January blues: The virus from hell and head lice

Last updated: 26/01/2016 15:30 by MichelleMcDonagh to MichelleMcDonagh's Blog
Filed under: MummyBloggers
 
It was my own fault. I jinxed us all when I breezily announced that we had got through the Christmas break this year without any sickness in the house.
 
The words were barely out of my mouth when we started to go down one by one during the first week of January.
 
Princess Firstborn fell first, starting with sore ears and progressing to sore everything - the virus from hell. I know because I was next to fall.
 
It was second only to the vomiting bug in terms of illnesses I have experienced. Burning temperature, sore ears, thumping headache, constant nausea, vomiting, aching bones, the list goes on.
 
It’s bad enough when the kids are sick, but when the Mammy of the house succumbs to illness as well, it’s a total and utter disaster.
 
For me, it’s the hardest part of motherhood — when you feel so sick and exhausted that you want to curl up in bed and be looked after by somebody else, but you can’t. You have to drag yourself out of bed to look after the other patients in the house and keep everything else going as well: meals for those well enough to eat, laundry and work (when you work for yourself from home as I do).
 
As if that wasn’t enough to give me the January Blues, I discovered the same week that the reason I had been frantically scratching my head for the past couple of months was not a side-effect of my new medication, and the reason the three kids had been tearing at their own scalps was not due to the cheap shampoo I bought.
 
It was a chance conversation with a friend who mentioned that her household had been infested by head lice that made me realise that so too had ours.
 
I had been checking the kids hair, particularly Princess Firstborn, as she is so dark I thought it would be easier to see them, but what I thought was dry scalp was actually tiny eggs. I didn’t realise the bloody things were so small - I assumed if you had head lice you would see them jumping around in your hair.
 
So in the middle of everything, I had to treat us all for headlice, including our babysitter who has hair down to her bum and felt itchy when she heard the rest of us were infested. She didn’t have them as it happens.
 
It took over a week for Princess Firstborn to recover from her virus and start eating properly again and when I didn’t seem to be getting better, I went back to the doctor to discover I had developed a sinus infection.
 
Manchild was also felled by the virus for a few days, and the other two kids escaped with bad head colds.
 
Then I discovered The Bruiser had something called constipation overflow (I never heard of it either) which was causing him to soil himself unconsciously every day.
 
He had to be kept out of school for a few days while we started him on a heavy regimen of Movicol to get his impacted poo moving again.
 
Add to this a great big dollop of the depression that has stalked me for most of my life and let’s just say, it hasn’t been the best start to 2016. Roll on February.
 
Michelle McDonagh is a freelance journalist working from Blarney, Co Cork. She’s a mum of three children aged 2, 4 and 5, and a firm believer in 'good enough' parenting, bribery and the healing powers of chocolate.
 
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