It’s been a bit of a bastard weekend. On Friday I was going off to the far flung and sun kissed exotic wilderness that man call Drenthe, for a weekend in a holiday house there with my parents and younger sister. Originally my parents would be going to a wedding of a cousin there and didn’t want to hurry back hme, but sadly the wedding had to be called off as the father of the bride had passed way. But since the house had already been booked and paid for, we decided to go anyway. My sister had also brought her baby with her, as her partner was going on a stag do for my foster brother, who will be getting married next month (in the best Dutch tradition of having lived together with his partner for donkey ages and having two children already).
Unfortunately things went wrongly quickly on Friday, as my sister’s baby, my niece, got a fever, which didn’t go away but got much worse, so much that my sister took her to the nearest g.p. surgery for consultation. Who took one look at her and called her an ambulance to get her to hospital. With her fever reaching 41 degrees celcius the worry was that she might have menigitus, rather than “just” some bacterial infection having turned nasty. Luckily, this seemed to have not been the case, but my niece still had to stay in hospital for observation until this morning. Her dad had already driven over on Friday night and he and my sister stayed in the hospital around the clock; not quite the relaxing holiday/stag party weekend they had looked forward to…
It’s scary enough having to bring any loved one to hospital, but when it’s a less than a year old baby, doubly so. Fortunately everything worked out in the end, but was stressfull and frightening nonetheless…
