Alyssa's diarrhoea - Part 1

The diarrhoea started on that fateful day, 10th of July, which also happened to be Desmond's birthday. It was a happy day initially. Desmond and I took leave from work to spend some time together. We watched Ice Age 3 which was hilarious, shopped a little and played some pool. Then we picked Alyssa up from infant care, which informed us that she had already passed motion 4 times that day. We went for dinner with the rest of the family at Jumbo, Kallang Stadium to further celebrate his birthday and by the end of the night, Alyssa would already have passed motion for about 6-7 times.

Things didn't get any better the next day as she continued to pass motion more frequently than usual. By evening, I decided to take her to KKH to have her diarrhoea checked out. She actually started to run a temperature by the time we got to KKH. We got to see the doctor quite soon due to her condition. The doctor felt her tummy, asked if her poop had any blood and if she was still taking milk normally. He promptly decided that it was a viral infection since there wasn't any blood in her stools and she was feeding normal, and sent us home with a tube of nappy rash cream and some Lacteol Fort, with is Lactobacillus Acidophilus. The purpose of that bacteria is to flush out those bad ones from her gut. He felt that Smecta (a medicine to concentrate poop and therefore lessen the number of times she poops) isn't too useful and didn't give us any.

Now, doctors DO NOT give medicines to stop babies' diarrhoea, like they do to adults. This is because babies can't handle the side effects of these medicines. Also, they need to pass all the 'bad things' out of their bodies. So, doctors will let them have these runs for about 5-7 days, by which the diarrhoea should clear up on its own. I know, it is unbelievable to have diarrhoea for a week. We, the adults would probably be dead at the end of it, but that is what happens for babies.

Diarrhoea for a week was a big problem for us. Diarrhoea is an infectious disease for all of you who didn't know and can spread easily from person to person. To make matters worse, she started running a temperature again once we reached infant care on Monday, even though I had already fed her some paracetamol earlier on and these people are really strict about not letting kids with fever in. So there was no way I could leave her at the infant care to go to work. It's not that I didn't want to take care of her but I have little annual leave left.

Frustrated, I called up Bindu for help to see if we can improve her diarrhoea in a lesser amount of time so she could return to infant care as soon as possible. Bindu is a paediatric nurse at Mount Elizabeth who gave me lots of advice when Alyssa gets sick e.g. the first time she got diaper rash, when she had running nose etc. Helpful Bindu called up her paediatric doctor friend and asked if there's was anything else we could do about her diarrhoea. Then the key question came: was Alyssa's stool mucous...?