Well, it’s one way to experience all the different hospital options, but I’d like to think I’ve done enough research for one year. I promise I was going to blog about something more uplifting and stop moaning…maybe even take some photographs! Eve had other plans though.

We had the pleasure of the hospitality (sorry) of yet another children’s hospital yesterday. Eve woke us at 4am because she’d been sick and by 8am she wasn’t showing any sign of getting better. I’m trying to write this without inflicting too many descriptive words on you, because I know there are those among you who probably don’t like to read blow-by-blow accounts of other children’s illnesses. Anyway, she wasn’t keeping anything down, even liquid. I tried feeding her small teaspoons of water and she couldn’t even manage to hold onto that. I’d read somewhere in one of those children’s instruction manuals you get when you have a baby that you have to be extremely careful of dehydration, as it can quickly become very serious. So, as soon as I could see that she was only getting worse we got her to our local doctor.

He took one look at her grey face and her sunken eyes and told us to get her to the hospital straight away. She was a listless little shadow of her former self and it was quite scary to see just how fast she’d gone downhill. We got on the motorway (no public transport for us this time) and drove as fast as our little Saxo could take us to Tallaght Children’s Hospital. I must apologise to you if you were bullied out of the fast lane or undertaken by a green hatchback yesterday morning, Matt was taking no chances. I was hiding in the backseat praying we weren’t all about to admitted.

Eve has never been so sick as she was yesterday and I’ve never felt so helpless as I did when we stood around the bed and watched the doctor hook her little arm up to the IV. She was so listless and ill she barely had the energy to cry when she felt the needle going in and all I could do was try and get her to look at me while I smiled as if everything was perfectly fine.

We sat with her for about 3 hours and waited for the fluids to do their work. The doctor told us to expect that she would have to be admitted and it did seem that nothing was happening. Eve slept for most of the time, and when she was awake she would just ask for a drink please. We didn’t want her to be sick anymore so we had to keep saying no. Big mean parents!

At last the doctor came in to decide if he needed to keep her in and told us to give her a little drink of 7Up. She was so delighted we were finally letting her have a drink her whole body was shaking as she was sucking it up the straw. As soon as she’d finished the cup she perked up and started chattering away to us just as she normally does. What a relief! Once the doctor saw she was doing a lot better he said we could take her home.

As soon as we got home she and I collapsed on the couch and fell asleep. They really do put you through the whole spectrum of emotions these children. I can tell you though that just like in Vincent’s and Temple Street, we were seen straight away. The staff were all lovely and explained everything they were doing. I did witness the trolleys along the corridors in the adult section though and I hope I never have to experience that for myself.

I didn’t write this yesterday because I was just a little bit too tired and a little bit too annoyed to fire up the blog.

Eve and I took a little trip to A&E (ER to any Americans reading this) yesterday. Eve had hurt her elbow playing in the garden on Thursday evening and it was hurting her yesterday morning so we wanted to get it checked out just to make sure there wasn’t anything worse than a sprain. I don’t drive very much, I don’t actually have a full license yet (I’ve been on the waiting list for a test for about 15 months now but that’s another story), so we had to take public transport.

We left the house at about 9am and were able to get a lift to the DART station, from there we were on our own. I decided to bring her to St Vincent’s Hospital close to Dublin city centre because it’s about an hour away from us if we take the DART. Sure enough we got there easily and were seen almost immediately. The nurse and the doctor who had a look at Eve were lovely and were able to tell me that she had a pulled elbow. Something quite common in little children with their extremely flexible bones sometimes flexing a little too much and going out of place. He was able to tell me exactly how this very common ailment is fixed…a simple turn of the arm and it would click back in place. Great! I thought, but then he told me that he was sorry but he couldn’t do it. St. Vincent’s is not a children’s hospital and they’re not insured to treat children in any way. I’d have to go to Crumlin Hospital or Tallaght.

I went outside to reception and asked the lovely ladies behind the desk if they could tell me how I could make my way to either of those hospitals. They weren’t sure other than to suggest a taxi, they didn’t think there was a bus or if there was where I would catch it. Neither option was really good for me…I don’t like to take Eve in a car without a kid’s car seat (it’s not legal for a start let alone safe) and I know from previous experience that Eve’s buggy won’t fit on most Dublin Buses. The ladies then suggested I go to Temple St hospital, they weren’t sure where it was but they knew it was close to Connolly station and I could get there by DART.

So that’s where I headed. We got off at Connolly at about 11:30am, Eve was loving all the train trips although her arm was giving her some pain, she’s a trouper and wasn’t too grumpy. As long as I supplied constant snacks and distractions she was happy enough. We got some vague directions from a lady at the station and started walking. Unfortunately it’s a lot further than the receptionists at St. Vincent’s thought and I took a few wrong turns. It’s not a part of town I know very well and there are no sign posts to tell you where the hospital is. I got directions about 4 or 5 times and finally found the little alleyway that is the entrance to the hospital. By that time we’d been walking for 45 minutes and Eve was fast asleep. I had to wake her so she could be seen which was thankfully quite quickly. I was worried we were in for a long wait when I saw the amount of people crammed into the little wards and waiting rooms. Everyone is in on top of each other, listening in on everyone else’s consultations. At one point a little girl was having her x-rays examined in the middle of the ward and we were all in on the discussion. The doctors and nurses must be masters of organisation to be able to remember who’s who and what needs to be done in the middle of all that.

Eve was seen and treated sitting on a waiting area seat by a door with people barrelling past. The doctor was lovely and although she was upset because it was quite a painful thing to have her bones popped back in place, Eve was great. She impressed the nurses by drinking her Baby Nurofen herself from the little cup they gave her, but she was starting to get very tired and so was I. With X-Rays and waiting time, we were there for about an hour and a half, so not really all that bad.

So now I just had to make my way back to the DART station…but I managed to get myself turned around somehow and ended up down at Croke Park. Don’t ask me how…I thought I was heading for Gardiner Street. Eve wasn’t happy at all by now but she fell asleep again while we walked….and walked. Finally I found my way back to Tara Street DART station almost an hour and a half after leaving the hospital. After that it was just a matter of getting a DART back to Greystones.

We walked back through the front door at 4:30pm. 8 hours after leaving the house. I’d spent about 3 to 4 hours of that time walking the streets of Dublin pushing a heavy buggy and was pretty worn out. I was also a little bit shocked at just how difficult it is for a person with no car to get their child seen in an emergency.

Now, I don’t blame anyone but myself for getting lost coming out of the hospital, I would have saved myself about 45 minutes without that little detour, but I just can’t understand why the first hospital we went to couldn’t treat Eve. I mean, sure, have children’s hospitals for serious illnesses and in-patient care, but surely not A&E? I got a little taste of what it must be like to be a parent of a child who has an emergency and doesn’t live even as close as we do.

Can anyone tell me…(because I’ve spent some time on the internet trying to find out and can’t find any clear information about it), when the plans to merge all the children’s hospitals into one national children’s hospital go through…will that mean even fewer places where young children can be seen on an emergency basis?

Election day today and for me, the very first time I’ve ever voted in an Irish General Election. In every previous one since I turned 18 I was out of the country, so you can’t blame me for the shower we’ve had in up to now! Well, actually you can blame me for Tony Blair…but not Bertie OK?

Thanks to sites like IrishElection.com, MyCandidate.ie, Politics.ie, Mulley.net (for all the party political broadcasts I couldn’t watch on the telly because I don’t have Irish telly channels) and so many other bloggers, I feel like I’m more informed about the parties and what’s on offer than I’ve ever been before. If I didn’t have the internet I would have had only the mountains of leaflets that came through the door to try and decipher it all.

So, I’ve chosen who I will be voting for by a process of elimination:

If you’re Fianna Fail…you’re out (particularly since we’ve got Dick Roche as our local FF candidate)
If you’re PD…you’re out
If you’re Sinn Féin…no way
If you’re in favour of handing over the Greystones Marina to developers as proposed…sorry, not getting my vote (rules out my local Fine Gael candidates)
For a little while I thought about People Before Profit, but then found out they were really the Socialist Workers Party in disguise…so no, can’t have politicians with hidden agendas (*ahem)
If you’d consider joining forces with any of the above (particularly FF or SF)…sorry, you won’t get my vote (so no Greens for me)

So, who does that leave me? I guess it’s Labour and Independent.

I don’t know if it’s the best method in the world and I reserve the right to change my mind until the last second. It’s a pity the only canvasser to come to my door was Dick Roche’s daughter (she was lovely by the way and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her there was no way I was voting for her Dad). As a result I’ve a house full of Dick Roche merchandise including a number of hefty key rings and a Dick Roche emery board (pictured above) of all things…so we women can think about politics while we’re filing our nails?

There is a housing estate linked to my road by a small opening in a wall. Around here it’s considered the “bad part” of town, as much as this town has one, possibly because it’s a council estate and compared to the leafy streets in other parts, this housing estate is a little rougher round the edges.

I love to go on long walks that bring me through both worlds, in fact I’m just back in the door from one now. It struck me this evening, like it always does that the streets in the supposedly safer areas are always completely deserted. As I walked along one of my favourite routes, past old Victorian houses hidden behind gates and tall bushes, the only person I saw was a woman retrieving her run-away dog. She caught him up and was struggling with the lock on her gate when I passed and she gave me a reluctant nod and a suspicious eye when I smiled at her.

The contrast when I reached the housing estate near my home couldn’t have been greater. Here the houses are crammed close together and the streets are so narrow the cars have to inch their way along through the space between all the parked cars. The place was heaving with activity. Children of all ages playing football, riding their bikes, sitting on the walls playing with dolls. Their parents and older brothers sitting on kitchen chairs out in front of their houses enjoying the sunshine and having a natter or doing a bit of work on their gardens or cars. As always happens when I walk through there I was greeted by everyone whose eye I caught, even the young kids playing football gave me a “Howaya.” One little girl ran along beside me as I walked and asked me “You have a little girl don’t ya miss?”

I love walking through this estate because it’s like I get to step back in time to what it was like in the housing estate where I grew up. One of the games I spotted being played was an old favourite we used to call Kerbs. Two people stand on opposite sides of the road and the object is to throw a ball so that it bounces off the edge of the opposite kerb. If it bounces all the way back to you you get 10 points…only half way and it’s 5. It gave me a jolt of reminiscence and I wanted to join them, just like when I walk through in the winter time and I get the smell of coal fires and mince dinners.

It’s the rough part of town and yet I always feel safe there.

I got back from the Irish Businesswomen’s conference this evening and am about to collapse into my bed. It was a brilliant couple of days and I thoroughly enjoyed being there and taking part as well as taking the photographs but today I’m exhausted. I gained a new respect for photographers who cover day-long events like weddings…they really earn their money.

The photographs of the conference are up on Flickr, Conn will have the Podcasts up very soon and Keith Bohanna live-blogged the event, so with Annette chairing the day’s proceedings and Alan being one of the speakers, bloggers successfully infiltrated the conference.

We’re becoming a little like the masons…we need a secret handshake.