Attendance Figures!

J's school holidays are a bit strange now because the spring holiday doesn't necessarily include Easter weekend. So he had Good Friday off then Easter Monday then back to school for the rest of the week then off for two weeks. Quite a lot of the holiday he and I spent being ill. For the last couple of years he has been getting recurring episodes of the same symptoms: sore throat, tummy ache, pains in his legs and feet and dizziness. I have taken him to the doctor several times but the response is always 'it's just a virus' or 'perhaps he's unhappy at school'. I keep hoping it'll get better but over the holiday he was really quite unwell. 

Then I woke up one morning with flashing lights in front of my eyes like a migraine and when I got out of bed I felt really dizzy and ill. I made it to the doctor who said it was 'labyrinthitis', perhaps I'd picked up J's virus and it had affected my inner ear. The dizziness carried on for over a month during which time J was ill again. Then we all got really bad colds one after another. Then J and I seemed to get another virusy sort of thing. Really most of the time I still feel rotten, just feel really awful inside my head but I can't explain to anyone how I feel. I hardly ever even tell people I'm feeling ill because I just can't explain it.
Anyway the situation with J has been getting quite desperate because sometimes it's so hard to know what to do, whether to send him into school or not and sometimes P's saying make him go in and I'm feeling he should stay at home and at the same time I'm feeling so ill and it's hard to think clearly enough to make a rational decision and sometimes I just want him to go in so I can get some rest.

One day I felt so bad I just felt I had to get him to go to school and he went in and went straight to the office and said he was sick. They weren't very pleased and after they phoned I just sat and cried because I felt too ill to cope with someone being cross with me but they managed to persuade him to stay for the rest of the day.

Then the headmaster said that the Attendance Officer had been into school and was asking about J's absences and I thought: 'I can't win, if I send him in and he says he's sick I'm in trouble and if I don't send him in it's messing up their attendance figures'.

When he was ill again on Friday I took him in to the doctor and got him to agree to refer him to a specialist so we'll just have to wait and see. I also said to the doctor that there are some aspects of his development that I'm concerned about such as he's 10 years old and still can't ride a bike, his co-ordination is poor, he finds it hard to catch a ball and still struggles a bit with writing. The doctor was a bit strange when J said he found it hard to think of what to write when writing about the Victorian day they'd had at school the day before. 'How can you not be able to write about what's happened yesterday?' he said almost like he was telling him off. But that's the whole point, he should be able to and yet he can't.  It's not like he's not intelligent, he's top of the class in maths.