This post is rather late in coming because I've had a very busy week, including the near-diagnosis of a brain tumour in my son (more on that later). Also, I made the mistake of starting a book by one of my favourite authors, which never bodes well for my productivity levels. Having 'fessed up now, I'll resort to the old adage of it being better late than never.
Lockdown has settled into a semblance of routine. My day starts with a run: shortish because I need to get back in time to exercise my offspring. Not really, I'm actually just fat and unfit, but it's a very convenient excuse. I then spend about half an hour trying to convince the boys to get off their iPads and come outside- the irony that they can spend the ENTIRE rest of the day in front of screens is lost on them. I generally eventually win the battle out of sheer force of will (bear in mind it's still early and I've just had half an hour of running to myself, so I've got reserves of will that I lack by mid-afternoon...and on some days by mid-morning) and manage to drag the boys out. Our walk is pleasant on the whole as the boys have ample space to narrowly avoid killing each other, unlike in the house where their fratricide attempts usually end up in something expensive getting broken.
We get home around 9 am (surprise, that) and I make breakfast while the boys 'start getting their schoolwork ready'. Yeah, right...if preparing for the day's work is battling each other in Minecraft cake wars (I could have the terminology wrong since it's garnered purely from eavesdropping). When eventually we have cleared space at the table, sharpened all of our pencils, broken a couple of pens, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had a snack (because breakfast was sooooo long ago), searched for a book that has gone missing despite it NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE, and shown a sudden and unexpected interest in using the vacuum cleaner, we settle down to doing school work. Originally I tried supervising both boys at the same time while tidying the house in between. I envisioned both boys working studiously at the table while I wiped counters and unpacked/repacked the dishwasher. Mistake. I was somehow labouring under the illusion that I had someone else's children. Now we split time into alternating half hour slots because apparently my sons cannot a)even sit at the table together without distracting each other and b)work without me constantly screaming at them from a proximity disallowed by social distancing. This doesn't leave much time before I have to escape to work, so the house gets a very cursory clean. To their eternal credit, and bless their wonderful souls, on most evenings this week when I've arrived home from work, my sons have tidied the house beautifully for me. On one occasion they had even lit an array of candles on the wooden coffee table in the lounge. I didn't have the heart to point out the obvious problems with this, especially since they'd even put a small jug of water next to the candles in case the house caught alight.
Work hasn't been easy. There are days that I'd really welcome a boring old rash coming in. Give me some acne or an urticaria! What lockdown does, is filter my patients so that I'm essentially only seeing really unwell patients. And really unwell patients are difficult to sort out under normal circumstances, but even more so when the usual referral channels are all distorted by a nasty virus, and I'm trying to be doctor and nurse and receptionist all at the same time. I'm also trying to deal with the economic fallout of lockdown: patients no longer on medical aids, dangerously sick people unable to afford the investigations that they need, not so dangerously sick patients who can't pay for the medication I'd like them to be on. This makes me scared for the future of the people of our country. It makes me frustrated medically because I am forced to give sub-optimal management when my decisions are dictated by what patients are still able to afford. And it makes me so painfully heartsore that I might shed a tear when I get home and find a tidy, candle-lit house.
This week was especially difficult for my husband and I because, as I mentioned in my introduction, we thought for 48 hours that my eldest son had a brain tumour. It's not the easiest thing in the world to put on a smiling, sympathetic face for patients when you haven't slept because you've spent the night imagining your son having brain surgery and dying (I'm a writer; I have a very active imagination. Also maybe an anxiety disorder). It happened as follows. For the past few months my 12 year old son, who among his many faults cannot claim laziness, has been very tired and lethargic. He's had some odd dizzy spells that I've conscientiously, as any good doctor-mom would do, ignored. He has also not been his usual cheerful, bubbly, emotionally stable self. On Monday this week it got to the point where I thought that I should probably do something about it, so I took him for some blood tests. This was a routine screening, to make sure he didn't have glandular fever, anaemia, bilharzia, or any of the other common causes of fatigue. I wasn't actually expecting any of the blood results to come back abnormal. But they did. Very, very abnormal. Abnormal enough that the only explanation could be that he had a craniopharyngioma (a kind of tumour in the brain). To cut a long and very stressful story short, multiple panicked phone calls to specialists and many more blood tests later, it became apparent that the lab had made a mistake and that he was, in fact, perfectly healthy and probably just a normal teenager. I will not mention which lab it was because I am fully aware that mistakes happen, especially when you're in the middle of a pandemic and most resources are being used to combat said pandemic. The lab in question apologised profusely and I don't for a minute blame them, but, holy cow, I would not like to live through those 48 hours again. On the positive side, my son doesn't have a brain tumour and I learnt a whole host of lessons this week, including:
1) It is far worse waiting for your child's blood results than for your own. If you want to learn how to warp time and really stretch it out (like if you've got a deadline coming up and you want to convert minutes to years), just do important blood tests on your child.
2) I would pretty much sell my soul to the devil if it guaranteed my child's health.
3) I will never delay giving patients results ever again. On that note, I apologise profusely and with my whole heart to any friend- patient (you know who you are) if I took even a minute longer than I could have before giving you your child's results.
4) Everyone makes mistakes. We are humans, not machines. Accept apologies gracefully, but just always double check abnormal blood results.
5) Contrary to what my blog might suggest, and despite their persistent attempts to drive me to insanity, I love my children more than I can put into words (and- not to blow my own trumpet or anything- I think that I'm pretty good at putting most things into words).
6) Lockdown is slowly becoming a new normal. We are a species that will adapt. And we will survive. Even if it means brewing our own pineapple beer*.
*In which case some of us may not survive.
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