NotSheep

Today was Toby’s appointment for a sweat-test and ECG. Scratchy took George, Freddy and Jack off for breakfast and shopping after leaving Toby and me at the hospital - along with Barney, who stayed with us to help. It’s a very large hospital complex, we had to visit three entirely separate parts of it, and I still couldn’t put any weight on my foot, so carrying a baby around the place wasn’t something I wanted to do on my own.

We went for the sweat-test first. It takes five minutes for them to stimulate the sweat, and then you have to wait half an hour while an absorbent pad collects it. Toby was a star throughout. He lay there and laughed and talked to the guy who did it, and threw his sock at him and then looked at him waiting for him to give it back - absolutely charmed him. In fact he was like that all morning - everywhere we went we were surrounded by adoring faces. At one point we had about five staff members surrounding us and vying for his attention

I walked from the lab where the sweat-test was done to the Casualty department, but even using a crutch and with Barney carrying Toby, it took ages and my foot was very painful by the time we got there. A nurse-practitioner triaged me and found a wheelchair for me. I was sent for an x-ray and back to casualty, where the same nurse showed Barney my x-ray and explained it all to him (though he already knew the names of all the bones from having learned it for jujitsu). I was sent to orthopaedics because there was a rough area showing on two of the toes, but ortho said there was nothing broken and that it’s just a case of keeping the weight off it until it healed a bit. Uh-huh. At least I’m not stuck in a cast for half the summer though!

I asked if I could have some help to get to the children’s hospital (same complex, different building) - Barney was thoroughly enjoying pushing me and Toby around in the wheelchair (and doing a great job of it too), but it was too far for us to manage like that. Someone from ortho arranged transport for us, but it took a while to sort it out: the computer system couldn’t cope with an adult needing transport to the children’s hospital, but had trouble with the notion of me being the patient at the start of the journey but not the end I asked them to phone the children’s hospital to make sure we weren’t too late for the ECG (although we didn’t need an appointment, they only do them a couple of days a week, and I wasn’t sure if it was all-day). It turned out that they’d stopped doing them half an hour earlier

So Toby wasn’t going to get his ECG today, and the transport arrangements were cancelled and I phoned Scratchy to get him to collect us. Home for lunch, then I took myself off to bed for a while, because between Toby not sleeping well and the pain in my foot, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.

Barney is off to Scout Camp in an hour - he’s packed his own bag and I haven’t checked it, so we’ll find out just how much attention he actually paid to the list!

Edit, five minutes later: Strike that last bit - I read through the items on his list with him, and he was missing about a third of them