There is horses flu everywhere in NSW. It started up here in the boonies, apparently. Horses all over Australia are being quarantined so as not to infect the rest of the equine community. It leads me to wonder what it would be like if you were standing next to a horse, with the flu, when he sneezed… gooey springs to mind, wet, ummmm… green?

Here is a joke as told by a 3rd grader (column 8, Sydney Morning Herald) ; Q:Where do the horses go when they have the flu? A: They go to the horse – pital!!!

It seems there is alot of that going around, the flu I mean and sneezing. When you are the mother of atopically challenged children, you don’t hate Spring but you don’t love it either. The weather here has been the typical asthma inducing type, gloriously and unseasonably warm in the day, with hot gusts of wind and freezing at night. Out of the seven children, four are currently dealing with their asthma. For the older girls, it’s more a case of compliance to their medication and upping the dose accordingly but for Ivy and Noah it is a series of nebulisers, preventers and then prednisone when things get bad…and nebbing two cranky toddlers every three hours is about as bad as it can be (for me) before we seek hospital admission.

Although, I am slowly (so slowly) coming to the realisation that gaining admission to hospital in the boonies is harder than it is in the big smoke.  Personally, I think it has more to do with paeds than with anything else. When Imogen and Madeline were little and I was inexperienced in asthma induced problems, I would ring their paed (a wonderful female doctor) and she would see me. In later years, we had a standing letter for the hospital and if I phoned the doctor she would more often than not meet us in the children’s ward. She was, in my opinion, a true paediatrician. Not only did she look after the girls’ well being but when their parents were getting a touch of the crazies, she could see it and would use her ‘assertive practitioner skills’ to guide us into hospital, so that we could have support too. She was a Godsend. Fast forward eleven years and my how things have changed!

Now, you can’t even get in to see your paed. You have to beg the receptionist for five minutes of his time. When you make a mercy call in the morning, if you are lucky, he will call you back at dinnertime…when the babies have really lost the plot, are crying at the top of their lungs, other children are scattered throughout the house in varying stages of undress, showering or getting redressed, because, on top of everything else, you have agreed to let the school aged children go to the fundraising disco, which has been scheduled for, you guessed it, dinnertime.

If you say you are not coping and that your week is like a living hell, the new age paed will be encouraging of your feelings of self doubt by belittling them and cussing about how horrible his week has been. (Of course it is impossible for a lowly SAHM/midwife to have a worse week than a doctor). If you then concede to being able to cope at home for a few more days on the understanding that you will be able to see him first thing Monday morning, you can then expect to be told that his schedule for that day is ‘disasterous’ and he can only squeeze you in at 8am (breakfast time and leaving for the bus time).

Unless you throw a mother (pardon the pun) of a tanty and tell the doctor that you are not going to make one more decision regarding the health of your babies because HE is the doctor and should be ‘guiding’ we parentals (medical training or no), do not expect the millenium paed to aquire ‘assertive practitioner skills’ anytime in the forseeable future. You see, he does not want to make the wrong choice at the risk of being sued. AAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!

While I very much like our paed, I find him very frustrating…hang on, there is a common thread here. I find all doctors frustrating! Well, what do you know? Is that what they call an epiphany?