Witness the Sickness

I am so sick. Like miserable, no energy, hacking cough, congestion, achy muscles type of sick. Who knows what it is, but does it really matter? At work the other day I desperately had one of the X-ray techs do an AP on me. No pneumonia. That would have been too easy. How did I get this? From my 14 month old daycare attending daughter. Only she's moved on and is back to her normal, playful self.

The same thing happened around Christmas, but my husband was the innocent victim. She brought something home that knocked him down with a viral malaise that turned into a raging sinus infection. The babe got better in a few days; he lingered on with "man cold" for a couple weeks. We all know how painful that is for everyone!

I hear that what my household is experiencing is a thing. People tell me, "I've never been as sick as I was my first winter with a child in daycare." I hear, "Every time they change classrooms you'll get deathly ill." I have also heard, "It gets better once they turn two." Please God, let this be the case.

So Mothers in Medicine, my question is, what are your strategies for dealing with this? Is there any preventative magic I should be invoking? Because I don't know that I can go through something like this (two plus weeks of feeling like utter crap) again. We all know how hard it is to take care of our patients (and our children) when we are the sick ones, and we as a profession are the absolute worst at staying home and nursing ourselves back to health! What do you all do?

Childcare Options for Doctor-Moms

Genmedmom here.

Childcare is such a huge issue for working parents. It can be so expensive, and it is so important. With me in outpatient primary care and my husband traveling for his work pretty frequently, we needed to figure it out.

Thankfully, we have my mom who lives close by and provides the bulk of childcare for our little ones. We have also used daycare, as well as nanny services, both to give her a break and to provide socialization for our kids.

Family help is the best, but it can't always work, for many reasons. Daycare has the advantage of providing key socialization, as well as building relationships with other working parents, a bonus that I didn't realize would be until it was. However, if we didn't have my mom to pick up our kids at the end of the day, we'd be pretty miserable. It probably wouldn't work at all.

I found nannies to be the most difficult. It was almost a part-time job to find a decent nanny, even with Care.com. And, they weren't always decent. Plus, that option can be very expensive, prohibitively so. Upwards of twenty dollars an hour in the Boston area, for a nanny with experience.

Other docs have written about au pairs, and that options sounds wonderful, but one has to have a place for the person to sleep, and we just never had that. It's a small house, barely enough room for us and the two kids. Au pair, sadly, was never a possibility for us.

What childcare options have worked best for others?