Gang Aft A-Gley

I'd been hoping to get started roughing out a plot for my Melbourne colleague over the last couple of days. Needless to say, something came up ...

Yesterday morning my wife started to feel sharp pains in the gut, following on from a couple of days of feeling seedy. They got worse, and soon we were at the hospital, getting her looked at for appendicitis.

The hospital is two streets away - that's the good news. The bad is that it's the same place that turned my son away when he cut his head open a few months back. All up, my wife spent ten hours in A&E waiting to be admitted, before enduring a night of throwing up in a room co-occupied by a trio of old women groaning, expectorating and hovering on the edge of death. And we still didn't know for sure what was wrong with her.

Fortunately, tests finally indicated that it wasn't her appendix, and she's home now, having discharged herself so quickly she it would have made Einstein's head spin. Not sure that was the best decision, but she's back at the doctor's in the morning to get checked out, so she might get away with it.

The hospital experience has, aside from all this, taught me two things:

1. It's both good and bad to have a friend who's medically trained. While this particular mate was immensely helpful with her translation of medical jargon and diagnoses, the way she reacted when I told her what the doctors at the hospital were up to completely destroyed any confidence I may have had in those looking after my wife.
2. Children have injury radar, but not the capacity to act on it. You must have noticed it. If your foot's hurting, you can be guaranteed any child in the vicinity will step on it. Likewise, when I took our littlies to visit their mum, the very first thing they did was jump on her belly ... Bless.