Talking to the great white telephone

Having followed the odd link to various infertility blogs, I am humbled by the amazing amounts of effort, heartache and dedication that some people put into becoming parents - not always even succeeding. When John and I decided to have children, we didn't talk (or think) about it much beforehand - it was just a sort of given that we'd have them, and there we were, parents. What that would actually mean, and how much it would affect our lives thereafter, wasn't something we gave much conscious thought to.
But once you have a child, you are a hostage to fortune. As I blogged on Saturday, I don't think there's much else as bad, as deeply to be dreaded, as the death of a child. Even the illness of a child is terrifying, with a gut-wrenching sort of fear quite different from fear for oneself. It strikes at your future and your deepest affections, all in an instant.
The trigger for my sudden burst of philosophising is that E, the seven year old, had sudden and dramatic vomiting and diarrhoea last night. We were peacefully watching "Dr Who" (a blog topic there, sometime), and by the end she said she felt sick, but after spending some time sitting dismally by the toilet, nothing seemed to be happening, so I sent her to bed. About an hour later, when I was watching a friend's DVD of "Blake's Seven" - another blog topic there, I think - I heard a nasty noise upstairs, and went up to find E being sick in her sleep.
A horrible few hours followed. I've only had gastroenteritis that bad once, on our honeymoon in Thailand, when I spent one very unpleasant day getting to know the hotel bathroom floor intimately while John (the bastard!) went on a trip to an elephant sanctuary. E vomited in her bed, on the carpet on the way to the bathroom, and in the toilet. She spent some time kneeling in front of it, clutching the edges of the seat like a drowning man at a lifejacket, gasping and retching. When the diarrhoea started, she sometimes needed both ends over the toilet at the same time, which is not anatomically possible, so there was rather a lot of floor-cleaning to do as time went on.
During the first hour, as she was getting steadily worse, I was really worried. There was an especially bad moment, when she stood up suddenly after one bout of diarrhoea and fainted - her eyes rolled up into her head like a voodoo priestess, and she keeled straight over backwards into my arms. I laid her on the landing floor, and she sat up again a moment later. I didn't think she had meningitis, as she was coherent and didn't have a headache, but I was worried in case she had something worse than gastroenteritis. I discovered a small area of red spots on one arm, which turned out to be a little area of petichial haemorrhage, the sort that doesn't go away when you press a glass on it, the sort that means meningitis. An abyss of panic opened up inside me before I reminded myself that haemorrhagic septicaemia is not going to be limited to one small area on the patient's arm, in the absence of any other pathology.
By this time, she was a nasty sort of creamy-grey colour, and really drowsy. Given it was after midnight, it was very hard to tell if she was drifting in or out of sleep or in and out of consciousness. Either way, falling asleep while sitting on the toilet is not a great plan, so I put a towel on the bathroom floor, moved her onto it and covered her with another towel; and lay down beside her. I'm getting too old for floors. Anyway, we both dozed like this for a while; every twenty minutes or so she'd get up and revisit the toilet, and every hour or so I'd take another batch of soiled towels down to the washing machine. About 3 am, we both decided the vomiting was over, and went to bed. Today, she's drunk plenty, eaten about six Cheerios, a piece of cucumber and a quarter of a hard-boiled egg, and is now clearly on the mend. But my goodness, I was frightened, twenty-four hours ago.