For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for June 04, 2013

Have to admit I was surprised she even came home in first place. You have to practically drag my sister out of building if one of the kids gets sick enough to spend night in hospital.

Must be a two-car family.

exactly why most of europe views us a “spoiled americans”

@clgray59 Oh, yeah, those French with 7 weeks vacation.

@Bluffwood, did you know that in some European countries the ladies have 2 YEARS off after they have a baby? Here we are lucky to get 6 weeks and then the employer complains about you taking so much time off.

I’ve heard that there are some hospitals redoing their children’s wings to have almost suites. A crib and a bed in each room and the parent pays like an extra fee but can stay there with their little ones. It may be for only those that are in intensive care but it’s cool that the hospitals are realizing that caring for the little one means caring for the whole family too.

if only we didn’t have to have cars/truck. you know have mass transit. oh no!! the oil companies want our money.such idiocy to talk about Europeans. trains and mass transit is only for Europeans unless you live in NY. or DC.

the powers that be like cars, they get rich off of us that way

Had no choice but to stay with my son in hospital in Singapore many years ago. No nursing service beyond the basic medical treatment required. And no beds for parents. Just hard upright chairs. I would have been there anyway, but would have appreciated a bit more comfort.

Our childrens hospital has chairs that convert into beds for the parents. They encourage the parents to stay with the kids. Our kid was there in 1983 on and off for 8 months.

Being a parent, I’m not sure why the writer of this comic didn’t have her Mom staying with her!! I never would have left my small child at the hosp. alone! And, being a retired Paramedic I certainly never “jabbed” a needle into anyone’s arm…lol

@Cigray59. This strip is pretty much 30 years old and Lynn and family are Canadian not American. 30 years ago it wasn’t anywhere near as common to be welcome to stay at a hospital bedside, especially as Elizabeth would be in a ward room with at least 2 or 3 other kids.

I was shocked to see her home and now even more shocked that she would be asleep at home. Come home maybe because you have to deal with something, but get back to the hospital. No child of mine is sleeping in the hospital without my being there. This is where having extended family and/or a church family is such a blessing. They can be home with the other kids while a parent is at the hospital with the sick child.

I stayed in the hospital in January when my husband was there for 2 nights. The nurse thanked me for being there.

My brother was in the hospital when he was about 2 1/2 for over a week. We had only one car, the hospital was 20 minutes away and there were four more of us at home. My parents visited him every day for several hours, but had to come home after visiting hours ended.

Not every family has two drivers! We have one driver, so one car is plenty.

Note to all the sanctimonious “I would never leave my kid alone in the hospital” folk: If you lived 30 years ago, you would have. Not all hospitals allowed parents to stay overnight. Some even forcibly removed them. When my 5-year old son had surgery in 1982, they would NOT ALLOW me to stay with him overnight. I was allowed to spend all daylight hours there, but when it was time for sleep, I was kicked out.

The first time a 3yo has to get an IV or a blood test, it is very hard to watch. many keep their fear for life, others can get used to it. Any way a 3 yo looks at it, a needle is going to be “jabbed” somewhere.

nothing worse than a sick child I use to work in a children’s hospital I could see it in the parents faces when there child was sick and I went thru it also you wish you could take there place

I’m sure it was. When my daughter was 4 she was hospitalized and in the middle of the night the IV fell out. She awoke to her bed being rolled to another room, and another IV being placed. I was with her, so I know how scared she was, and screaming about it.

A small kid is at the hospital overnight and both the parents are home, sleeping? Unbelievable today, and unbelievable at the time this strip is placed. Lynn slipped up there.

“You never know when you need a spare…….”Here at my daughter’s place, there are three cars that run and three that don’t. The owner doesn’t want to sell them because they have valuable parts. No plans to sell parts, that I know of.

Your “explanation” of why this is funny is based on so many assumptions it is astonishing. Most of us wake up with messy hair, many men sleep without shirts, many women wear nightgowns with narrow straps, and not all of us are blase about having a young child put on IV medication.

Why does everyone assume she was actually asleep? You’ve never gone to bed because you know you should but you can’t fall asleep?

Elly was probably called because she a) as a parent needed to be notified when the treatment changed and b) may have needed to sign permission papers. Since circumstances have changed, she can now go stay with her daughter for a few hours.

Seems like these days, the first thing they do is put in an IV!

The last time I had to be in the hospital they had a window seat that converted into a bed and my husband stayed there during the night. They brought him pillows and a blanket., and the nurses were glad to have him there because he would get up and get me things and I didn’t have to call for them.

I find it absolutely fascinating how your mind works sometimes! What kind of parents are at home having sex (which is my guess as to what you’re alluding to when you say “John and Elly were probably doing something other than sleeping, when Elly got that call”) while their 3-year-old daughter is sick in the hospital? John and Elly Patterson may not be good enough to garner “Parents Of The Year” awards but they’re certainly not the WORST I’ve ever seen either! They may have gone to bed but I’d be willing to bet on it that with Elizabeth sick in the hospital, stress and worry would have only caused them to lay there and toss and turn restlessly — NOT go to sleep (or do anything ELSE for that matter either!).

 

Meanwhile, no matter HOW good my hair looks when I go to bed, you should see the kind of bed-head hair I wake up with in the mornings! I don’t know what I do at night in my sleep, but in the mornings, it sometimes looks as though I’ve gone for a ride on a motorcycle or in a convertible with the top down and, instead of tying my long hair back so it doesn’t get all matted and tangled up, I just left it loose to do whatever it wanted to do and look however it wanted to look by the time I reached my “destination”! In other words . . . it’s a real mess!!! Unless you sleep sitting up (or you’re bald), I don’t know how you can otherwise escape bed-head hair. Some may look worse than others but you’ve still got it!!! ;-)

um…no….many of us are smart enough to know how to utilize one car efficiently. Between me, my husband and two kids, three of us with jobs, having one car has never been a problem.

This is (comic or not,) an example of a Mother’s love.

many of us live in rural areas where one person might commute over an hour each way so is never home, therefore the spouse needs a car for errands, takiing the kids places, etc…and we don’t have buses!! Having a car is a necessity.

Something on this site is freezing up my computer. I think it’s an ad from ‘adchoices’. these &(%$^&# are crooks, and they don’t care what their ads do to your site, or your readers’ computers.

Better late than never, I suppose. I wouldn’t have ever left the hospital but then again, I only have one child and I work from home so I have the luxury of taking my laptop with me so I can still work if it ever came to that. Crossing fingers that my son stays healthy and never needs an overnight at the hospital.

My sister-in-law was forced to leave her newborn in the hospital and come back multiple times/day to nurse if she wanted to do that. She was not allowed to stay there with him all day or night — and that was 20 years ago.

I was a phlebotomist for 25 years in large and small hospitals. It was not uncommon for a parent—a mother—to greet me with “there’s that mean lady going to get blood from you”. At those times it’s best to have the parent out of the room. Then there are parents who explain to the child what’s going to happen, that it may hurt but only briefly. Some kids are awesome and it’s the parents’ doing. Little Elizabeth was probably scared when she had to have an IV placed without Momma. Let’s hope the IV nurse was kind and gentle.

I can’t believe she ever left the hospital!

“I never would have..!” BLAH BAH BLAH. Get over it, people. Those were different times then and when nucelar family was at it’s height. Hospitals were a lot less family friendly and accomadating and expectations were just different. Seriously, the self rightous indignation micro view from the micro minds is embaressing.