Is there a doctor in the house?

Earlier this week I had to go and see Dr D for some female things "down below". It was the first time I have seen him since my post-natal check. It was like seeing an old friend, and we had a good chat.

While there, he told me that he would be retiring in the middle of this year. At 71 he feels he has worked long enough. Entirely selfishly, I told him he couldn't retire because I needed him to deliver my second baby (not, as yet, conceived, or even planned). I think I must have looked so distressed that he gently patted me on the arm and said there were lots of good doctors in town and he would recommend someone.

I will really miss him.

Is there a doctor in the house?

The Boy is one of the fittest men of his age I know. He does a lot of exercise, eats healthily, and doesn't drink too much (except on occasion!). However, he is a bit pathetic when it comes to his health.

Of course all men get "man flu" (i.e. a small sniffle that means he takes to his bed), but he always has some ailment or other. After about 5 years together I realised that, generally, these are quite legitimate issues. He has, for example, put his back out a few times. He has torn some muscles, had a motorbike crash. He has asthma and tends to get chest infections. This has led to my theory which we both now recognise as the quota of 3.

The Boy always has 3 ailments. Just when something gets fixed or gets better, something else goes wrong. Many are the times when he has wondered why his wrist hurts, foot aches or some other random problem - and I check how many things were wrong before the latest problem and it would always be 2, with the latest unexplained issue taking him back up to quota. He has pretty much run out of things to catch, but has two permanently torn ligaments in his fingers now, thereby ensuring that 2 of the quota are always filled. When Eve was born there was a bit of a joke as to whether she would have my constitution or his. So far all was looking good (i.e. mine), until this week.

Eve has had reflux since she was about 4 weeks old, but it has gradually been getting better so I was fully expecting when we went to the doctors yesterday that she would be able to come off the drugs she has been taking for it.

Except Eve is taking after her father, although starting small and going for a quota of 1 to begin with. The day before we went to the doctors, as if knowing she would be given the all clear on the reflux, she got conjunctivitus, and now she has a fever too just to make damn sure that if the eye drops work she has something else to be going on with.

Like father, like daughter - in the most unexpected ways.

Midnight dash

Further to my previous posts about the woeful state of post natal care in Hong Kong last night I found myself urgently needing to access it.

Eve has been a bit poo-ey (babies mean you start to create lots of new adjectives) since the green poo incident. Last night she was unsettled all evening, not all that unusual at the end of the day, but after her 11pm feed she started to scream. This was not a "Mum, I'm hungry" scream, or a tired scream but a "blue murder I want to kill someone" scream. I took her off the Boy and started wandering around the flat. H, the fountain of all baby wisdom, came out of her room to tell me that Eve was ill. It being 11pm, and me being very tired, at first didn't think she was - after all she had just fed really well. However, H showed me the depression on the top of her head (a sign of both dehydration and that something isn't very well) and it was like a hollow hole. I showed the Boy and, quick as a flash, we were off to the hospital.

We have a choice of two hospitals. The public hospital is brilliant, one of the best in HK and has an expertise in obstetrics and children. However, going there would have meant a long wait and we were both worried and tired. The hospital where she was born, although private, has a very good emergency unit, the added advantage of having her notes and we would probably be seen immediately. We drove there.

She was seen straight away (there was no line at all - prompting us to repeat over and over "it's not like this at the NHS") and they had all her notes with the doctor within a few minutes and we were out within 15 minutes of our arrival. It transpires that she has, perhaps as predicted, some sort of gastric bug. It is unusual in breast fed babies, but perhaps not ones who already stick their hands in their mouth all the time or whose father is a bit ill with a poorly tummy too.

She has been given some drugs to take and we are keeping an eye on her. She seems to be OK, feeding well, although she has lots of wind. The Boy, H and I are now obsessing about the state of her poo and her feeding habits.

The whole experience was nerve racking, tiring, and expensive (the whole lot came to HKD 1,000 including being charged for parking at the hospital). However, I finally realise that with my own baby no issue is too small and no cost too high to make sure she is OK. It also helps that I have very good health insurance from my company!

The final note to all of this is how brilliant H is. Not only is she excellent with Eve on a daily basis, but she recognised the difference in her cry when the Boy and I were too tired and fraught to react to it, and knew what symptoms to look for and worry about. I feel very lucky to have been blessed with such a great nanny.

Doctor Who?

Little Eve continues to change day by day and now her nappy rash seems to be passing (entailing two sessions of what we now call "roam free" each day when we take off her nappy and let her air a bit - being a modest lady she hates having her bits exposed but it does the trick on the nappy rash). She is back to a rough 3 hour feed cycle, with a bit more sleep during the day and a bit less at night, typically, and I am managing to get 5-6 hours sleep a day. An improvement on two weeks ago. We have figured out how to get her to sleep in her cot at each nap, and generally are getting a bit better at this parenting lark.

It was all looking peachy until about 12.30 last night.

Eve tends to start muttering and whining about an hour after she goes down to sleep. She isn't awake, just making noises, so I usually ignore these until she actually wakes up. Apparently lots of parents have a habit of going to the child as soon as she makes a noise, thus instilling bad habits in the child. No such luck in our house on a cold night. I will remain under the duvet until I am certain she wants feeding. So when, at midnight last night Eve starts making little noises I check her eyes are still closed (they are) and head back to bed. By 12.30 she is making a bit more noise and so I get up to feed her. As I take her out of her baby sleeping bag I realise she has wet through to the bag itself. And she stinks.

I wake up the Boy to help, something is clearly not right as she had only been changed 2 hours previously. Upon closer inspection, we find that our delightful daughter has deposited a vast amount of nasty green, watery, smelly goo in her nappy. This is not normal. Breast fed babies do not get this. We turn to old British faithful, Miriam Stoppard's book on children's ailments, to find that for small babies such symptoms mean you should immediately call your doctor. To a new Mum, even one as laid back as me, this is tantamount to shouting PANIC and setting off fireworks.

Which is when we hit a snag. We don't really have a GP in Hong Kong, Eve sees her pediatrician and then only during office hours. We scurry around to find the card and call the emergency number on it. It is a pager service and the person at the other end speaks no English and simply keeps repeating "patient pager" at me in a strong Chinese accent. After the tourist trick of speaking loudly and slowly doesn't work (with hindsight I might have shouted) I hang up and start to get frantic. We call the surgery where my doctor is based, hoping there will be an out of hours number on the answer machine. All we get is a message (also in Chinese) telling us the opening hours. By this point I am suggesting we go to the hospital. If Miriam says it is serious then we should be worried.

The Boy now realises that his "sick" daughter is currently latched onto my boob and showing no signs of ill health - in fact is guzzling rather loudly. So he tries the emergency pager number again and this time the operator speaks English and offers to page the doctor. We decide to go to bed, wait for the call back, check on Eve at her next feed and if the problem is still there then take her to the hospital.

Of course we don't get a call back, and Eve is absolutely fine at the next feed and thereafter. In fact as I type this she is asleep next to me having thrown up some of her breakfast that she hungrily guzzled too fast and too much an hour ago.

My mission for the day is to find out what number we should have called in an emergency for the inevitable next time.

Shallow Al

As I continue to get a grip on both my sanity and this whole motherhood thing, I find that little bits of my former non-mummy self are making a welcome return into my life. It was, therefore, with some joy laced with fear that this morning I left Eve for the first time since she was born. For the past 3 weeks, Eve and I have been together 24/7 and now that her physical umbilical cord has fallen off I thought I should make an effort to break the emotional one that has seen me with her all the time.

I had to go to the doctors this morning, and then Eve had an appointment afterwards. I arranged for the Boy to look after Eve for the 90 minutes I would be out of the house at my own appointment. I don't quite know what horror I thought would befall my daughter in this time. She was fed just before I left (and I had left gallons of expressed milk anyway in case she woke up), and with the Boy and H at home she would be perfectly well looked after.

However, it was really hard to leave. I took the bus, which I always enjoy doing, stuck the ipod on really loud to drown out my own fears and apprehensions, and tried to forget that I had left my darling daughter behind.

It was actually rather nice as I experienced the real world just as I used to and got some time not to think about the next feed or what every gurgle meant or when she would wake up and need a cuddle. Of course I called home as soon as I got to the doctor's - to find predictably that Eve had been fast asleep since I left.

Of course having her back in my arms was the nicest feeling, but I confess to rather enjoying my "me" time on my own.

The whole experience was made even more lovely by the fact that I can now get into my favourite pre-pregnancy jeans and tight tops and not look like a moose. There is still a bit of excess skin and my muscle tone is shot, but for someone who gave birth less than 3 weeks ago I am looking pretty good! And I got to wear my lovely black high heel boots too and tottered rather than waddled for the first time in 3 months.

Small things make me happy, whether dressed in pink or otherwise.

The incubator speaks

I went to see Dr D today to check on my blood pressure and Bump progress. Good news, blood pressure is stable and Bump performed wonderfully and boogied her way through the scan. Bad news is that my kidneys seem to have joined the breakdance party now and I am having lots of tests. The later stages of pregnancy seem to be a succession of body parts giving up on me.

Sadly, however, Bump seems quite happy where she is. After Dr D saw my glee when he said she could come out now and be fine (perhaps it was me jumping up and down and punching the air that gave it away), he then spent 20 minutes telling me the benefits of keeping her in there for a few more weeks. This seemed to almost entirely involve referring to me as an incubator and describing me in terms more akin to a petri-dish than a living, breathing person.

Somewhat affronted, I left, promising to come back on Monday for my test results and went and bought 4 mince pies and ate all of them when I got back to the office.

A little bit of slap and tickle

Another trip to Dr D today to have the bump checked and scanned for two heads and a tail. She does, in fact, appear to be human so all is OK.

I did, however, have to have an injection today. I have a rare blood type that means I need to be injected with something to ensure that I don't reject future babies (future babies?! I can't see me doing this again). I am petrified of needles, and it was a rather big one so Dr D suggested he inject me in my bottom.

Or rather what he actually said was "Go over to the bed, pull up your skirt and bend over".

This was a bit more funny, but not much, than him reading out the lot number and expiry date of the stuff he had just given me, as he wrote it in my notes, and reading the expiry date as 04/07 (rather than 04/10 which is what it is). Apparently no-one ever notices his little gag and he seemed quite upset that neither did I.

I guess when you've been delivering babies for 40 odd years you find amusement where you can.

Mr Tickle

For those of your reading outside HK, or those who have not had children inside HK, the whole process of having a child here is strangely absent of midwives. Having had a sister and sister in-law who are either on or about to get their second child I have heard stories of the supremacy of midwives and the largely redundant role of men in white coats.

However, HK is the city which is almost entirely designed for everyone to make money and no more so is this true when you have a baby. As a result, the whole process is being taken care of by my obstetrician, Dr D. He does all my antenatal checks and will deliver my baby at a hospital of my choice (you pay for everything but at least get what you pay for in terms of a doctor on call pretty much 24 hours a day and a nice private room - I am hanging out for a facial and getting my nails done during the labour but have yet to find this clause in my health insurance).

Dr D was recommended to me by two friends who between them have had 4 babies delivered by Dr D. He is atypical of most practioners here in that he is deeply pragmatic and doesn't put up with any silly fads or nonsense. I adore him because he tells it like it is, and has a distinctly British sense of humour - sarcasm in the extreme. When I was about 12 weeks gone I had a panic after reading in a book that I was not supposed to get my heart rate too high (I had been dragon boat racing the previous weekend). Without even looking up from the notes he was making he said "oh, they did those tests on mice. You don't look much like a mouse to me so I wouldn't worry about it". It was the perfect response.

He doesn't seem to take too many patients anymore, he doesn't really need to and seems to prefer giving a lot of attention to fewer people, so you can always get an appointment or get hold of him. However, with his experience and care and attention also comes a few quirks. I will admit that, at 70ish, going to see him is a bit like going to see ones Dad - he has the same kind of cheeky, naughty side to him that your Dad gets once he retires.

So, to my experience last week. I was having a check up and lying on my back on the table, top pulled up and pants pulled down a bit so he could give the bump her scan and check on the size of all the stuff inside me. I am horribly ticklish so giggled as he poked and prodded. He looked at me, a little concerned, so I told him I was very ticklish. He promptly dug his fingers into my sides, causing me to curl up (bump allowing) in fits of giggles. Then, with an evil grin on his face said "Sorry, I can't resist doing that when I know someone is ticklish". He chuckled to himself and continued to poke, prod and scan.