DAISY RETURNS!!!!!

Hi there tiddly-peeps (A Hoobs reference for all you wonderfully amazing parents who manage to survive early mornings without the aid of Channel 4). I feel like I’m starting all over again, I’ve been away so long. I must thank Pops for holding the fort during my absence.

It’s been a crazy few weeks. And not the usual summer madness that school holidays and unexpected heatwaves bring, but another level of madness altogether. Pops hinted at the situation – I’ve been stuck in various hospital wards, attached to an array of monitors and drips, enduring an assortment of tests and investigations, and basically have lost touch with the world completely. But I’m back! Well sort of…

I’ve never spent time inside before – in any sort of institution. And for the first time I started to understand how prisoners actually make it through sentences that last for years on end. I know there are some differences – prisons have televisions that work, hospitals don’t – but I should imagine there are also a lot of similarities between long stay in a prison and long stay in a hospital. For a start, breakfast arrives ridiculously early to the sound of clattering on iron railings; secondly the staff get to submit inmates to a range of unexplained ritualistic procedures at periodic intervals throughout the day; and finally, there are strict visiting hours with controls on numbers, suitability and type (children usually not welcome). But I dare say smoking rules are more lax in prison, as Pops pointed out (I never thought I’d live to see the day Pops stood up for the rights of a smoker!).

I’ll tell you more about the details over the next few posts, as I start to orientate myself around the keyboard again. Suffice to say for now that what has always been a healthy suspicion of all things in white coats has now grown into an active distaste. I always knew that historically the world of doctors and medicines was designed to control and subjugate the patient, but I had kind of hoped things had moved on a bit in the 21st century. I was wrong.

More of that to come. But the whole experience has changed me deeply, and this morning when I found myself interrupting a game of doctor and patient between Poppy and Lily, a crisis of conscience quickly ensued. Dr Poppy was administering to patient Lily, by searching for a migrant heartbeat in her lower digestive cavity, with the aid of a plastic stethoscope. At this point, patient Lily intervened, shouting, 'Duh, Poppy! It's my foot that's hurting, you don't have to listen to my heart!' – rounded off with her best 5-year-old impersonation of a teenage grunt.

Dr Poppy simply looked up, made an absentminded adjustment to her stethoscope, and got back to what she was doing, completely ignoring the patient's interjection, as if it had been nothing more than the buzz of a passing fly.

Afraid that the whole thing might escalate into a doctor-patient uprising - as Poppy is going through a very determined stage at the moment, and Lily does her best to provoke her - I urged Lily to let Dr Poppy do what she wanted to her patient. ‘After all’, I heard myself say, 'the doctor always knows best!'

And then I almost choked on my words! Here's me – still reeling from the shock of dealing with a consultant who thought the world revolved around him and no patient had the right to speak - and there I was trying to train my child, already showing very positive signs of rebellion and self confidence to question authority, to abandon all sense of control and give in to the power of the dominant regime. Aarrghh!!

Don’t worry – I will explain all very soon. It’s getting late, and I have a heap of medication to get through before I can go to bed…

It's nice to be back.

Daisy x