It’s Just a Tummy Bug, Right?

I’m not quite sure why going to the doctor is such a big deal for me.

Part of it, I guess, is a product of only having one child, and those embarrassing trips to casualty with a mildly snotty infant, and weary doctors uttering the immortal phrase, “Is it your FIRST baby?”

(Yes, of course it’s my first baby! Why the fuck else would I be ringing NHS Direct and bringing him into A&E with a mild cold?)

Part of it, I guess, is ingrained into you when you come from a country where healthcare is free: you don’t waste taxpayer resources on minor ailments that should sort themselves out with over-the-counter medicines like paracetamol.

Anyway, when Zac got sick a couple of days ago – an unusual occurrence for a child with the constitution of an ox — I was definite that I wasn’t going to panic and rush to the doctors.

Doctors? Pah! Doctors are for wusses. And he’s only got a runny bum and a bit of lethargy, anyway. No biggie!

It’s just a tummy bug. Nothing to get hysterical about.


Zac is collapsed on the sofa, looking, it must be said, rather peaky, when I wander over to him and apply a hand to his forehead.

It’s boiling.

I find our thermometer. He’s running a temperature of 39.4° (103°).

Whoops!

Never fear, I think. I’ll give him paracetamol to bring the fever down. And if it goes up to 40, I’ll get him to the doctor, pronto.

Zac takes the paracetamol. The fever breaks.

But he’s still tired and hitting the bathroom every hour or so.


My stoic unwillingness to go to the doctor does not, of course, stop me from going into full hysteria mode when Zac complains of pain in the base of his spine.

Now, I am pretty certain that that’s because I dropped him on his arse while endeavouring to remove him from a wetsuit.

All the same, we are in foreign climes. And foreign climes have strange and terrifying diseases.

So, obviously, Zac has one of them.

The base of the spine is quite near the hips, which is where dengue pain classically appears. He has a fever. There are mosquitoes.

Therefore, he has dengue.

I Google, frantically. Egypt did have some nasty dengue outbreaks during the nineteenth century, which prompts a pleasant diversion into outdated medical reports, but as far as I can tell, there’s no dengue here now.

Avian flu? Last seen in 2009, and anyway, I caught that in Bulgaria and Z escaped unscathed.

Rift Valley Fever? Ooh, that looks promising… I mean, scary! Terrifying, in fact.

But aren’t we a long way from the Rift Valley? And he hasn’t been handling cattle? Do they even HAVE Rift Valley Fever in the Sinai?

Then I Google “spinal pain”.

MENINGITIS!!!! Aaaaarrrgggghhhhh….

It’s TOTALLY meningitis!


“Honey!” I say, putting a hand on Zac’s forehead, now cool. “Why do you have the lights off?”

“Wha’?” he says, rather drowsily.

“Is the light bothering you?” I ask, switching it on.

“I was aslee’,” he says.

There are red marks on his limbs. AAARRRGGGGHHHHH….

I race next door and Google “cup test”. Then “glass test”.

I come back, with a glass. “Do you have a headache?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I have stomach cramps before I have the diarrhoea, but my head feels fine.”

“What about the light?” I say.

“I’m fine with the light,” he says. “Why do you keep asking me about the light?”

I apply the glass to the red marks on his limbs, which are beginning, even to my fevered mind, to look less like septicaemia and more like a line from sleeping on a folded blanket. They disappear. Or do they?

AAARRGGGHHHH….

I go back next door and talk myself down from meningitis, then set an alarm for 5am to check on Zac, which I proceed to sleep through…


The next day goes better. He’s still largely sleeping and shitting, but I figure that’s the bug working its way out of his system, and he’s well enough to go on the computer, get on Google, and diagnose himself with rotavirus.

And anyone who’s well enough for Google diagnoses is clearly on the mend.

Doctors! I think.

Pah! Who needs doctors?

Plenty of people would have gone rushing to the doctors and it’s only a harmless little rotavirus. Wusses.

Pshaw!

He’s drinking water. He’s eating bread. I mean, sure he’s a bit sorry for himself, but he’s basically on the mend. No fever. No vomiting. Fully lucid. Apparently hydrated. Not in pain. It’s just a tummy bug. Plain, old-fashioned Ramses’ Revenge.

Nothing to get hysterical about.

And, when I feel sufficiently sorry for him to rescind his computer ban, he comes straight to life, gaming on Skype with friends in Latin America.

I can’t help but notice that his bum’s still running, though. Tomorrow morning will be 48 hours. The time at which one would typically call a doctor.

Well, I think. I might try Imodium first…

We are supposed to be leaving Egypt on Sunday, and I doubt they’ll even have samples back from the lab at that point.

And I’m still hoping we can go windsurfing tomorrow.


Zac is back on the sofa the next morning, and still rather peaky. He looks noticeably paler, and, alarmingly, even thinner than usual: he eats as much as plenty of adults but didn’t hit the 30kg mark until he turned 11.

Right! I think.

Let’s give Imodium a go, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll pop round the corner to the doctors…

“I’m not going to have to do a stool sample, am I?” he asks. “I don’t want to poo in a bucket.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess they’ll probably want to do one…”

He drinks some water.

An involuntary lurch, an Exorcist style stream of liquid – pure water, with flecks of bread that somehow hasn’t made it out the other end yet – and the sofa, the T-shirt, the shorts and the carpet bite the dust. Zac slumps back, covered in watery vomit.

Oh shit, I think.

Even as a child of two or three he’d routinely make it to the bathroom when he puked, and, apart from one memorable bus journey, this has been the case while we travel.

He lurches again, a full-body retch that’s painful to watch. The rest of the water comes back up. His forehead’s damp with sweat, but still no fever.

“Right,” I say, fetching him a change of clothes. “We’re going to the doctors. Now.”


It takes him a while to get his clothes on, but, fine upstanding chap of 11 that he is, he’s resistant to help.

I think he’s probably tired, what with getting up through the night for bathroom breaks for two nights running.

We make it across our ridiculously enormous garden and out of our ridiculously enormous gate before he sits down suddenly in the street.

“What’s the matter?” I say. “Cramps again?”

“No,” he says. “I just feel really weak.”

“OK,” I say, now genuinely alarmed. “I’ll carry you. Don’t worry. It’s only round the corner.”

“This is how people die of diarrhoea, isn’t it?” he says, waving away my offer to serve as porter. “Their bodies can’t absorb either food or water and they die of dehydration and malnutrition.”

“You’re not dying,” I say, bracingly.

But, I realise, he has a point.

If he were smaller, I’d have had him at the doctors sooner. Because he’s eleven, my gut instinct is to treat him as an adult.

But he’s not an adult. He’s a 30 kilo child with no fat reserves to burn.


There’s someone seeing the doctor when we arrive, so we sit in the waiting room, Zac pale and floppy with his head in my lap.

“We’ll be five minutes,” says Doctor Sadek. “Just five minutes.”

In my lap, Zac undergoes the magical transformation from “poorly” child to “potentially very sick” child, and seems to shrink, becoming younger, smaller, more and more vulnerable by the second.

An entire family emerge from the surgery, their teen daughter complete with brand new bandage on her elbow, expressions of relief all round.

Zac lies on the couch, and one doctor examines him while I explain to the lovely, fatherly Doctor Sadek the sequence of events.

“Diarrhoea, vomiting and fever?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Only one day of fever, though. It cleared with paracetamol.”

“He has gastroenteritis,” he says. (Or, as we lay people call it, a tummy bug.)

An exchange of Arabic with the lady who’s been examining Zac.

“She says he has starvation on his breath, the smell of starvation,” he says. “We’ll need to put him on intravenous fluids.”

“Right,” I say, processing this.

A drip? Fuck! He’s really ill!

He hasn’t digested anything for 48 hours. Of course he’s ill! D’oh!

I am irresistibly reminded of a time when I was about Zac’s age, and had what we in my family term “a bit of a nasty cough”. My mother sent me off to walk to the doctor’s, in the snow, only to be summoned to the surgery to collect me on the grounds that I had acute bronchitis, a 40 degree temperature and shouldn’t be walking anywhere at all.

This, I think, is where I get my bracing attitude to doctors…


Zac, who’s normally very brave about needles, is extremely anxious about the IV – close to tears, in fact.

He looks very, very pale, very, very thin and very, very sick as he lies on the couch by the IV rig.

“All they’re doing is rehydrating you,” I say. “The first one’s a sugar solution, to get some fluids and calories into you, with a medicine in it against the vomiting and cramps. Then they’ll put another one into you, which is salt, to balance your salts out again and get you even more hydrated, and antibiotics, to get to work on the bug that’s causing all this.”

“Don’t worry,” says lovely Doctor Sadek. “It won’t hurt. Don’t look. It’s just a little plastic tube.”

Zac whimpers a little bit as the needle goes into his arm. I stroke his leg.

Drip, drip, drip goes the fluid.

Lifegiving fluid.

“You do this all the time, right?” I say to Doctor Sadek.

“Yes,” he says. “Every single day.”

And, I would imagine, he does it every single day with kids much, much younger and much, much sicker than Zac, kids out of the desert in pickup trucks after the herb tea didn’t work its magic, kids from families who don’t go to the doctor not because they’re being macho but because they can’t afford it…


The IV works little short of a miracle. Within twenty minutes, the ghastly pallor has gone, and there’s almost colour in his cheeks.

“Mum?” he says, out of nowhere. “You know about euthanasia?”

“Yeah,” I say. “What about euthanasia?”

“And the pro-life people who won’t let euthanasia happen?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Well, when Old Granny died she wanted to die, she felt her time was up, so they didn’t give her treatment. So if she can choose to do that, why couldn’t she just ask a doctor to kill her?”

“Well,” I say, breathing a sigh of deep relief. “It’s the doctrine of double intention. Which you might think is a piece of Catholic double think. But it goes like this…”

He’s better, I think. Any time now, he’ll be talking about MineCraft.

“Look,” says Doctor Sadek. “His colour’s come back.”

150ml into the first IV, and Zac begins talking, not about Minecraft, but about something called Team Fortress 2.


We leave equipped with an eyewatering selection of medicines. An anti-vomiting medicine for before meals.

Something called Streptoquin, with a bunch of antibiotics in it plus something to clear the muscle spasms and work against cramping, for after meals.

And Flagyl, a hardcore antibiotic typically prescribed for amoebic dysentery and other nasties, also after meals.

I guess that’s what they do here. Rather than wait for samples to get back from the lab, they just treat for amoebic dysentery anyway.

“Do you think we should have gone to the doctor sooner?” I ask Zac.

“Yes,” he says. “I think we should have gone yesterday.”

And, I think, he’s right.

Because, while gastroenteritis is “just a tummy bug”, so is amoebic dysentery. And, while it may not have the Google glamour of Rift Valley Fever, that kills kids here, and elsewhere. I will try to avoid Googling it this evening.

Thanks to Chris_Short for the image of the IV drip.

22 Responses

  1. c says:

    Poor Z.

    Don’t beat yourself up, hon. It’s so hard to make the call between “why are you bringing this kid here” and “why didn’t you bring them here sooner”.

    • Theodora says:

      Yes, you’re always sat in the halfway house, aren’t you? Particularly, I think, with bigger children…

  2. Talon says:

    Don’t be so bloody hard on yourself. He started to improve, was feeling better. What parent still would’ve ran to the doctor? You handled it well. Cut yourself some slack, sistah.

    • Theodora says:

      Thanks, Talon. Much appreciated. Seeing him on the drip was scary as hell, though…

  3. Oh my, says the parent of the Latin American skype friend. I am so glad Z’s feeling better. I would have waited EXACTLY the same amount of time.

    • Theodora says:

      Thanks, Lainie. I think what it’s brought home to me is the weight issue: I was treating him as a sick adult, because he was behaving, fundamentally, like a sick adult. And, of course, he doesn’t have any of the spare pounds that the rest of us live off when we’re sick.

  4. Lauren says:

    Arghhh, this sounds so horrifying and scary. I’m glad he’s much better now 🙂 Google is so evil when somebody is ill.

    I am a hypochondriac so every time I break out in a sweat I am convinced that I have a fever and clearly that means I have malaria and I need to get to a hospital immediately. Dave loves it.

  5. Theodora says:

    It was, briefly, REALLY scary: because, as a parent, you’re responsible for someone else, so when they get sick IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT.

    And, also, as a parent, you don’t want to present as a neurotic proxy hypochondriac, so you have to wait to see a doctor.

    And, yes, I can imagine Dave loving repeated malaria scares. With your luck, though, you’ll probably actually get the bloody thing. And then you can laugh at him. Repeatedly. Online…

  6. Amy says:

    I’m the hypochondriac mother who has the kid at the doctor quicker than you can blink … yes, I have four, but anyway …

    I’m trying to avoid playing pharmacist, but I can’t help it. Flagyl is the typical “you have a gastrointestinal bug” antibiotic. Most GI infections respond to it. It’s just the easy get-out-of-gaol free GI infection antibiotic.

    • Theodora says:

      Ah, thank you for that, Amy!

      I last encountered it twenty years ago, when I was prescribed it specifically with amoebic dysentery, and so I read the packaging and panicked: the doctor also said it was in case there were amoebas. But he does seem to be very much on the mend, so hopefully he’ll be fine…

  7. Kristy says:

    So glad he is on the mend. Make sure he is all fit and ready to hang on the beach in 3 weeks 🙂

  8. Lisa wood says:

    Actually I think I would have waited another day!!! We are not that into doctors so we play the wait and see what happens game! Mind you our oldest son is like your son – when he was younger he was so thin that he had no weight on him to help with fighting anything! And no weight to lose – which is scary for when they do get sick.
    Good to see he is on the mend! Alls well that ends well :0

    • Theodora says:

      I hadn’t thought about how much the weight impacts things when they do get sick, until I saw him weak and on the IV, actually: for me, I couldn’t leave him another day once he started vomiting, because I wouldn’t be able to get any meds or fluids into him, which meant he’d be likely to dehydrate.

      Anyway, hopefully he won’t be sick again…

  9. Mary says:

    I would have waited as well. As a nurse I usually feel I can handle anything and avoid being the panicky mom! So glad he is doing better and stay away from Google!

    I think we are all a little on edge with our little ones the last month! So scary when they are sick!

    • Theodora says:

      I think having nurse training would be very handy sometimes, but I naturally tend to panic… He is much better now. Still feeling a bit sluggish, as he puts it, but I think tomorrow we’ll be out and about again. And we’re meeting friends today…

  10. nilda says:

    Wow! Scary…..
    Glad you got some medical help when your instinct told you you had to. I tend to wait things out as well. I don’t like how lots of doctors treat things “because it’s standard procedure” and how most treat unnecessarily. I had Bella at home because of that.
    But it’s good to know they are there when you really need them and I think most people will know when they “really” need to go….like you did.

    Glad Z is feeling better!

    • Theodora says:

      Yes, I think in some ways I was quite sanguine because I already knew there was a good doctor at the bottom of the road.

      A friend of mine had both her babies at home. I think I’m too neurotic for that. I’d like to be in the hospital in case anything goes wrong (although I did get out of there six hours after he was born: they insist you stay for six hours minimum in the UK).

  11. I am absolutely certain I would have done exactly the same as you, down to the beating myself up about it. But your instinct was right on track, getting him there when he needed it, and it wasn’t too late at all.

    • Theodora says:

      Thanks, Paige. I will be a bit more cautious with him on tummy bugs, though, just because he has absolutely no body fat to live off: I would be quite happy to lose a few kilos in similar circumstances, but he really doesn’t have any spare. Hopefully that’s the last one. It seems to have been salmonella, which has been doing the rounds here.

  12. Hey Theodora, just going through and catching up reading the blogs I like and this was brill. Reads like a novel. Feel for you though. My boyf was convinced I had dengue in Thailand and whisked me to the doctors only to find out it was a tummy bug. As much as I begrudged the expense I would have thanked him if I did have it. I’m of the same brigade as you with avoiding docs but you certainly have a point here…

    • Theodora says:

      Thanks, Kiri. I thought I had dengue in Indonesia. Turns out I was just being pathetic and had a virus…

      I think the thing with avoiding docs is that the typical rule with a tummy bug is leave it 48 hours, which I did here. In future, given Zac has no body fat to burn, I’d probably only give him 36 hours before going to the docs.

      Me? I’d love to have a 48 hour tummy bug and lose a few pounds…