Listen to old wives' tales

My little preschooler started vomiting Thursday night, for no apparent reason, and did so every hour until we took her to the hospital at five in the morning. Prior to this, she was her usual talkative and smart-ass self, telling me that I and her dad should say sorry to each other and shake hands so that her daddy could stay home forever.

Anyhoo...the doctors at the ER ruled out bacterial infection, and since she wasn't feverish, concluded food intolerance, and advised us to have her take oral rehydration salts and lugaw. The following day we were back in the ER...she had lost so much fluids and no appetite, the IV was the only way to go.

We stayed in the hospital the whole weekend. Although she got well, I ended up gaining three pounds (one per day) from bingeing on potato chips, burgers, Oreos, and lattes from Starbucks. (Three pounds despite walking nine flights of stairs daily as cardio.) A Starbucks at a hospital? Yep. They got fastfood and a Subway, too. A far cry from hospital food.

Let me wear my MBA hat for now: I'm betting that a large chunk of the hospital's revenues comes from the lease rental of these establishments, on top of the bond/rent/monthly payments they get from the doctors who secured clinics in their spanking new building. Even the drugstore isn't in-house, a separate company runs it. (Which meant I had to egg a doctor friend for my nightly Valium.) The food court, for one, had more concesionnaires to rival that of our friendly neighborhood Ever Gotesco. They might as well start putting DVD players in the rooms, and entice AstroVision to open a branch there.

Back to my mommy hat: We were discharged sunday night. Diagnosis? Viral infection, something she could've gotten from the air, from the water, from the phone...as long as it responded well to treatment (read: rest and plenty of fluids) then it didn't warrant being isolated and identified.

Plain old usog to me.