Sickness #2

I haven't posted anything on my blog for a year. I've been writing a post about our whole big move but that's taking a back seat until I exorcise the rage demon currently inhabiting my body. So far, in an effort to do this I've rage filled the dishwasher, rage soaked my oats in preparation for porridge, rage watched an episode of Star Trek TNG and rage fried an egg for my daughter's breakfast, it was star shaped. Though greatly reduced, the demon still persists. So rather than disappear and play a computer game as is my want, I've decided to blog. Before we continue please be aware that there will likely be some rather profane language used. I don't swear often and when I do I make good use of it, now is definitely time for some salty language.

Our wee boy Benny is sick again. If you have read the original post about sickness you'll see that it ended with me outlining our decision to leave HK for the health of our family. Now, for 3 out of the 4 members of our family this has definitely proven to be an effective step towards better health. We have left HK and up until last month not one of us had been on antibiotics in just over a year, the kids daily medication has been greatly reduced, Carys' allergies have largely cleared up. The positive impact on their health has been a huge positive. Except this hasn't really been true for Benny. My wee man just can't catch a break. He's been hospitalised 3 times since being here. Twice for respiratory issues and once for surgery to remove his adenoids in the hope of solving the respiratory issues. The last time he was in, which was about 4 weeks ago, his blood oxygen level was so low he was in serious distress. Now he's sick again with, drum-roll....respiratory issues. I'm hopeful he's just caught my end of term exhaustion sickness / cold / Man Flu (which is REAL, it's an affliction). A lot of what he's got is what I had, only because he's little his body is fighting much harder. The cough alone sounds like a bass drum. 

As a parent you have to accept sickness. Your kids will get sick. They will touch everything and anything with their hands, feet, tongues, nose, mouth, eyeballs, it really doesn't matter. If your child can jam something into an orifice, be it something they pick up off the ground or a part of their own body which has just come into contact with something on the ground, they will almost certainly do so. Why you may ask? Because it delights them to see you shriek and flap like an ineffectual harpy at them. Also because they might quite like the taste of a commuter's freshly discarded, crushed under foot, crunchy possible foot item. Or perhaps they just love the taste of months old, but still slightly squishy gum stuck under a park bench. As a special needs teacher I should also point out that your child may also have sensory issues (whew glad I reassured everyone by throwing THAT into the mix). When you or I look at these things with parents eyes we see scrofula, herpes, poo, and projectile vomiting straight out of the Exorcist. In the child's mind they don't think of these things as cesspits of disease, they see something potentially edible and tasty or just something they can use to pass the time.

I vividly remember eating a peanut off the playground, it had been stepped on but it still tasted of peanut. I could have been 7 at the time, or 14. Actually now that I think about it, these old habits have just come right back into fashion since being a parent. Whoops, child you just dropped the whole plate of dinner I just spent half an hour making. Oh well, no big loss, scrape it up, back on the plate, NOM NOM, mmmmm delicious. I drop food on the floor almost daily, not because I'm wasteful but because invariably a child has appeared like a poltergeist directly in my path. Actually that's a lie, they almost never appear like poltergeist, usually they do it while making about as much noise a train derailing, complete with wailing and shrieking of passengers. Actually you know what, they appear like Kanye, rambling about stuff he just made up like it's God's gift directly to you, demanding all the attention and treats for himself and not giving a fuck what anybody else thinks or want.

Anyway, I digress. What do you do as parents when your kids are sick? Well that's one of many million dollar questions in parenting. The truth is, it doesn't matter how small or large the sickness is, generally there's always a part of you that's scared shitless. The more sick they are, the more terror you feel. When I came home from a work trip overseas I found Benny gasping for air, barely able to draw a breath. This is literally as I walked in the door and dropped my cases. Immediately I knew something was seriously wrong, so I set about treating him as best I could. The next morning we were at the hospital and this was when we found he was in respiratory distress. By the time he was in hospital he was actually breathing better! You can imagine how little oxygen he must have been getting the night before. You can also imagine the cascade of emotions I felt, and probably Sher too. Guilt over being away from him, horror at finding him in such a state, runaway imaginings of what might have happened if I had gotten home later. And anger. So much anger. I get angry, not at the kids, because it's not their fault, but at the actual sickness. I hate it. I hates it like Golem hates Bilbo. 

As parents there's very little we can actually do. Your child's body has to fight the illness, the bacteria or the virus. The best you can do is make sure they receive proper medical care, continue the treatment all the way through and provide them with lots of comfort. Oh and vaccinate them against everything you possibly can, because not doing so makes you ignorant, a menace to society, a danger to my children, and a terrible parent. By not vaccinating you're essentially saying you're alright with your child, my child and any number of other children in our community either dying or becoming horrifically sick because of your idiot choice. Now, back to comforting the sick. We were supposed to be attempting sleep training again this week. Yes, yes, I know, it's going on 6 years now and we still aren't sleeping through the night. That's a different, much more exasperated and much more profane blog post. The point is, there's no sleep training happening now. Benny is sleeping in the big bed with Mum so she can keep an eye on him and help him when he needs. I sleep in the kid's room with Carys. This leads to awful sleep for Sher, an almost broken back for me, but also a whole lot of comfort for our little ones. It doesn't matter that only one is sick, the other one is sensitive the fact her brother is sick and reacts to it. She needs comfort and hugs too. We're an extremely huggy family. 

One last thing and then I'm done with this rather rambling rant. I'm an atheist. It's taken me a while to be comfortable with saying this, partly because there's always that irrational part of my brain wondering if I'll be struck down for saying the words and partly because I don't want to offend anyone. I bring this up because even though I'm an atheist I can tell you I try bargaining like hell when the kids get sick, like Benny has been. Especially now because he's been perma-sick for about 6 months, it's always the same shit and I'm now really worried for him. You will do literally anything to help your child. This is something you understand intellectually before you have kids, but it's something you know viscerally once you have them. It is a brutal, agonizing feeling which comes from a place of deep love. I would do anything to take Benny's sickness and pain away. At this point I don't care about the arguments that it's making him stronger and healthier in the long run. Screw all of that. I want my son to be well for more than 4 weeks at a time. If they ever invent a way for people to transfer a person's pain to another person you can bet your ass parents will be lining up around the block to volunteer. I'm sick of my son's sickness. Sick of the pain it brings him. Sick of the emotional and physical distress is causes him. Just fucking sick of sickness. I want it banished like an evil spirit or better yet, burned at the stake. I'd dance naked around that particular pyre. More than anything I want, so desperately, for my family to be well, to be healthy. And not just for a few weeks. I mean seriously, long term, forever, happily-ever-after healthy. Right now I'm too bogged down in woods to see the trees, let alone any light that might be spilling in. Other than my wee man's happy face, that brings me such joy and I'm eternally thankful for him and my whole family.

Sickness

I don’t know about other parents but I’ve never gotten used to my kids being sick. It’s something which always causes fear and tension in me. Lots of people told me many things before I had kids, as I’ve said before, but no one really talked about the sickness. If they did it was usually in a “you don’t know what you’re in for” kind of way. It was always, something along the lines of “hope you’re ready to clean up another person’s barf, har har”. No one really mentioned the arse puckering terror of seeing your child’s temperature rocket to 40 degrees celcius. Incidentally if it stays at that temperature for too long it can cause neurological damage. A fun fact I picked up now I’m a parent with access to the internet. 

Whenever my kids get sick my mind will generally go plunging down the anxiety inducing worst case scenario thought track, like a Mack truck with broken brakes plunging into a ravine, there’s little I can do to stop it. The internet only makes things worse. We’ve all Googled symptoms of an illness we’ve had, and we’ve all been terrified to find we have Cancer, Ebola, sudden terminal onset low libido, menopause or just DEATH; and not excema like we thought it might be. 

I TOLD YOU IT WASN'T MAN FLU!!

We all do it, it seems to be a human trait, how many of you watched Still Alice recently then went and told all your friends you for sure had Alzheimer’s? When my daughter recently came down with something it was the weekend, the doctor’s office was closed and we didn’t want to fork out several thousand dollars for an on call doctor. So I consulted The Oracle of all things, Dr. Google. This was, as it always is, a mistake. My daughter had a fever, pink cheeks, a body rash and a cough. Go ahead and Google that. I had a choice of 25 different illnesses to choose from on WebMD, as though it was a sickness combo menu. This was provided I ignored the other results saying it could be 1 of over 100 things, I was after all trying to narrow it down a bit. Of those 25 things the scariest were meningitis, MRSA, and Rotavirus, all of which can be extremely dangerous or potentially fatal. Fortunately I figured it probably wasn’t any of those things, and was more likely Scarlet Fever which was also a choice on the sickness menu. Turns out Scarlet Fever isn’t just something which happened in the 1800s, there’s been a resurgence recently. Another fun fact I recently found out, it’s estimated that about 60% of Staph A strains causing Scarlet Fever here in HK are drug resistant to a particular kind of antibiotic, though fortunately there are alternatives which are effective.

My wife and I recently had a casual discussion about our family’s general health over the past 5 years. We realised that each one of us has been in hospital in that time. Sher wins with the most visits; 3 for babies and 2 for health related surgeries. Carys has 1 surgery to her name, an adenoidectomy which has helped her health somewhat. Benny has been admitted once for a mystery viral illness; he was hooked up to an IV, given fever meds, and antibiotics, after a few days he was released. I’ve been admitted to hospital with a mystery respiratory illness which affected my ability to breathe, caused a constant fever and general lethargicness. I had 3 different types of antibiotics, was hospitalised for a week, and it still didn’t go away. We’re not sure why it did eventually go, but I think it’s because I had osteopathy which helped open up my chest, literally because my lung had partially collapsed with the bacterial infection sitting in the collapsed part. Sher was NOT happy about that one. 

So between the 4 of us, we’ve had 7 hospitalisations over 5 years. This is both a testament to the availability of health care here in HK (THANKS Obama...no wait), and a testament to just how sick we’ve been. We can’t even begin to count the number of times we’ve been to the doctor. Carys has quite frequent illnesses, and we think it’s largely due to the pollution here. It’s almost always a respiratory illness. She’s had a postnasal drip since...forever so she’s pretty full of phlegm. From the age of 2 she’s had weekly, if not daily doses of Piriton or Aleve, both medications to stop anti-histamine responses. She seems to be quite sensitive to the air, no joke, she tells us the air is bothering her. When the pollution is high it bothers her nose so much that she’ll be in tears about it. She tells us her nose bugs her and will rub so vigorously at it that she causes a nose bleed. Some mornings we walk into her room and her bed is like the scene of a brutal murder, there’s blood smeared everywhere. Some nights she’ll wake us crying because her nose is so itchy she can’t sleep. That’s with air filters going all the time. We don’t think it’s allergies, it’s year round and when we travel overseas we haven’t had to medicate her. I’m deeply worried about the effects of frequently medicating her will have on her long term health. Similarly, I’m worried Benny will have the same issues. 

A while ago we stopped asking why we were all getting sick. The answers were pretty clear to us; first and foremost for Sher and I it was probably stress about almost everything including but not limited to, money, work, sickness, and money. Next it’s because we live in what one of our doctors called a petri dish. Discovery Bay is a bit of a closed system in some ways. Kids generally don’t leave the island for any reason, all their friends are here, they live here, many go to school here. We can shop here, see the doctor, dentist, go to the gym, swim, eat out, all within a 10-20 minute walk of our homes or a 5 minute bus ride. Once an illness gets into the system it does the rounds, hitting many, many people. It’s difficult to avoid these illnesses because you’re in contact with the same people, the same objects, every single day. This is doubly true for our kids who have a small number of play areas to use here; once one kid smears his boggers over the climbing frame dozens of kids will come into contact with it in a short space of time. Not all parents are vigilant about their child’s health, outsourcing this responsibility to their helper either by choice or necessity (the work culture in HK is insane and toxic in itself, with people expected to stay in their offices until 8pm or usually later, as well as working weekends. It’s just an accepted part of living and working here.). As a result you have kids whose faces are caked in snot running around outside, hacking their wee lungs up, sneezing on every surface including your face and generally spreading whatever nasty bug they have to others.

A final reason we figure we’re all sick frequently, and it’s the one that bothers us the most, is the pollution. It’s been clearly proven that high levels of pollution have been linked with increases in respiratory illness among other illnesses. Here in HK the levels of pollution are high on an almost daily basis, though the government uses standards and benchmarks which are decades out of date which results in their measurements showing pollution levels to be low or moderate. If they used the updated standards we’d see the levels are hundreds of times higher, and thus hundreds of times more toxic. In my lifetime, Hong Kong has gone from a highly desirable location to live and work, to a hardship posting requiring added incentives to get people over here. Despite this the government has no interest in changing things. 

An average to bad day in HK, courtesy of:
http://www.strippedpixel.com/hong-kong-air-pollution/

So, the question for us became how can we stop the sickness. The answer we came up with was simply to leave HK. If it is the pollution, the closed system we live in and the stress linked to living here then it’s time to get the hell out. We can’t in good conscience stay here if it’s costing us our most valuable asset, our health and the health of our kids. Personally, I’m fucking tired of living in fear of my kids coming down with some illness AGAIN, because that means another trip to the doctor, more drugs, possibly another hospital visit. I’m just tired. And I’m angry, I mean thoroughly pissed off like I want to kick the living crap out of someone because the place I live may be causing my family to become ill. I’m angry that the government doesn’t seem to be living up to it’s responsibilities of safe guarding people and tackling the source of so much illness, choosing instead to treat the symptoms. The health care here is great, but I’m tired of having to rely on it on a near monthly basis. I’m also scared that one day the sickness one my family members has will be one of the terrifying Google results. 

At the end of the day, sickness is going to be a part of our lives no matter what. Where you have sick kids, usually you get sick adults too. Kids need to build their immunity so I won’t stop ours from playing in the dirt or socialising with other kids. However, we have the choice to live in a place which supports my family’s overall wellness. It’s a luxury many others don’t have. I reached the point where I couldn’t make up excuses for living here anymore. There are many good reasons to live in Hong Kong, but they aren’t good enough for us anymore. The pros no longer outweigh the cons. We have the luxury of choosing to live somewhere else for the wellbeing of our family and while there are no guarantees being in a new country will be better for us, we’re pretty sure it will do. So we’ve made that choice and are leaving. Sickness can kiss my sweet ass as I walk out the door.