It's a pain in the arse, Crohnically. My DD had a chronic illness from about 9 months to 14, in pain, constantly feverish. She was at the doctors weekly during that time, and though I was working full time, she only managed to be in nursery about 3 days a week (work love me. It was a great time.)
You end up balancing how ill she is against how ill she might be. The doctors got angry because I asked them to prescribe Calpol - not because of the cost, but because the nursery refused to give any medicine that wasn't prescribed.
It was an exhausting, draining, stressful time.
You're right about the cough and cold with the doctors. I felt dreadful for taking her week on week. The week prior to her first hospitalisation, I took her twice - once on the Wednesday where the ruddy doctor just stared blankly at me and said 'what do you want me to do about it?' and again on the Friday, where a different doctor said they'd rather see a healthy child than turn away a sick on.
On the Saturday, I took her down to OoO at about 5 in the morning. She went from fine, to obviously desperately ill, and was admitted while they did some life saving stuff and treated her for suspected meningitis. They saved her life again a few hours later when she crashed again. Pumped her full of antibiotics.
She was ill and in pain for a further 4 months, still seeing the doctors weekly, still getting either vague sympathy or raised eyebrows. Eventually, she came home from nursery with her ear sticking out and lower down her head than normal. Took her back to the doctors 3 times, finally got admitted again and she had emergency surgery to drain the abscess from her mastoid complex (that soft bit of skull behind your ear). She'd had an internal ear infection for about 6 months that nobody could see because it was far behind the eardrum. It was that that caused the sceptisemia that nearly killed her early on, and it finally made it's presence known in this massive abscess.
Within a week of the surgery, she was fine. Her immune system was pretty grim because of the massive amount of antibiotics they'd pumped her full of for a week, but she grew two clothes sizes in about four weeks. She went back to nursery full time, loved every second, absorbed everything, and is now an incredibly wonderful and healthy six year old.
Anyhow, the point of this isn't to scare you with my story; it's actually to express sympathy. I've been there. I know how horrible it feels to leave your child when you're not sure you can. Everybody hated me during that time - the doctors for being a paranoid mother, the nursery for leaving my sick child with them, my work for being flaky, not in regularly, and needing to leave at a second's notice. My daughter probably wasn't too impressed that I was passing her on. I hated myself for being a rubbish mother and a rubbish employee simultaneously. The stress made me into a fairly rubbish wife and mother to my older child.
But the thing is, there was the square root of fuck all that I could do about any of it. I had to work or we'd lose the house. I had to be with my daughter because she was ill. I had to take her to the doctors because I didn't have a medical degree and couldn't diagnose her myself.
You do what you have to do in this world and try to get through it the best that you can.
So you have my sympathy for feeling judged.