First round of trouble.

We spent a lot of time planning for this trip, and one of the things we planned for was getting sick. We bought private health insurance and had to work out what we'd do if one of us needed to go to the doctor. We packed a good supply of over-the-counter medicines and got prescriptions for multiple rounds of antibiotics for each of us, should we get food poisoning.

The surprise was that we'd have to deal with it so quickly. Very early in the morning after our first full day here, Carter threw up in the middle of the night. And then he proceeded to vomit every couple of hours for the next day and a half. He's only been sick while traveling once before, and that time it ran through him fairly quickly. This doesn't seem to be as intense as before, but it still means we've spent the last two days holed up in our hotel room taking care of him. We're still not sure if it was something he ate (the last thing he had before getting sick was chicken nuggets at Ruby Tuesdays) or if he picked up a bug while playing in the park. It's starting to seem like the former, since Doug and I are totally fine.





He's definitely getting better now, and I suppose that if I had to pick a place for it to happen, this is a pretty good one. We're in a city we know well and are spending nearly two weeks in, so being out of commission for a couple of days is no big deal. In addition, we're staying at the Ritz-Carlton, so we have access to a lot of services. We've been eating room service and going through towels and changes of sheets like crazy. Doug has made several trips a day to the convenience store across the street for snacks and drinks. The only thing I really regret is that we didn't get a room with a balcony. It would have been fantastic to have an outside space to hang out in these last few days.

One thing I'm still uncertain about is whether we timed the antibiotics correctly. The stuff we have is three doses, once a day. He threw up within an hour of getting the first two doses, so I'm not sure how much of it really got in his system.  I'm now wondering if it would have been better to wait until the vomiting ran its course before giving him the antibiotics. This is something we'll need to get some advice on for future reference.

Happily, Carter is definitely on the upswing. I think it'll take a couple of days for his digestive system to get back to normal, but we may be able to venture out of the hotel again tomorrow.

I'm reminded of the last time I was in London, while I was pregnant with Carter, when I came down with one of the worst cases of food poisoning in my life. (Apparently the bolognese sauce on my pasta hadn't been reheated properly. Still can't eat the stuff.) We were there for six days and spent five of them trapped in a tiny hotel room, with me completely miserable. It looks like Carter is doing much better than I did then. It's hard to see your baby miserable, though. He hardly ever gets sick, so we're lucky that this isn't something we've had to deal with much before.

Anyway, we hope to have more pictures and fun things to report about in the next few days. :-)