Allergy Attack

Daisy Turnip writes.....

Daughter was sent home from work yesterday and we ended up having to see the emergency doctor – a nice 2 hour wait at the hospital emergency doctor clinic! We finally got home, Daughter took the prescribed medication and trotted off upstairs saying she wasn’t feeling too well.

Ten minutes later, she came running into the kitchen complaining that her tongue felt funny. No kidding!! Her neck and face were bright ready and hives suddenly started popping out all over her skin – stomach, face, arms, legs, you name it, and there were hives there. She was having a severe reaction to the anti-biotics she’d just taken! Something I recognise as it happens to me when I take a certain drug. Your body basically swells up until you look like a bright, pinky red Michelin Man, along with HUGE hives – not a pretty looking sight and extremely scary. As we stood there we watched her beautiful angelic face (ok, I’m just being gushy now because she was poorly and it was scaring the hell out of me too!) get both pinker and pinker and rounder and rounder.

‘Get your shoes on, we going back to the hospital – NOW!’

As we left, Hubby whispered in my ear, ‘Put your foot down!’

Driving up the motorway was horrendous. Twelve miles to drive with your one and only child, scratching incessantly and crying, saying she can’t breath properly and then in the next breath saying, ‘how embarrassing, what if someone sees me like this, am I going to die?’ Hmmm!!

And then, the mobile phone came from out of her bag? ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, thinking she might be calling someone. ‘Taking a photo to show my boss what’s happened to me!’ God, it would have been brilliant if they’d have sacked her for leaving work because she had taken ill. She’d have got herself some hot shot employment lawyer to slap an ET1 on the HR Manager’s desk, including photographic evidence of her condition! She will go far will daughter!!

By this point, I was seriously praying that I’d get pulled over by the police, so they could have taken her on a ‘blue lighter’ to the hospital – she would have probably taken a photograph of them too! But, typically, where are our boys in blue, when you really want them and you’re so seriously breaking the speed limit up the M40 – nowhere! But hey, she’s fine now and I do use that motorway a lot, so it’s not so bad!

We arrived at the hospital and calmly threw ourselves, screaming at the A&E reception desk (ok, a slight exaggeration, and I did not vault over the desk), with me kind of barking out to the receptionist that my daughter needed adrenalin and steroids. Coupled with our panic and my dodgy black country accent (which no one seems to be able to interpret in Warwickshire) he obviously couldn’t understand a word I said and simply walked off looking confused!! I have no idea where he went but then Ms Nightingale appeared and asked if someone was seeing to us? She then looked at Ms Michelin Junior and said, ‘Oh dear, you’d better come with me.’ Hooorray!! I turned round to properly look at Daughter for the first time since we’d left the house. She looked as if she’d done 50 rounds with Frank Bruno – without the bruises of course, but her face had completely lost all features and had completely swollen to one big mass of pink with 2 tiny slits where her beautiful eyes could be seen only twenty minutes before.

Five minutes later they were pumping adrenalin round her body! The itching, hives, redness and panic soon started to fade and the breathing began to ease.

Once she’d received numerous jabs and drugs she then lay with an oxygen mask on her face for an hour and a half, which was then followed by a fifteen minute session with the nebulizer – it was amazing, she still tried to talk with the mask on!! It was at this point, I realised she was on the mend and whilst she was doing her Darth Vader impression she started laughing and said, ‘This is going to end up on your blog isn’t it!?’ I just laughed and nodded. She then started to recite bits of my blog, using the exact phrases I use. Very funny!

Doctor then came in to assess Daughter who at this point was either seriously high, or just seriously happy! She asked if she could have some replacement tablets for the ones that she’d initially reacted to and made some quip that she’d like the same ones again and then started laughing. I’m sorry, but it was funny and I laughed too. He was obviously at the end of a double, triple shift and he said, ‘No, you can’t have the same ones, you can never have that drug again, do you understand me?’ We nodded and hung our heads in shame! He left, never to be seen again.

The mask finally came off and I asked how she was feeling? ‘I’m starving! I’ve had nothing to eat all day apart from a piece of toast this morning. Can we go now and fetch a curry on the way home?’ Near death experience over! Nurse smiled and nodded. I think she was grateful that peace would soon return to the A&E unit!

The only thing to do now is to get her to continually recite and remember that bugger of a name of the drug she’s allergic to!