Under the Weather

Phew, 10 days since the last update? Shocking! Sorry!! It's been a busy old time - Lara started going down with a bug last Thursday evening, she had a temperature of 38.4 and was sick. Olga wasn't much better suffering from a very sore throat, most likely they had the same thing, as it was clear by Friday afternoon that Lara had a sore throat too, from the pain-face she pulled whenever she coughed. So Olga and Lara stayed at home on Friday, and after trying NHS Direct (on hold for too long) Olga phoned the GP surgery, and was advised over the phone by a GP to carry on with administering nurofen to try and bring Lara's temperature down. However, by time I got home at 5pm there was no improvement, and we were getting more worried that Lara was showing too many swine flu symptoms to just ignore the possibility, so Olga phoned the surgery again at 5.55pm, and the GP agreed we should go straight there and she'd take a look at Lara, which reassured us as otherwise we were concerned about who we could call over the weekend if her condition worsened. NHS Direct previously have been very good, but at the moment they seem to be "swine-flu'd" out and we wanted someone to look at Lara first-hand. The GP agreed that Lara certainly was ill with something (although she wasn't specific about what it was) and prescribed a course of antibiotics.
Olga and I have taken it in turns to take Lara to the bed in the spare room when she got so wound up that she wouldn't go back to sleep without one of us being there to fall asleep on. This did lead to a nice moment for me on Sunday morning, when I was woken in the spare bed by a happy, smiling, not-feverous Lara poking me and saying "Bah-bah", which is as close as she's getting to Papa at the moment, although every once in a while there is a definite swing towards Papa.
Sunday was a long day for all of us, with plenty of jobs needing to be done at home whilst balancing giving Lara the attention she needed - and fitting in regular updates from the cricket in Cardiff!
Lara still wasn't well enough to go to nursery yesterday, so she came to work with us, but her temperature stayed pretty normal all day, and the contents of her nappies moved from molten basaltic lava (the quick flowing stuff in Hawaii) to the more gloopy, acidic lava (the one that kind of plops along - pun intended).
Lara still woke a couple of times last night, but she only needed water rather than nurofen, and I didn't need to take her to the spare bed to sleep. Then the final test - the contents of the potty - this morning was fine, and she had the green light to go back to nursery. So far I've not had a call to come and collect her, which is very good news.
We still don't know what "it" was, but obviously it wasn't swine flu, and we don't want to appear to be the kind of parents that rush into full panic mode at the first sneeze and demand to have two tonnes of tamiflu delivered, but Lara certainly was showing two or three of the symptoms, and we're glad we had her checked out by the GP on Friday.
That doesn't make it any easier to read the headline about the 6 year-old girl who died from swine flu 48 hours after being diagnosed with a sore throat though...