Miss Polly had a dolly that was sick, sick, sick

  Richard Bell Dads Column – Issue 12

The tremendous effort and enthusiasm given to the rhyme together with the greatly exaggerated actions drew gales of laughter from the entire room. My daughter, the ‘angel’, had learned about medicine and was administering a spoonful of imagination and prescribing bed rest to her two dollies, now meticulously wrapped up like multi coloured tortillas in baby blankets on the floor!

It was only a few days later that a real spoonful of medicine was required as Mummy found herself in hospital and very poorly indeed.

It is times like these that we know who our friends really are and how lucky we are to have them. At a moments notice they took our little ‘un whilst we sat in a small room in A&E and waited. And waited. We waited for tests, we waited for more tests and, most of all, we waited for answers. Finally and frustratingly, the first prognosis three hours previous was the eventual diagnosis, the dreaded Gall Bladder! A painkilling injection later and my wife, hastily admitted to the ward, was examined and labelled ‘nil by mouth’!

A dazed thirty-minute drive later and I was collecting our daughter already fed, bathed and changed, at 10.30pm. I thanked our friends in weary two syllable bursts and left with a little girl in a little boy’s PJ’s. Physically and emotionally I was drained (as I had started work at 6.00am that day) and had no clue what I was going to tell sleeping beauty when she wakes up and asks where Mummy is. Bleary eyed I phoned work, who were very understanding, and duly fell asleep next to the strangely comforting snoring baby monitor.

The next few days were spent ferrying much needed supplies to the patient (after trying to find a rare parking space). I busied myself sorting out balanced and nutritious meals, that didn’t have fat and salt as their first two ingredients, for the tyke and myself and wondered why the Pope had not made Barney and the Wiggles saints yet.

The first visit to the hospital with our two-year-old was one I had been dreading as much as my wife had been anticipating.

We arrived at the ward and found my wife surrounded by half a garden centre interspersed with cheery messages of hope. These provided a short-term distraction to the horrible realisation that all her favourite food was now officially ‘off limits’! She was propped up, teary eyed and delighted to see her little girl without evidence of sleep depravation, malnutrition or a serious fashion disaster!

“Mummy” a little husky voice cried, as our daughter leaped over the bed like Starsky over the bonnet, missing the saline drip by a hair’s breadth! The two hugged like they'd been apart for years and then a little hand reached for the IV needle in the hope that it would free her mummy from this enforced separation causing a spontaneous reaction from me even Chuck Norris would be proud of!

A hospital ward is no place for a ‘very active’ child! There I said it. You can bring all the sticker books and crayons you like but nothing is as much fun as the button for the nurse station or the oxygen supply!

The visiting hours ended entirely too soon and clutching a bag for home in one hand and a fretful, confused child in the other, we said “See you later” to Mummy and headed for the lifts. It is an awful affirmation that absence really does 'make the heart grow fonder' and that when you work as a team to raise your progeny a crisis can be a revelation for your relationships, with both partner and child.

A few days later, a few tantrums later, a few steep learning curves later and a twenty-minute hospital car park jam later, we were driving home. All three back in the world we put on hold a few days earlier, chattering like chimps but with a nagging doubt as to how our little precious had handled all this upheaval. The Robert Winston TV programmes had permeated our subconscious and forced us to consider angles previously left to happenstance!

Luckily, a sloppy gear change cleared all that up for us.

As metal ground against metal with an annoying, potentially costly, deep rasping sound a small person in a small seat boomed - “Daddy’s bottom!”

All’s well with the world!