The Joys of Getting a Water Sample From a Toddler...

Written by Bethany Dempsey for her Facebook blog, BD Blogs!

First, let me tell you… It doesn’t matter how poorly your child is… They could be clinically dead, and I promise you that when you see a doctor they’re tap dancing with a giant smile on their face. Or is that just mine?

Makes me out to be a gigantic liar… I mean, I tell the doctor how Oscar’s not eaten and won’t eat anything I offer? What does he do? He tried to eat the stick the doctor shoved in his mouth to check his throat. *eye roll*

Then comes what I was expecting: “I’m sorry, mom, but we think Oscar needs to spend the night in paediatrics”… and then the killer line that no toddler mom wants to hear, EVER….

“And we’re going to need a water sample.”

Handing me a pot that I struggle to piss in without it going on my hands… Never mind a sodding toddler. So it began… When the nappy first came off… We were nervous… Like, REALLY FUCKING NERVOUS.
It was like a “pass the baby” time bomb… Who’s about to get sprinkled first? And to add fuel to the fire, he was on a rehydration challenge: 10ml of water every ten minutes… It was like a really tense game of buckaroo.

The first hour comes and goes… And you know I’m kinda wishing this tense game could be finished… We start googling tactics: who’s gonna hold the little pee pot? Maybe we should run a tap? Foot in cold water?

We get to hour 4. By this point I’m making him down cups of water like an 18 year old on Jägerbombs…

We get to HOUR SEVEN. By this point he’s running round the ward, todger out, with me giving zero fucks… I’m giving up, there’s something clearly wrong here and, without being rude, I don’t give a flying shit when I’m running on no sleep.

Me and my mom get into a conversation about something boring and irrelevant and ta-dah! … The kid only went and pissed on the floor. The devastation was real; I tried everything to scoop piss into that pot. Imagine me, on my hands and knees on a hospital floor trying to SCOOP baby piss into the tube. I dunked a spare bib I had on me into it, and tried to SQUEEZE the piss into the tube. And what happened while I was doing that? In came the nurse… To say she looked a bit disgusted was an understatement… But in the same breath, I can’t help but feel she’d have done the same thing after watching her child intently for seven hours waiting for him to piss..!

Cover image provided by Henley Design Studio.