I spoke too soon

Weird Sunday.

As I said this morning, Anya has mostly been a lot better today. Temperature down, eating food, the whole bit.

All was going great for most of the morning, and we even took her out to the park where she had a giggle on the slide and a sit on her favourite rocking toy. Then as we headed back, she started getting grumpy. Like, These People Are Trying To Kill Me grumpy. Grumpy like something had been amputated.

We figure that she's tired and put her down to sleep, where she continues to wail like she's trying to cough up a lung. We try food, milk, changed nappies, cuddles, everything; even breastfeeding, the ultimate Anya pacifier, barely touches the sides of her despondency. Eventually we leave her and after about 5-10 minutes she drops off to sleep.

Half an hour later she's awake again and screaming blue murder. Again, nothing consoles. And the screaming is really not like anything we've heard before, so we decide to call the health info line to check. After veerrryyy sllooowwllyy taking my details, the person on the end of the phone runs through a checklist to no great avail before catching a bit of Anya's screaming. She sounds like she's turned a bit white.

"Was that her screaming then?"

"Yes."

"OK, are you able to take her to the ED?"

"Is that the emergency department?"

"Yes. You were heading there anyway, right?"

"Er, yeah."

Well of course I wasn't really. I mean, we were ready to, but I thought she was just having a sook. But the note of alarm in the woman's voice is infectious, so we go into full-on mercy dash mode. Bundle Anya in the car, grab a change bag and a bottle, and head off tires screeching.

Hospital waiting rooms clearly have a different effect on babies to the one they have on adults. Whenever I sit in a waiting room I automatically feel worse than I did before. I don't know if this is the power of suggestion but it clearl operates the opposite way on Anya. As soon as she's through the sliding doors a beatific look comes on her face, a smile spreads across her lips, and everything in the world starts to delight her.

We get put through to the pediatric waiting room but Anya is being so sweet and amusing that we're clearly at the bottom of a long list populated with Sunday-afternoon accidents: wrist sprains from catching footie balls, head cuts from walking into cupboard doors. Weirdly, all the kids in the waiting room are girls. Maybe all the boys get injured on Saturdays to balance it out.

Anya of course is thrilled: the waiting room is full of new toys she's never seen before, as well as older kids she can watch and learn from. The whole thing is just great fun to her; less so to us - we're exhausted and had been looking forward to an afternoon nap. After about 2.5 hours, we give up and take her home for dinner and bed. And she almost instantly gets very grumpy again.

Well. I'm just glad there doesn't seem to be much wrong with her. Obviously, it's always going to be better to spend the afternoon in the emergency department on a false alarm than to go there with good reason. But I think not spending the afternoon in the emergency department is best of all.