julie from school, then back to A&E for the usual long long wait, and the usual interrogation from frosty staff. His working day was trashed. I got my phone call from the GP and had to take Duncan into the surgery anyway to be checked - so while Joe was sitting on the hard plastic chairs in the waiting room of A&E, I was sitting on the slightly more padded seats in the GP's surgery. Joe got away with two hours, I had an hour and a half. I reckon I won because Duncan threw up in the waiting room, though its true that Joe had an awful lot more driving to do.

But we did get through Pirates of the Carribean and I can recommend it if only because any film that can still grab your attention when all hell is breaking loose around you, does have to be a pretty well-crafted film. And the hat-trick? That was because it dawned on me in the GPs surgery when I was struggling to fight down the effects of my contrast medicine, while mopping Duncan's soaking forehead, and simultaneously texting Joe about Julie's progress, that we had finally managed to get three of the family sick at the same time! Let's hope this gets all our bad luck over with in one go.

By the time of writing, normal service is rapidly being resumed. Duncan's temperature has finally come down and though he is still on the sofa he is just plain bored.  Julie made it back to school the next day, and though she hasn't made it through a whole day of lessons, she has managed to avoid self-harming.  I had my CT scan and am waiting for the results.  And Joe's boss didn't explode.