Poorly Picklepot

On Wednesday night, Picklepot came into our room crying. He said he had tummy ache, and didn’t feel well, and he ended up sleeping in our bed. It was our first clue he was unwell.

On Thursday morning, he was slow to get ready for school – he kept saying he had tummy ache but he said it was because he was hungry, so we hurried him along to get dressed and go downstairs for breakfast. Despite him repeatedly saying he was hungry, he didn’t eat much breakfast, and then it was another battle getting him to brush teeth / brush hair and get out of the door to go to school. He was very moany and complaining a lot, but he can be like that in the morning anyway so we kind of didn’t take much notice of it!

At quarter to ten the school phoned me to say that Picklepot was really feeling under the weather, he was complaining of aches and pains and had a bit of a fever. I went to school with some kids Ibruprofen and we made the decision that a member of staff would give him the medicine and he would continue at school to see how he felt once the medicine kicked in. I knew he had cooking planned for yesterday and I knew he’d be upset to miss it, even if he was unwell, so I didn’t want to take him home early unless I had to. After being given his medicine I went home again, and I didn’t hear anything from school so I figured he had perked up a bit.

At the end of the school day Picklepot was escorted over the playground to me by the teaching assistant Mrs G, he was crying and she said he had been like it all afternoon. She said he’d been complaining of feeling poorly, he was quiet and crying and not like his usual self at all, and she said maybe he was coming down with something. I took him home and he cried the whole way home. At home he got into a onesie and snuggled on the sofa under a duvet. He asked for a chopped up apple, but he didn’t eat it. He didn’t want any dinner and he fell asleep on the sofa after another dose of Ibruprofen.

While he slept he was pale, with flushed cheeks, and he was restless while he slept and moaning / crying in his sleep. Just before 8 I had to take Sunshineface upstairs for a nappy change, and while I was there I thought since it was almost bedtime I’d get him in his PJs and get him ready for bed. While I was sorting him out, Picklepot woke up on the sofa and came upstairs. He said hello to me as he walked past, and he went straight into his bedroom and climbed into bed. I went in there a couple of minutes later and turned off the light since he was cuddled up under the duvet and he didn’t say anything. I checked on him 20 minutes later, after Daddy P got home and took over putting Sunshineface to bed, and he was snoring.

Overnight, Picklepot was up quite a few times. He was crying, saying he was in pain, he was aching, he needed a wee, he needed another drink, he had two more doses of Ibruprofen to try and get his temperature down and get him back to sleep again. When I woke up with Sunshineface at 8am I knew that Picklepot wouldn’t be going to school, so I rang them to register him absent at 8.30 and after that I called the doctors surgery to get an appointment for him today. Since it’s Friday I didn’t want to leave it and have him get much worse over the weekend.

We got to the doctors in good time for our appointment, and unsurprisingly after a quick exam and taking his temperature (39.5) the nurse confirmed that Picklepot has definitely got tonsillitis again. She got a prescription from the doctor for some penicillin, which I picked up from the pharmacy in the same building before we left. I also got some more Calpol since we’d run out, and the nurse said I can double-dose Calpol and kids Ibruprofen to keep his temperature down. When he has a fever he is much more prone to more violent night terrors, so we’re working to avoid that!

We came straight home afterward and he took his first dose of medicine, he’s been cuddled up on the sofa all day watching YouTube videos and while he looks a better colour he is still very quiet and clearly not feeling right. Fortunately Daddy P is off work today so he was able to stay home with Sunshineface while I took Picklepot to the doctors, and he has been able to watch both kids while I got on with work.

We have plans all weekend, so I’m not sure whether we’re going to have to cancel them yet or not – I’m going to see how he feels and take it as it comes. It would be nice to get out and do stuff / see people as planned, but if he’s not well enough there’s no point trying to force the issue, it will just end badly.

Fingers crossed he feels better soon!!

The End of the SATS is Nigh!

I spoke with Miss B this morning because one of Picklepot’s classmates said to me that Picklepot was hurting him. This kid keeps coming to me and telling me, and I keep saying, “You need to tell the teacher, or a dinner lady, when it happens” Because he won’t, he’ll wait til he sees me which could be the day after or it could be three days after the event. Anyway, I know this kid has similar issues to Picklepot, so I know he’s obviously heard somebody at some point say “I’ll tell your mum!” and so he thinks that is the way to deal with it. I spoke with Picklepot, and he said that it was yesterday, during ICT, this kid kept telling him he’d done it wrong, and he said no I haven’t, but the kid insisted he had and kept going on about it so Picklepot got annoyed with him. I explained again that even when he gets annoyed he isn’t supposed to hit people, and that if the kid wouldn’t get out of his face and telling him he was wrong he needed to call over the teacher and let them know what was going on, not resort to hitting the kid. So I spoke with Miss B, and she said OK, we’ll have a chat about the right way to handle things, because not only does the kid keep telling me instead of the teachers when he feels that Picklepot has done something wrong, but also because Picklepot felt the best way to resolve the situation was to hit the kid, which obviously isn’t the thing to do.

While we were chatting she said the SATS would be finished tomorrow and she was hoping that once it was all out of the way things would calm down. It’s not just Picklepot who has been up in the air about it all – a lot of the other kids in his class are finding it tough too. I found out Picklepot has to go off alone and do his SATS away from the other kids, because not only does he chat to them when he shouldn’t, but also because of his constant narration of everything. I don’t know if that’s just him, or if it’s to do with the ASD? But I’ve noticed it at home, too, he doesn’t do anything silently – he’ll narrate it, just like they do on those YouTube videos he’s such a fan of, even if there’s nobody there to listen, I’ll hear him from the other room rambling on about whatever he’s doing. Anyway the oher day it was Mrs S, the headmasters wife (she’s also a teacher at the school) who took Picklepot off for one of his SATS and he was quite proudly telling her that his scores didn’t matter, that mummy & daddy loved him anyway, that the SATS weren’t to test him but to test that the school had taught him everything they should have done, to test that the teachers had been doing their job properly – all of which I’ve told him, and his dad has told him, and we’ve gone through time and time again at home. He then finishes off this explanation to Mrs S by saying, “If I fail, Miss B will get the sack!” Where on earth he has heard that I don’t know. It’s certainly not something I’ve said to him! Poor Miss B! Luckily Mrs S laughed about it, and told Miss B who laughed about it and she was laughing when she told me, but then I walked home with one of the other mums and she said her daughter had come out with the same thing the other day at home! So it seems the kids have heard it somewhere, it’s beyond me where they’ve heard it, but apparently all the year 2 class believe that if they fail their SATS then their teacher will get the sack!!

Anyway as it is the last day of SATS tomorrow I’m hoping that we can do something to mark the occasion, maybe go out for dinner as a family or something, my mum is visiting tomorrow and it was her birthday earlier in the week so it’d be nice to take her out with us too. No plans so far for Saturday but I think Daddy P had a couple of presents hidden away for Picklepot for after the SATS so he might get those. Then on Sunday we’re off to my in laws for dinner.

Today I went for a lovely walk in town with Sunshineface, met up with a friend and we went for coffee, then we took a walk alongside the river in the sunshine, it was lovely and just what I needed to lift my spirits this morning. I felt a bit blugh first thing, I’m not really sure why. Tonight I’m out with my team from work, we won the ICE award for the month for being so damn good at what we do so as a treat we’re going out for dinner. I’m looking forward to going out with the gang, and going out in general – I get so few hours off from being ‘mum’, it’ll be nice to be me for a while! 

Here We Go Again ... The Hunt For Diagnosis

We went for the doctor’s appointment on Wednesday morning last week to get the ball rolling with the ADHD diagnosis for Picklepot.

Our appointment was at 9.20am so we walked to the doctors after morning registration at school (So Picklepot’s attendance record wouldn’t be affected by missing morning register) and we arrived at the surgery at 9.10am. I had both boys with me. Sunshineface had a bad night so I was exhausted and he hadn’t woken up til late, so he’d woken up and had a nappy change, got dressed and got straight in the pushchair.

The doctors surgery seemed quiet, and when I booked in on the computer screen it showed a 12 minute waiting time. Considering we were 10 minutes early for our appointment, I thought that was fair enough. However the minutes ticked by and it became apparent that the 12 minute waiting time was a gross underestimation.

By 9.45am Picklepot was spinning, flapping and squealing in the waiting room, bored of waiting. There are a few childrens books on a small table in the corner of the room, and the ones aimed at really young kids he’d read to Sunshineface, and the ones for older children had pages ripped out and drawn on which made him upset because someone had done this awful damage to a book so he didn’t want to look at them. He span and flapped and squealed some more. I asked him to come and do it near me and not on the other side of the waiting room just so he wasn’t in danger of accidentally tripping and falling on someone else, or hitting them with a flailing hand or foot. I didn’t try to stop the stimming. I knew it was important for him to release the energy he had inside him.

I’d already warned him that I would need to talk to the doctor about him. He said that was OK, because it was to get the doctor to do a referral to a specialist who could help us better understand why he finds it so difficult to sit and concentrate like the other kids do at school. We were called in to see the doctor just after 10am. By this point Picklepot was bouncing off the walls.

The doctor we saw is what I call an ‘old school’ doctor. He has a big ancient wooden desk in the middle of his office, and a huge wooden bookshelf to one side with copies of Grey’s Anatomy and similar; he has models of skeletal systems, a skull with labelled areas, coasters that look like scrabble letters with his initials. He also had a Care Bears beanbag which Picklepot made a bee line for (after dancing around the room nosing at everything and asking questions about it all).

I didn’t try to stop it. When you’re there to get your kid referred for an assessment like ADHD the best thing to do is let them bounce and twirl and talk at ninety miles an hour and fiddle with everything because it shows the doctor some of what you’re experiencing and why you’re asking for the referral. So I left Picklepot to it and spoke with the doctor, who was very much in agreement with me about the need for assessment as he agrees its pretty obvious Picklepot does have ADHD as well. We discussed the mess up with the CDC and all of that – and both of us said at the same time “It’s like they deliberately make it difficult in the hope you’ll give it up”. He wrote the referral as I sat there. He took the notes I’d made and read though the letter that Mrs D had given me. (He also made sure he found the copy of it on the system before allowing me to walk off with that copy again)

We were in there for maybe 10 minutes, but I felt it was a good appointment. He’s definitely on the same page as me. As I was preparing to leave, he said that parenting could be challenging at the best of times and parenting a child as full on as Picklepot is an even bigger challenge but what we must all remember is that the person facing the biggest challenges here is Picklepot himself, so it’s important we do all we can to get the right assessments and diagnosis so that he can benefit from the support available. He said if I don’t hear anything in 4 weeks about an appointment for assessment he wants me to contact him again.

Here we go again, we’re going on a diagnosis hunt, we’re off to find the next one, what a beautiful day, we’re not scared …