Thursday, February 14, 2008
One After Another
14-FEB-2008:
The fact that today is Valentine's day didn't hit me until the DJ mentioned it on the radio this morning as I was traveling to work. I've even forgotten to wish Saimun a happy Valentine's day, although what is so happy about it - with all the illness going around in the house - I can't imagine.
Dominic came down with a fever late last week and recovered over the weekend. On Monday, he caught conjunctivitis. Daddy took him to the doctor but was told that it was only mild conjunctivitis and will require no treatment or medication. The next day, a fever developed although it only lasted for one day.
Dominic is still having a running nose and a mild cough. I am feeling under the weather myself. The cough still persists and daddy's ignorance is driving me up the wall. First of all, he kept insisting that Dominic has the flu - which for some reason means 'running or watery nose' for most Malaysians. In Cantonese, they call it 'seong fung', which is entirely different from the definition of flu here. Flu is a serious matter and therefore the over-the-counter flu medicine here will always contain paracetamol. I don't know how many times I've explained to him that the purpose of paracetamol is to ease aches and pains and to bring down the body temperature. It will do nothing to stop the mucus flowing out of the nose, but daddy's hard-headedness means that I get the same reply everytime, i.e. "but it says 'flu' here on the box". Sigh!
Secondly, it is annoying that daddy keeps tellng me that we have to "treat" Dominic's illness. His definition of a "treatment" is to pump him with medication - cough mixture, flu medicine or whatever he thinks "should" help. It is most annoying that he doesn't trust what I said. I said cough mixture and flu medicine will only ease the symptoms and will not get rid of the virus infection. When there is a virus infection, the body's immune system has to fight it. There's nothing much you can do except if there's a bacteria infection, in which case, the doctor would have prescribed antibiotics.
One thing we can do is to strengthen his immune system by giving him lots of vitamins (contained in vegetables and fruits). And annoyingly, daddy said nobody should eat fruits when he's having a cough! I know he got this idea from his mum, no doubt about it. Since I don't want to get the blame anyway (whether or not it is due to the fruits), so I stopped giving Dominic fruits and gave him vitamin syrup instead. But come on ... I think the idea is so ridiculous. Perhaps his mum is allergic to certain types of fruits. Perhaps she just heard it from someone else who happened to be talking nonsense. Can you believe that she once told me that tomatoes are not good for us (because I attempted to put TWO tomatoes into the ABC soup)?
Daddy suggested that I take Dominic to the doctor again. I doubt that the doctor will be able to do much but I'll just do it to please him. But this time, I'll at least ask for some eye drops for his conjunctivitis.
I've said it many times and I'll say it again. I don't like the health services in this country. It's difficult to get an appointment at the time and day that you want. You can't bring your child to a specialist unless it's something serious and that requires weeks of advanced scheduling. Of course you can always go private but then again you can't just go private - there are restrictions as well. I don't even know how it works. Most of the doctors come from India, Pakistan and God knows where. The midwives are inexperienced and the nurses are careless. I'm not saying all of them are but enough news in the papers to scare me. It could be worse in Malaysia but at least in Malaysia I am sure that I'm able to pay for the best doctors I can find.
More bitching about the NHS at http://sukye.multiply.com/journal/item/80/The_National_Health_Services. :p
