Mike and Emily’s story

My daughter Emily was born seven weeks ago in our local hospital. She is beautiful and luckily a healthy little girl. Fortunately she and my wife Rachel returned home soon after the birth. This week though I suddenly felt very nauseous and started projectile vomiting. Remember the scene from The Exorcist? Well it was like that without the head spinning and I felt terrible. I also had a fever, headaches and stomach cramps. I tried to keep away from Rachel and Emily, but two days later Rachel started to experience the same horrible symptoms. I thought that we must have the “Winter Vomiting Virus”. I was feeling a bit better at this point and had been drinking plenty of orange squash and taking paracetamols.

‘We were really scared about Emily catching this bug, so I quickly called my local GP’s surgery for advice. They told me that this was likely to be the norovirus. It’s very contagious and is spread through ingesting the virus (in vomit or faeces particles) commonly in contaminated food or water. To prevent it spreading, we needed to keep our environment really clean. I wanted to protect us with the best thing that I could buy and with a bit of searching on the internet and talking to an old friend of mine who is a nurse in a hospital I bought the Tristel Protect range of products.

‘The Tristel products have been used in hospitals to protect against all sorts of infections, because they kill all of the nasty bugs really quickly and it’s non-toxic and safe to use. Brilliant I thought! It was really easy to use and I kept cleaning the toilet and bathroom with the wipes and foam after each bout of vomiting or diarrhoea. We were advised not to prepare food while we had the virus, but with both of us being ill we didn't have much choice.I regularly cleaned the kitchen and everything in it with the Tristel products. We kept washing our hands especially when we went anywhere near Emily. We also cleaned Emily's cot with the Tristel products and regularly washed all of our bed linen.

‘This was hard work because we really didn’t feel well at all. But it was all worth it I think. We both eventually recovered after a few days and Emily hasn’t caught the virus. We've carried on using the Tristel products though because the virus can live on in the environment for days in a contaminated area. Better to be safe than sorry.