WARNING: The below contains graphic scenes involving bodily fluids that some may find disturbing.
I'm back again, closing in on a year since my last entry, but this was always meant to be about my experiences, mundane, unusual, interesting, exciting, workaday or otherwise in Dubai, and as I'm getting on for eight years in the city now, there is relatively little new that happens. Skip to ** if you want to avoid my overly long intro and explanation of why I haven't written more often.
I could write regularly about the hilarious exploits of my genius first-born, of course, but, I am fully aware that not everyone finds her every utterance and achievements of learning from a friend at nursery to say "bovver off you silly pow" quite so engaging and brilliant as I do.
But, this recent incident stuck in my head, and even though it occurred several weeks ago, I have been meaning to write about it as I think it gives some interesting insights into a) the healthcare system in Dubai and b) parenting in general. Although as a disclaimer I must say that I would never, best beloveds, dare to inflict "parenting advice" on you. God, no. My parenting skills fluctuate between the New Zealand dad blogger How to Dad's philosophy of "she'll be 'right" and panicking in a middle class angst way that I haven't got enough money to start her on piano lessons yet, at the ripe old age of three years 10.5 months, and worrying that she isn't progressing fast enough with her nursery level Arabic, which seems to chiefly exist of learning how to say the colours of the UAE flag in Arabic.
I should also add that the events discussed in this blog happened several weeks ago, and everyone is fine now, well, I am mostly fine. You see, because one of the reasons that I haven't written for such a very long time is that we are expecting Desert Baby 2 at the end of January and the pregnancy has been going about as well as the last one, but let's not get into all that depressing moaning, except to say I am mostly fine, apart from tedious prenatal issues you don't really want to know about, and feel the size of an effing house already, and baby is as fine and as prodigiously sized as the last one.
**Several weeks ago now, Desert Baby woke us around 2am to tell us "Mummy, daddy, there's sick in my bed because of me". So we both got up to investigate, still in sleep fug, not a little bit grumpy that she had only just got over a long period of coming into our bed at 2am and kicking us repeatedly through the night due to being post-two week trip back to the UK, which due to time difference and being in a different bed, always disrupts her sleep, so all in all, this felt rather unfair.
Still sleep fugged, we could not find the offending article at first, but when we found it, we threw the sheets in the bath and gave them a good dousing, cleaned her up and popped her into bed next to us to keep an eye on her. We are new to the puking child thing, as she has a relatively hardy constitution in this regard, you see, and we had not yet realised that a three-year-old who has puked in the night once is likely to do it again, which she did, again, and then again, and then again, and after three more changes of sheets I said: "Do you know? I think I'm going to have to take the day off work and take her to the doctor. You're off the following day if she's still not better."
You may be wondering where the 'parenting low point' I refer to in the title of this blog arises. Well, best beloveds, there are several moments that could qualify for that label in this tale. Decide for yourself which you think it is.
So, I emailed my excuses to work, got showered and dressed and waved Him Indoors off to work, and off to the pediatrician's office we popped. At this point, she had only managed to keep a bit of water down, but when we got to the surgery, she very much did not keep it down, and it projectiled across the waiting room, narrowly missing a small cluster of youngish, well-turned out good looking people who had gathered. I had pondered to myself who they could be, as we went and did the obligatory weight, height blood pressure and "what is the issue, dear?" checks with the nurse.
More and more of these curiously healthy looking, well dressed and young men and women gathered as I steered a now waxy pale Desert Baby into the toilets for another clean up and change of clothes. (At what point does one, as a parent, stopping automatically carrying baby wipes and a child's change of clothes with one? I can't see myself stopping any time soon, particularly after this recent adventure).
We were summoned to the doctor's office fairly quickly after that, who took one look at her and decided intravenous fluids were necessary. Overkill, you might say, as she had only been sick for about 10 hours at this point, but, she could not keep water down, and they don't mess around when dehydration threatens here, partly because they don't have to, because most people have private health insurance, and partly because it can be pretty dangerous pretty quickly for little ones in this climate.
Being the curious sort, I asked: "Who are all these people in your waiting room? I have never seen it this busy, and they don't look ill. Is there some kind of meeting or convention?"
"They're medical reps," replied the doc. "We only let them come here one day per month and today is the day, so they're all here."
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah," I said, in my usual insightful way.
The presence of medical reps in doctor's surgeries here interests me, because, because far as I am aware, this is not a thing in the UK. As I understand it, the purchase of drugs is much more in the hands of the NHS, whereas it seems that individual health providers have the opportunity to pick and choose what they want in the UAE. Although, I should add, that in some cases, controls are far tighter, as certain drugs available in the UK for heavy duty painkiller purposes and what have you, are not allowed at all in the UAE.
These people, and believe me I would be the last one to judge, they have to make a living,and I am a journalist for goodness' sake, we get about as much respect as organ thieves these days, sell drugs directly to doctors, which, I would hazard a guess, is why you find some doctors awfully keen on prescribing certain types of drugs, when, dare I say it, they may not be ENTIRELY necessary.
I can't speak for everyone in the UAE, but I frequently come away from the doctor's when I go for relatively minor ailments with a carrier bag of four or five different prescriptions, and for the most part, I take one or two of them, and the rest go into our bulging medicine cupboard should a similar ailment arise in the future, before inevitably getting thrown out when they go out of date.
In this case, the doctor recommended that the husband and I take fancy and insanely expensive probiotics supplements to "prevent us catching the infection", the kind that Him Indoors always refers to as 'bividus madeupidus" in tribute to a certain shampoo advert that claimed probiotic qualities as one of its many virtues some years ago.
"Are they safe to take when pregnant?" I asked, realising as I asked that this was irrelevant, because our insurance pretty much never covers them, I suspect for the reasons I have suggested above, and when they don't cover them, I NEVER have enough ready cash to feel like forking out the AED 200 (45 quid or so) that they cost for a small bottle on the off chance that they might possibly do something to help.
"Also," I thought, "Desert Baby was sick on my actual face last night, so I suspect the 'me not catching the virus ship' has well and truly sailed".
That there, apart from Desert Baby narrowly missing puking on a medical rep, might, be considered a parenting low point, but, there are more, and if I could just lower the low point slightly, I did not let out a blood curdling scream and run away to scrub my face with bleach, at the time of the incident, because I did not immediately notice she had done it, so concerned was I about how poorly and frightened she was in the middle of the night. It took me rather a long time to clean it off, as I was more worried about her than me being covered in puke. That is the closest I am going to get to a heartwarming parental moment, so drink it in, people. Don't drink the puke in, obviously, I can vouch for the fact that this is not an agreeable pastime. You see, I had to ruin it, didn't I?
Anyhoo.
As expected, the insurance company refused the bividus, so after being administered IV fluids, queuing at the pharmacy for various other unguents and potions, which she didn't really mind at all because it meant I let her watch cartoons on my phone, apart from the ouchiness of the needle which she wasn't awfully keen on, we went home and I managed to salvage a bit of the working day while she had an extended nap on the sofa.
Although she was better the next day, nursery has a policy that you have to keep them home at least 48 hours after they're sick, so Him Indoors was in the hot seat the next day, which passed without incident.
Then the weekend dawned, and I woke feeling, slightly less brilliant than I have habitually felt during this pregnancy, and convinced Him Indoors to get up and give her breakfast while I lounged around like a beached whale. It got to about 8.30 or 9am, and I was thinking I really need to get up and give him a break, when he wondered in saying he was not feeling too clever in the stomach department, so I snappily agreed to get up and take over, until about 11.30, when I was violently sick myself. At this point, I was slightly in denial, and convinced myself it was a relic of morning sickness, never mind the fact that it was totally different.
Pregnancy sickness for me is a feeling of general terribleness, and an awareness that I am going to be sick at some point, it's just a question of when, I just have to do it at some point, sort of like an appointment, whereas this was running to the toilet and barely making it kind of sick. Nonetheless, I told myself it was fine, just more of the same, and feebly tried to entertain a now perfectly healthy and active Desert Baby.
Another hour passed, and I woke Him Indoors because I was feeling gradually more terrible, and we munched on some dry bread for lunch and enacted Dubai summer parenting protocol, which is stick a Disney movie on the laptop and collapse. By the end of the Disney movie, things had gone quite wrong, and I started being sick in earnest, combining it with lying on the bed considering whether being this pregnant and this sick necessitated a trip to hospital, and deciding not, as I had been this sick quick frequently during the early stages. I also admitted to myself that yes, as expected, puke on face incident was not conducive to virus spread prevention.
A charming side effect of pregnancy, as many of you know, is swollen fingers, so I had been wearing my wedding and engagement rings on my little finger instead of my wedding finger to prevent them getting stuck, so they were a little looser than they should be.
How is this relevant? You may ask. Well, best beloveds, in one particularly frenzied dash for the bathroom, my engagement ring flew off, made what I thought was the quiet dinging noise of it bouncing off a pipe and then disappearing into the bathroom somewhere. And, as I have become something of a professional puker of recent, I flushed instantly so as not to prolong the agony, to then wonder feebly back to bed and ask Him Indoors to have a look for the ring I could not, at that time, find on the floor.
I know that you know what had happened to that ring, best beloveds. He couldn't find it on the floor. As Him Indoors was feeling significantly better than I was at this point, I uttered the immortal phrase that is the title of this blog: "Can you just snap on a rubber glove and stick your arm round the U-Bend?" And, you have got to hand it to him, he was awfully game about it.
He did not find it, best beloveds. And again, very gamely, called the maintenance company to see if there was anything could be done to find it, and they said no, we are sorry that has happened to you, but we can't help. I resigned myself to the fact that my ring was most likely on its way to the sewage farm just outside International City, and wept the silent tears of a pregnant, sick woman whose engagement ring has just gone down the toilet, which is to say, fairly pathetically.
We agreed, somewhat optimistically to leave the toilet for a few days, on very, very off chance that the plumbing is so peculiar that the ring might not have gone beyond the point of not return, and might resurface..... Him Indoors also agreed to ring the insurance company and find out "if losing engagement ring down toilet while in the throes of projectile vomiting" is the same as "accidental loss or damage", and they were surprisingly sporting about it and agreed to send us a claim form. Meanwhile, I decided it was time to stop risking losing my other ring and put it on a chain round my neck for safe keeping.
A few days later, ready to fill in the claim form and admit to myself that the ring would have to be replaced, I wondered into the bathroom, and took a cursory look. And "bovver me" as Desert Baby would say. The damn thing was only sitting there in the water, looking for all the world as if it had not been on a near sewage-based odyssey. So I fished it out, disinfected it rather thoroughly, and stuck it on a chain with the others. We had not told the story of The Engagement Ring that Went to Sea(wer) to Desert Baby, but, for some reason, she had been slightly worried about it every time it gets near water ever since, ie, in the shower or in the swimming pool. What can I say? As I mentioned at the start of this epic tale, she is a uniquely sensitive and brilliant genius of a child, well capable of grasping the complexities, so we told her.
She has no doubt repeated it to the great delight of her nursery teachers, along with her other classics, which include, intriguing tales of her father's bowel movements and the time we let her fire a bow and arrow in Sherwood Forest, because, you know, parenting skillz, as discussed above.
I shall sign off now, and leave it to you to decide which the parenting low point is, the puke on face, the narrowly missing puking on a medical rep, the hand round the U-bend (twice). I can't quite decide myself. Tell me your parenting low points too, if you like. I often get told by child-free friends that I should keep quiet about this stuff, lest I put others of wanting to have kids. But, if I can break my promise about giving parenting advice very briefly, you need to know this stuff, this is what it can be like, in fact, this is fairly low level of bodily fluid horror compared with what can happen, if some of my parenting associates are to be believed.
