So, it’s like I can only go back to work and negotiate hours and know what days I’m working if I have the childcare in place. So, the only thing we can do is hubby stays at home while I’m working and then we swap when he gets back, when I get back and, even now, like I had a day yesterday where I spent most of the morning in bed. I couldn’t move and, you know, I thought I thought I’d got rid of that. I thought that horrific pain, that horrific exhaustion because I mean I’m always I’m always tired. I always have pain somewhere or another but to that level where I can’t literally even lift my baby out of a cot. I can’t even sit up.

My husband he was he was sort of the girls were up and they were jumping all over him and trying get him. He put his head round after doing the morning routine to see if I’m up yet and he’s like, he didn’t even say anything and, when I went down, I made it up that lunchtime, he said, “I just put my head round and I thought, no, not today. She can’t do it.” Which is great that, you know, he was able to because he’s self-employed because, so you know he gets that flexibility there and I just I just think about all those people who might not have that luxury or that that flexibility. And I said to him, I said, “I’m supposed to be going back to work in September.”

Then, you know, again, the anxiety is building up where how are we going to manage with that because if we don’t have the nursery places, if we don’t, we can’t have him at home day and night, you know, while I’m at work and then I’m too exhausted to do anything else or I’m in too much pain. So, he then has to do the night shift at home as well, it’s like, working fifteen hours a week, I’m going to be, that’s not enough to keep a roof over our head and we’ve already been told by our landlord that we’ve got to look elsewhere. And it was hard enough before the pandemic to find a place that would allow you to rent with children. And that’s affordable, to be honest, because [city] is not the cheapest but he’s already said, “You guys need to look for somewhere.” And it’s, it hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been easy to try and find somewhere and I thought, I can’t give up, because even though it’s fifteen hours a week, I can’t give that up because that’s that extra bit of income coming home but we can’t have him off work all the time because he he’ll only earn if he’s working.

And I said to him, I said, “I’m supposed to be going back to work in September.” Then, you know, again, the anxiety is building up where how are we going to manage with that because if we don’t have the nursery places, if we don’t, we can’t have him at home day and night, you know, while I’m at work and then I’m too exhausted to do anything else or I’m in too much pain. So, he then has to do the night shift at home as well, it’s like, working fifteen hours a week, I’m going to be, that’s not enough to keep a roof over our head and we’ve already been told by our landlord that we’ve got to look elsewhere. And it was hard enough before the pandemic to find a place that would allow you to rent with children.

And that’s affordable, to be honest, because [city] is not the cheapest but he’s already said, “You guys need to look for somewhere.” And it’s, it hasn’t been easy. It hasn’t been easy to try and find somewhere and I thought, I can’t give up, because even though it’s fifteen hours a week, I can’t give that up because that’s that extra bit of income coming home but we can’t have him off work all the time because he he’ll only earn if he’s working.

Between the first and the second visit he woke up in the middle of the night and he was kicking. He was like twisting his body. He was like smacking his head back on, in in the cot and I was like, “Oh my god, he’s fitting.” But he wasn’t. He was wide awake. He was crying. He was agitated. And the only thing I can think of because, even though the Covid specialist at the hospital said, “Oh I’ve not come across that. I don’t think kids have such symptoms because babies normally are fine.”

But then they very quickly realised that he’s one of the exceptions and maybe other children have it or babies have had it and the symptoms have been overlooked because they’re not the common ones we’re told about in the media. So straight away in my family we were all like, don’t go by, babies don’t get it, kids are safe, because they’re not, you know. And for a lot of people around me, that actually changed the way they then, you know, went around their daily business but, in the end, we got the results back from the camera down. They said to me that they couldn’t see anything so there was nothing clogging him, so they couldn’t explain why he, his chest and throat were all so noisy. And the only thing, even now, they say is it’s all Covid. It’s all Covid related because there was no, nothing congesting his nose or nothing like that.

His breathing is still loud, so even though the mega episodes of the two, three hours of up to seventy, eighty breaths a minute has stopped pretty much that was only last month, in the last month, like in the beginning of June maybe. Other otherwise it sort of up until the end of May he was still having even if it was one a day, he was still having episodes of. Mostly in the morning, he was waking up and his breathing was really, really fast and then, as the day went on, it would get better. But he still does have, throughout the day, it’s a lot noisier than it would be normally. It’s a lot it still gets a bit fast sometimes.