Dubai's Desperate Housewife

I’ve struggled to write this post today as I try, usually, to see the positive side of things, but sometimes it can be very hard to see a way to smile.

Okay, so it’s not like anything major’s happened. For that I’m truly grateful. All that’s happened is that DS got hand, foot and mouth disease. And, if you’re thinking of cows, sheep and disinfectant foot baths on remote farms, no, that’s not it.

Hand, foot and mouth disease is a simple virus, often spread through nurseries and characterised by a fever, painful white blisters on the tongue and little red spots inside the mouth. Sometimes blisters appear on the hands and feet, too, hence the name. It’s no big shakes, really – kids get it all the time but, unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do to treat it but try to ease the pain and fever while you wait it out. Even more unfortunately, the younger the victim, the worse they seem to get it. An adult, for example, would only get a mild sore throat.

My son today. Honestly, he looked just like this except when he was sleeping.

So I gather from DS’s ear-splitting and unrelenting screams for the past 24 hours that it’s quite painful. I gather from his frustration and abject misery that he gets quite hungry, but then can’t eat because the blisters hurt too much. I also understand from my two sleepless nights that he sleeps a little, then wakes up in agony, screaming, despite being knackered and wanting to be asleep (that makes three of us).

I have to say, it also doesn’t look pretty. Yesterday it looked like an alien was trying to explode through the membranes of his sweet little tongue while he had chicken-pox over the roof of his mouth.

So today the patient was off school. After a very broken and uncomfortable night, we exploded into the day at 5.30am with a bout of screaming that ended at approximately 11am. (Amazingly, I was still there, despite the temptation at times to walk out and never go back.) The screaming was so loud, so unrelenting, that even Gerlie, who has the patience of a saint and loves DS to bits, busied herself with some unnecessary vacuuming upstairs and left me to the acoustic shredding of my soul courtesy of my son – and I can’t say I blame her.  

The screaming stopped after he ate some tiny cubes of cheese, then exploded back into life around 3pm, continuing roughly till 7.15pm. I think DS was starting to feel a bit better then; the alien bubble on his tongue had gone down a lot and he managed to eat some soft spaghetti, boiled carrots and ice cream (“Oh mummy, if I must!”) for his tea. Before bed, he sat on the sofa with DD reading him a story, and it was at that precise moment that DH walked in.

“Oh what angels,” he said. “Have you been good for mummy?” If you see a woman sobbing into a skinny decaff cappuccino at Costa tonight, it could well be me.