Breast is indeed best and hospital review

Sophia is sick yet again! Just one week after she recovers from the last bout of sickness.

Just to give a bit of background, I fully breastfed (ie no formula no other milk but yes solids from 6 months) Sophia for a bit more than 1 year then slowly weaned her off to full cream cow’s milk over the next 2 months. For the first 14 months of her life she only caught the flu once and that was when she was just 6 weeks old and a terrible strain that the whole family also caught. Other than that she was spared even when some of the family are sick. However, very soon after coming off breastmilk completely she caught a cold. After she fully recovered she went for her mmr jab and was well for a week then developed a high fever complete with runny nose and cough.

Of course, the spike in temperature has to come on a sunday when all the clinics that are halfway decent are closed. So we brought her to KK’s A&E department.

Upon entering the A&E department, the first thought was “wow, its quite empty, great, the wait won’t be long.” We took a queue number from this unconspicuous box that was horizontal from the entrance so its not really in our line of sight.

Queue ticket here

While waiting Sophia was actually still quite the happy camper.

Happy Sophia at the waiting area

After a short wait our number was shown on one of the triage doors.

Triage

We were attended to by a Filipino nurse who handed us a disposable kidney dish with some paper napkins and tap water to sponge Sophia with. Sophia was not too keen about the stethoscope and screamed very loudly. So I had to bring a very unhappy girl to the registration counter and pay up the $90 registration fee. We were then told that the wait was 2.5 hours!! Once we entered the real waiting are which was hidden from sight of the entrance we understood why. It was packed to the brim and every other child had a cold pack to his/her forehead so I asked Sophia whether she wanted to go to the playground. She immediately nodded her head. How she knew what was a playground is beyond me.

Look, mummy, I'm driving!

We barely played for 5 minutes though before grandpa called us saying they called her name but he can’t hear which room she was supposed to go to. So I had to bring Sophia over and ask around till I finally was told which room. We saw a doctor who was clearly an Indian national and rather young. She was very kind but Sophia similarly didn’t care for her stetoscope so we ended up with another very upset baby again. Her diagnosis was virus infection ie the-doctor-doesn’t-know-what-it-is-either and we were prescribed some paracetemol, ibuprofen, and iliadin.

So we jumped the queue to be ahead of some 80+ people just because Sophia had a sufficiently high fever. But half the people had fever pads on so I wonder whether they just had like 37.x degree fever or something. Else the priority queue would be ridiculously long anyway.

I hope this past month is not indicative of what it will be like on an ongoing basis. She’s sick for half the time ever since she came off breastmilk. So mummies out there, breastfeed as long as you can. It is, however very liberating when I finally stopped and didn’t need to be attached to the pump.

UPDATE: We suspect she has been falling sick because of the new milk we introduced. We’ve been rotating between fresh full cream cow’s milk from Horizon (organic), Organic Valley and Pura and I recently found an organic cow’s milk farm right here in Singapore that delivers their milk so I started ordering from them and the times when Sophia started falling sick roughly coincides with starting of that milk as well. Sophia has also been getting hives which she didn’t used to have so it does seem like a sort of allergic reaction. We’re stopping that milk to see whether the situation gets better. Already after stopping it as of yesterday, her temperature has gone back down to the 37s from the 38s and 39s, but it could also just have been a case of the infection having run its course and is dying down. I do hope its an allergy to that milk though, then the solution is an easy one.