LIFE'S A GAS

Daughter was sent home after spending over four hours in the hospital, because the tests they ran all came back negative. She still has the pain though. We will just have to see how she goes on....

It was a strange day yesterday. We had a very late dinner. Daughter had been complaining of pain for two or three days - but then, she often gets pain and has been to hospital with it in the past. She said this pain was different though and during dinner it got worse. I was concerned when she said it was now a constant throbbing and that it was tender to touch. I told my husbamd to ring the hospital for advice, but they just told him to ring either our doctor or 999. He rang 999 because he didn`t want to wait hours for a doctor to come out as he/she would probably only then send her on to hospital. Anyway, switchboard operator wanted to talk to our daughter and asked lots of questions, at the end of which she was told to ring a doctor. She was in the process of taking down a phone number when there was a knock at the door and - to our great surprise - it was a first response medic. Still not quite sure how that happened!

The medic asked more questions and took her temperature - which was slightly raised. He made it clear he was pretty certain she had appendicitis. The funny thing was, he gave her gas and air for the pain. She was extremely nervous of having it, but in the end loved it because it made her feel very happy! She was very amusing and I am pretty sure the amusing things she was saying brightened the medic`s day considerably.

Because hubby had had alcohol, he was unable to drive and, of course, there are no buses on Christmas day. The medic was pretty sure they would keep her in overnight so, although one of us could have gone with her in the ambulance, we decided in the end not to. Daughter had to get a taxi home which cost her £25.

While she was away we watched a DVD of our son`s called Amores Peros (Life`s A Bitch). It was watchable but pretty violent. There was dog fighting in it and lots of either dead or injured dogs - but strangely it didn`t upset me and I even quite enjoyed the film. All in all, an extremely strange and unusual Christmas day!