"Taking my toddler to Geelong Emergency after an unknown bite"

My 2 year old was bitten by something. Her head was swollen up to 3 times its normal size and she could barely see through her eyes.

We went to Geelong emergency. There was less than 10 people in the waiting area. 3 of which were children.

Triage was quick. The lady seemed to do nothing but take my child's temperature.

We were asked to wait in the children's room.

After waiting almost 2 hours I asked if we could have some Panadol for my child.

15 minutes later I had to ask again for Panadol.

After 3. 5 hours of waiting we were taken into an area that appeared not to be paediatric for her to be examined. She was given something which only after prompting what it was a number of times was I told it was an antihistamine.

Then the staff put a number of patches with what I thought was anesthetic cream so as to draw blood to check if there was a poisonous bite. We were told it would take less than an hour to take affect. We were then asked to go wait outside in the waiting room.

After an hour and a half of waiting we asked at the reception what was happening and had to explain the whole story of our already 5 hour ordeal to another staff member and then after 15 minutes that staff member seemed to literally tear the bandages off my toddler's skin and leaving what appeared to be marks that remained for 4 days later. In the end I had to tell the staff member to stop and took the remaining bandages off myself so that they wouldn't hurt her as I assumed it did. The staff member appeared to really annoyed that we had asked for help.

After 1 hour we were called in to take the blood test. This time it was what I assumed to be in the paediatric area. Every other bed in the area was taken up by non children patients. By this time there was 6 other children in the waiting area.

After the blood was taken we were asked to wait another hour for the results and again were told to go wait in the waiting room.

After 1. 5hours we queried what was happening. Only from this did someone actually go and look up our records to see if the results were in. My understanding was that the results had some in after 30 minutes.

We were called back in the same room (which I felt had not been cleaned since we had the blood test as all the equipment and rubbish was still there)

and given a prescription for Claritin.

Over 7 hours in emergency for something I can buy over the counter which did not bring down her swelling at all.

In the end we went home feeling really disappointed and upset over our treatment.