Easter Saturday we were staying at mum and dad's house with the children, Cameron had a stinking cold and a cough but apart from that he was OK - running around the house and playing football in the garden with grandad. He went to sleep in the car on the way to my gran's house and woke up miserable and clingy. It took a little while before we realised that he wasn't just clingy because he was grumpy, he couldn't actually stand up. When we tried to put him down he would just stand on his left leg with his right leg hanging there and say "stuck" over and over again.

We took him back to mum and dads and when the same thing happened we called their doctors emergency service who said to bring him in to their clinic at the local hospital. We took him straight in and the doctor took one look at him hobbling around on one leg and asked us to take him up to the children's ward.

Cutting a long story short, we were advised that the most likely cause was a virus in his hip, other options were a bacterial infection which needed to be ruled out by blood tests or sickle cell - the thought of which reduced both Wayne and I to terrified silence. Because of his cold (and hatred of doctors and hospitals), his temperature and heart rate were high and his oxygen levels were low. Three doctors together with Wayne and I had to hold him to get the drip put in his hand and to take blood to be tested. One doctor kept remarking how strong he was as he pulled away from them time and time again. It wasn't painful for him as he had numbing cream on his hands for an hour but he just hated being held still.

The nurses in the hospital were great. They bought him some dinner even before he had seen the doctor. As it was Easter they had chocolate eggs for all the children, even those like Cam who we didn't know whether they were staying or going home.

Wayne and I spent a horrible time sitting by the side of his cot in the dark, listening to all the other children and their parents, the nurses and doctors. There wasn't really much to say so we just sat there, dozing in and out of sleep and listening to Cam snore in his cot.

We were so grateful to eventually get the test results back and learn that it was just a viral infection, something which they called irritable hip syndrome. Apparantly it is fairly common in young children, that following a cold the virus goes to their hips and means that they can't bear weight for a period of time. We bought him home under the instructions to rest him for 10 days (have you ever tried to get an active 20 month old boy to rest without just leaving him in his cot all day?!) and we took him back to clinic at the hospital yesterday for a check up.

He has been getting better and better over the last week and they told us yesterday that they don't need to see him again, the virus seems to have cleared up by itself as they thought it would. How scary though? We had never heard of irritable hip but you can imagine I googled it as soon as we got home, the very first page coming up being this one from the NHS. Talking to some of the other mum's in the playground last week with Cameron firmly strapped into his pushchair and fuming that he couldn't run around with the other children as normal, I discovered one other parent who had experienced the same thing with her 4 year old. For something so common I was mildly surprised that I had never heard of it before.

So, I'm enjoying working from home this week without a sick little person here with me. Poor little chap, his last bad virus turned into pneumonia and this one into irritable hip. I think its time to wrap him up in cotton wool and not let him out for a while, don't you?