illness Archives - Going Dad

Know the Numbers

It might not be music to your ears, but if you are barely making it 3 weeks without a child getting ill, this works out to the average amount of times they could get sick in the space of a year. There are many common questions about ENT specialists, specifically in relation to ear infections, and if your child has 8 or more ear infections within the space of 12 months, this poses a major problem. The reality is that when it comes to ear infections, anything less than 3 is fine, and if your child is getting up to 10 colds a year, this is still in the normal range. It’s when a cold lasts more than 10 days, fever lasts more than 5 days, and difficulty breathing beyond a stuffy nose is when it becomes a problem and you need to seek medical advice.

Ensuring You Get the Balance Right

The fact is your children are going to be exposed to a variety of germs and bugs when they are in school or in daycare, but it’s essential for you to make sure that they have the right tools to fight off these things more effectively. When you have your first child, the number of bugs that you will catch from your children is incredibly surprising and can wage war on your own immune system you will find you are in a better place to help your children fight these things. The best thing you can help your children with include some of the following:

Making sure your children get lots of sleep. It can be difficult, especially if they are waking up a lot at night, but ensuring that they feel as rested as possible makes a big difference.

Increasing their vitamin intake. Vitamin C is incredibly important, and low levels have been linked to more severe colds.

Improving their gut bacteria. If you have taken your child to the doctor a few times this year resulting in a number of courses of antibiotics, this could have an impact on their immune system. Improving gut bacteria is one of the best ways to improve the immune system overall.

It is incredibly difficult when our children are unwell, but it’s important to recognize that their being sick is more common than you think. If your children are unwell every few weeks, this is par for the course. The best thing you can do is to make sure you and your children are more comfortable so they can ride it out.

Unfortunately, it’s something that every family is going to have to deal with at some point or another. With cancer these days striking 50% of us, this is clearly just a fact of life that we all have to learn how to live with. But when it hits your own family, it’s something that you are going to need to understand as best as you can – and this can be hard when you are in the midst of it. Here are some ideas on what you might want to think about when it comes to dealing with cancer in the family.

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Supporting One Another

One of the main things you will need to do in this situation is to ensure that the family is supporting one another. This is vital for the sake of everyone involved, especially the individual who actually has cancer. Supporting one another can look like many different things. It might be that you are going to simply be by their sides, or that you are spending more time together and trying to laugh together. If it is a particularly difficult time and they are undergoing procedures such as chemotherapy, then you can also look into purchasing some of these gifts for chemo patients. These are not only practical, but can also help the person to feel comforted and help them to take their mind off of things. However you do it, supporting one another in this way is vital for everyone to keep on moving as best as they can.

Looking Into Options

In terms of treatment, you are probably going to want to keep your options wide open as best as you can, to ensure that the individual with cancer is as likely as possible to recover swiftly and fully. Chances are, you will first be trying the standard medical care and seeing how that goes. And you might also be considering holistic cancer treatment centers if that is something you want to try as a complementary approach or an alternative. At all times, the important thing is that the individual themselves has the final say and they are happy with whatever approach is taken.

Managing Emotions

There are always going to be a lot of emotions when something like this is happening, and they will need to be managed and dealt with properly if they are going to be in a better place. That again is something that you can do together as a family, and you should find that you are much more likely to get through it together if you are working through the emotions as one. So all in all, this is the kind of thing that you should focus on from the start as best as you can.

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Looking Ahead
Whether or not you know what the prognosis is likely to be, it’s important that everyone is doing their best to look ahead, with as much positivity as possible. That can’t be forced, of course, but it is something that you should be able to focus on in some way if you are keen on trying to make it through, and if you do it together you are going to find it so much easier. Looking ahead will enable you to still have hope in your hearts, which really matters in all this.