Maternity 33

week 10: becoming your family’s “triage nurse”

Illness is the number one enemy of productivity. It’s hard enough balancing home and work: add one sick person to the equation and it becomes impossible. And while, in your past life, you only had to worry about your own health, you are now vulnerable to the aches and pains of several other people. And toddlers are full of bugs! 

I’ve struggled mightily to limit sickness in my home. We don’t drink from the same cups, nor eat from the same dishes. We wash hands compulsively. I try to avoid public transport at rush hour. The list goes on. Yet, I’ve had no success in staying healthy. Actually, this past winter has been a real ordeal in terms of minor bugs and at times it felt as if we could never leave our home, as one of us was sick. In the darkest moments I envisioned a home-bound life, and seriously wondered how I could ever again become a productive member of society.

There is no magic solution to this problem. However, as I have spent three years building up my medical experience and essentially acting as my family’s triage nurse (the people who sort through minor and major problems when you check in to the hospital), I have come up with two measures that help us get back on our feet as soon as possible and limit the time spent healing.

1. Go local. Kids’ bugs are for the most part local bugs: i.e. they caught them in your neighborhood park. It thus makes sense to have a local pediatrician. Ours is 6 blocks away from our house and a simple call to the advice nurse is usually sufficient to limit the drama. I might call fearing appendicitis and hear that there is a 24 hour stomach virus roaming in our neighborhood. This brings the adrenalin down and we can then focus on simple healing principles: hydration and rest. The (obvious) second advantage to having a local pediatrician is the time saved when a visit becomes necessary. If one of our children is ill, I don’t usually need to take a full day off work. I’ll work from home and take a break at the time of the pediatric appointment.

2. Find a family doctor. I have been very frustrated by one feature of the American medical system: the non-existence of the generalist, family doctor. This is a staple feature of French life and it makes a lot of sense. Basically, doctors need to be able to make quick diagnostics and suggest effective remedies. To do this properly, they need to spend time with you and get a good sense of your personal and family history. They also need to know basic features of your life rhythms and circumstances. This is considerably easier to attain if they treat more than one member of the same family. In the U.S. my children have one doctor, I have another and my husband has a third. So if I get strep throat (which I had twice this winter), not only do I have to find treatment for myself, I then need to call the pediatrician and have my husband call his doctor to take preventative measures. This is a royal waste of time for me, and totally inefficient for the doctors as well. End of rant. 

The only solution I have found is to go to a doctor who does not operate within the confines of the American medical infrastructure and who was trained in Europe. Our family M.D. (Medical Doctor, i.e. practicing modern medicine) is Nigerian, and trained in British Medical schools.  She also happens to be a homeopath. My most rational friends ask me how in the world I can go to a homeopath, because they think it is quack medicine. The answer is pretty simple. Firstly, she’s a family M.D. who happens to be a homeopath. Secondly, she’s not medication trigger happy. This means her first reflex is not to prescribe anything, but to talk you through the illness and follow basic healing rituals. Whatever we have, she always recommends rest and hydration. This works most of the time. I know it, because I was raised by a family of western doctors and even they recommended rest, hydration and a little will power rather than medication. So when we visit our homeopath, she reassures us by checking that the illness is not terrible or life threatening and then gives us the courage to treat it naturally.

As a homeopath, she also prescribes remedies. I’m not sure how I feel about this. From a scientific, experimental perspective, homeopathy has not been proven to be more effective than placebo. In other words, the homeopath could prescribe a salt pill (or a piece of chocolate) and tell you it will treat your illness and they would have the same chance of success than if they gave you an actual remedy. Yet, I actually see some value in this, since there are no unfortunate secondary effects from homeopathic remedies, contrary to many medications prescribed by conventional doctors. 

But it would be a mistake to conclude that all homeopaths are quacks or idiots. We first met our homeopath when our son was a few months old and we were looking for advice about immunization. Though my husband and I are proponents of inoculation against life threatening diseases, we were a bit confused by the number of vaccines a baby and toddler receives nowadays. Hepatitis A and B, for instance, and administered before the 3rd birthday, whereas we got these shots in our teens, when we began traveling to distant lands. The homeopath had some sound advice, which boils down to three principles:

• vaccinate only for life threatening diseases;
• vaccinate only for diseases with known viral strands (we don’t get flu vaccines);
• administer one vaccine at a time: for instance, we separated Measles, Mumps and Rubella. The rationale for this is that it is very unlikely that you would contract all these diseases at once, so you should teach your body to fight diseases as they will likely come.

We applied these principles to the standard vaccination schedule recommended by the American Pediatric Association, and our pediatrician has no issue with our marginal changes.

You might think that this is all a bit lunatic given the additional expense we incur each time we visit our homeopath. I’d be inclined to agree with you if it weren’t for my first point: our family needs a doctor willing to build a relationship with each member of our family. Ultimately,  this saves us time. And for productivity obsessed people like me, time is our most precious commodity.

Those of us who are really serious about balancing home and career need a reliable source of medical advice and care. I highly encourage you to find a doctor who can serve as your local, family M.D.

If you curious about homeopathy, read the wikipedia article here.