McBean’s bad day

We went off to the doctor to get McBean’s little willy checked out this morning.  On the way, we ran into a friend with a new baby, so McBean and I walked FenFox the rest of the way to school (she was going late due to extreme camp exhaustion) while Lazyboo stayed to chat.  On our way back to Lazyboo, I tripped and fell.  McBean was on my hip in the sling, and his head hit the road with a sickening thud.  Now that’s a sound I’m not likely to forget in a hurry.  So we hurried back to Lazyboo, McBean sobbing and me freaking out.  So we all traipsed off to see the doctor, now with a brand new concern.

We have two regular doctors, and neither of them were available today, so we had to see the practice leader, who is a rather distractable older jewish man that neither of us are overly comfortable with. Despite that, he managed to reassure us fairly quickly that McBean was ok and hadn’t suffered any major injury in the fall.  Phew.  So we took his nappy off to find out the problem with the little willy. The verdict was that the foreskin is infected (either fungal or anaerobic), and that it’s a fairly common problem (he said he sees about one a month).  The next part was problematic though because he told us it was due to poor hygiene (not sure how this happens given it’s cleaned several times a day and then he’s bathed) and that we should be retracting the foreskin to clean it.  This surprised me so I questioned him, and he didn’t really answer but made noises about how it’s hard to know what to do when when… I kindly finished his thought and admitted that we don’t know a great deal about pen.ises.  Hmm troublesome.  After asking a few of the other mums of sons that we know, we’re comfortable with not trying to do anything with the foreskin, though we will make sure he actually sits in his bath every night to give it a good soaking. The doc also said we should keep him out of cloth nappies until it’s healed, and why would we want to bother with them at all anyway?  Sigh.

So our poor little lad has ended the day with fungal creams and antibiotics and a lump covered in gravel rash on the back of his head.  But despite all that, he’s still been a cheery little guy, exploring and laughing and chatting and smiling away.  Now if only I can get the sound of that ‘crack!’ out of my head….

And to end MY day on a similarly bad note, FenFox has reappeared an hour after bed time coughing and spluttering with a very congested sounding chest… here we  go again.