Blog

This time twelve weeks ago it became apparent that the course of our life was about to take a terrible turn and, as events quickly transpired, change our lives and the lives of our family for ever. It was my night off from the hospital. I had come home for a rest. Hospital life was moderately stressful but we were kind of in a groove with it and a couple of girlfriends had come over with a bottle of pink to give me a little down time. It’s not that we weren’t worried about Oscar because we were. He had changed that week and was sleeping a lot. And when he wasn’t sleeping he was connected up to a drip, because he was off his food, and also a pump for long periods of time for the antibiotics. The administration of these clearly caused him a lot of discomfort and for some reason he was always worse at night. On that night he was yelping with pain and the nurse on duty called me in because Holly was having a sleep over with my parents and so I might as well be with David. When I arrived it was very frightening. There were few experts around because it was evening time. Time appeared to pass very very slowly. We seemed always to be waiting for a porter for a scan or for someone from HDU or something. It is just too painful to write down how it all played out. We never had any real sense that there was major life saving activity going on like you see on the tele. It was all very calm and quiet and Oscar was being monitored. As the night went on David and I became increasingly frightened but we were unsure how frightened we should be. He had had a CT scan around 11pm.  The results of which we had been informed were clear. He was then, finally transferred down to the high dependence unit and then to the intensive care unit. Just having your child in intensive care and being wheeled off for scans is terrifying enough, never mind if there is a prospect that they may become seriously ill or worse. We just sat in waiting rooms and waited. [···]