Ironically, after specifically mentioning in my last post that the wife and I couldn’t take the kids to the doctor, just that situation came up.
Josh and Evan went to the doctor a couple of weeks ago for strep throat. They were both given prescriptions for antibiotics, but for some reason their mother didn’t want to get two identical prescriptions and decided that they could share one. When we pointed out the (seemingly) obvious fact that you have to take the full prescription for the antibiotic to be effective, and offered to get the other one if she would only give us the prescription, she refused. So both kids took five days worth rather than the ten they were supposed to.
On Friday morning, I got out of work at 1 A.M. as normal. Jennifer and I stayed up until four, which is also pretty normal. At six, Josh woke us up crying, saying his ear hurt. Josh sleeps like a teenager, and if left alone will sleep until noon. He also rarely cries unless his feelings are hurt, but pain doesn’t bother him. So we were obviously worried. At nine when his pediatrician opened, we called and tried to set up an appointment, but were told (as we had feared) that they wouldn’t see him because his mother wasn’t present. So we took him to the children’s hospital. After a bit of a wait (swine flu — the number of suspected cases in this country is almost one eighth of the number of fatalities this year from standard seasonal flu, so we all need to live in bubbles!) and explaining the situation to several people, they tried to set us up an appointment with his pediatrician. Unfortunantly, he had left for his vacation at noon, so we were given an appointment with the doctor who was covering his cases.
So we got to explain to four more people there what was going on.
Finally, Josh was seen, and told that his strep hadn’t been taken care of by half a regiment of antibiotics, so we were given a new prescription. We filled it, then when we got home, we looked at Evan’s throat, and he looked like he still has strep too. We managed to talk their mother into giving us the prescription she wouldn’t fill, and got it ourselves. It was $60, which I dropped without second thought. She had second, third, and fourth thoughts though, and loudly announced to the kids how much their medicine was worth. By then I had gone to work on my two hours of sleep, and Jennifer, running on the same, stayed at home to take care of two sick kids. I had a hard day at work that day, my third two truck night in a row, but when I got home I found that the kids had made me a card that touched my heart and made everything worthwhile. Click to embiggen.
