Seeing stars – on feeling dazed by a health service that assumes parents are guilty when their kids get hurt

As soon as you’re admitted, your freedom is requisitioned. Put on a ward where wellbeing is secondary to scientific assessment: poked and prodded ever hour, machines and children wailing all around, sleep is always out of reach; water is provided, but ordinary human kindnesses – a cup of tea, a meal – forgone in favour of the stripped back serviceablity of enforced rest and regulation cereals or white bread – these finally absolved of their last vestiges of wholesomeness, to be eaten under clean, thin sheets on a rolling tray in an overheated ward.

Here, asking for silence is a sin, as parents tend tetchy children, their monitored attachment to their offspring subject to tick-box scrutiny.

My children answered all their own questions as to how Ava came to be here, concussed, brought in by paramedics some hours after the incident occurred. I thought it was wiser to stay quiet. After all, I smelled of booze from a post-work drink, so opening my mouth might only lead to further questions.

We’ve been through this all before – when Jonah broke his collar bone in the middle of a park, colliding with a careless adult on the big slides. Child protection kicked into gear (the same that failed so many kids in care homes across the country who were chauffeured to parties to cater to the whims and blows of politicians and their powerful ilk). We were treated with suspicion by the paramedics who met us on the scene, (yes, again with a bottle of wine after a summery picnic) for answering on his behalf, despite my son grey with pain, and struggling to articulate the exact chain of events.

This time, given half a chance to regale a carefully listening adult with their tale of a race down a ramp ending in a head-on collision, Jonah was more than happy to tell it on Ava’s behalf, letting Tom and I, sat nervously in the parents’ room, off the hook. After all, I wasn’t even there, twiddling my thumbs through a dull afternoon at work, looking forward to my cinema and dinner date with reprobate Kate, I wasn’t told My daughter had hurt herself until we’d ordered tapas and were well into a carafe of Thursday wine.

Ava was, by then, vomiting and passing out. Call 111, I instructed Tom, flustered in the heaving restaurant my crackling phone, in the heaving restaurant, cursing the childminder, on my crackling phone, for allowing me to get entrenched in my evening by hoping not to worry me. It was better, in the end, that I vented my irritation away from the crisis emerging at home.

National Health were concerned enough to send an ambulance; the paramedics were in turn concerned enough to take her in; so I left after a hasty main – a rushed and stressful meal that had been the soft opening of a new tapas restaurant near Brick Lane.

I left my paid-for tickets with Kate, and bike outside the Richmix, taxiing to the hospital with a kindly cabbie telling me about his grandson’s burnt hand and own brush with NHS overscrutiny,

At Homerton, the drama had already turned to late night waiting room tedium. Ava was floppy and monotone to my barrage of questions. Finally, finally a professional assessment – and my own 3rd degree.

Passing all the questions about my parenting – unknown to outside agencies, no unaccountable bruises, normal delivery, breastfed – we might have been allowed to leave but for an ill advised squash that had Ava lurid-vomit in a cardboard bowl once more. Rather than irradiate her with a scan, it was agreed she would go under observation and, on the children’s Starlight ward, our unrestful night began; her little hands curled into mine for the longest time I’d held her continuously since the day she was born.

This morning, though she’s barely eaten and not slept at all, she was able to tell the doctors what day it was and who I am, and so we will soon be sent on our way.

Our brush with well-meant imprisonment is a stark reminder how little autonomy you have, once institutionalised. Chatty but impersonal, ruthlessly safe but brutally efficient care of the state; care we are lucky to have and thus can’t complain when it seeks to blames us for our behaviours, care where, if we are lucky, we begun and will end our days, but which, worryingly, when we are in an everyday crisis, assumes a degree of fault we have to prove ourselves not guilty of before we are allowed to get on with the rest of our lives.