It is the most nerve-wracking thing for first-time parents when their child gets his or her first fever. You feel like that little human being in your arms is the most fragile thing in the world.
The emergency room becomes your second home, while you and your spouse becomes the running joke between all the staff nurses working the graveyard shift there.
I remember when little Athena got her first fever. She was just a month old and we took her on her first weekend away from home to Bukit Tinggi for a short holiday.
On the second night, she started burning up in the hotel room. My wife and I started panicking (I started panicking!) and we started pacing around (I was pacing around!) not knowing what to do.
I started googling on my phone to see if I could find a bomoh nearby that would make a in-room call and heal my daughter who was obviously suffering. I couldn’t find anyone.
I called the front desk and asked if their in-house doctor was around. They said no. Then I thought maybe we should just drive back to the city and head to a hospital. But it seemed too far.
I was so distraught that I didn’t realise that half an hour had gone by without a sound from Athena. She had fallen asleep cosily next to my wife on the bed.
What happened was that as soon as I started googling for witch-doctors, my wife had taken a basin of water to sponge the little girl. In twenty minutes, her fever subsided and she went to sleep.
Huh!
But jokes aside, in the months and years to follow, our hearts never failed to skip a beat whenever Athena got sick. It might be just a slight cold or a high temperature, we would worry nonetheless.
Trips to the doctor would happen very often and our paediatrician, Dr. Soma, would always smile patiently and check on Athena and then tell us that everything will be okay.
Apparently, according to Dr. Soma, small babies often get temperatures because that is just how they start building up their immune system so they will grow up big and strong.
We’ve also slowly started learning how to distinguish what situation requires a trip to the emergency and what just requires a bedtime story and enough sleep.
An extremely high fever that breaks the 40 Celcius mark and doesn’t go down would definitely require a speedy drive to the doctors to get her fever down.
However, if she has a slight fever but is still active playing and eating like normal, then it’s probably just a dose of children’s paracetemol and a good night’s sleep.
It has even come to the point where my wife and I have become experts at inserting the dreaded suppository. It was scary at first, but now it we can do it with our hands tied behind our backs!
But hey, as parents, we can’t be blamed if we worry every time our child gets sick. That’s just what parents do. All we want is the best for our children.
If I had the abilities of John Coffey from The Green Mile, I would suck out every little sickness from Athena so she would never have a sick day in her life.
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Zan Azlee is a multimedia journalist, writer and filmmaker. He specialises in solo-journalism and often reports from conflict zones around the world. He usually succeeds in staying safe and coming home unharmed to his daughter, Athena Azlee, and wife, Jasmine Abu Bakar, by screaming like a little girl whenever he is faced with danger. Follow his exploits at FatBidin.com.
