When To Worry

As a parent, a relatively new one at that, it is hard to know when to worry about your child. Ask my husband, he will tell you that in the past I have been one huge worry wart. I worried about things I didn’t even know about! You would think that would be a recipe for disaster, or at the very least ulcers, when the time came to be a mum.

Strangely enough, the opposite has happened and I find myself being less of a worrier. I should clarify here, that it has taken me 13 months to get to this point. There was a period there when any time someone else had my son, I thought, “What if I never see him again?” and that was not a pleasant feeling. But yesterday we took Nicklas to the emergency room (more on that in a second) and it was me telling my husband that everything would be fine.

I think I’ve just finally come to the realisation that there is no use worrying over nothing…there’ll be plenty of time for worrying when there’s something to actually worry about.

Last night, while my husband was giving Nicklas his bath, he called me upstairs to look at something. I thought Nicklas must have been doing something cute, like always, but instead Mike asked if I thought Nicklas’ belly looked bigger than usual. We got him out of the bath and started to get him dressed and his belly did seem rather inflated and felt quite hard. He was showing no signs of discomfort or pain, and was actually giggling whenever we poked his belly. But a quick google search of “swollen hard belly” brought up nothing good. It never does! So off to the ER we went, still not even sure if there was any swelling.

Now, we live in Australia, where there is both public healthcare and private. We have private healthcare, not necessarily by choice, but we have it. So off to the private hospital we went, thinking our wait would be much shorter than that at the public hospital. We were in, seen, x-rayed and home within an hour of leaving the house, so that part was great. The not-so-great part was the $200 bill and the doctor’s look of “What are you talking about? This child is in perfect health!”

We should get some of the $200 back from the public healthcare system, but it will probably be less than half. I guess my lesson here is that unless he is upset, seems to be in pain or copious amounts of blood are spewing from his body, it can probably wait until the morning when the dr’s office, who bulk bills, is open.

That said, a virtual friend of mine has since mentioned that her daughter’s only cancer symptom was a swollen and hard belly. She was otherwise in great spirits. So it just goes to show, sometimes you are better safe than sorry!