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"One, maybe two days in ITU, then seven to ten days back on the ward.."
Those words echoed in my ears for two long, terrifying weeks in ITU, and for the three and a half weeks we spent back on the ward. Number two daughter has had her scoliosis correction operation and is finally back at home.
In the eighteen years since we started to care for her I have never felt so impotent and it really wasn't a good experience. I held her hand and told her I loved her as I watched her slipping under the anaesthetic and I was there every day in ITU when she lay sedated and struggling. Not being able to help her, not being able to look after even her most basic needs, and most distressing of all, not being able to ease her pain, has been terribly upsetting.
There's one area I could help - I've been her voice, I've been able to let people know when she was in pain or simply sad, almost like an interpreter.
As I said before, she's home now and we're both getting used to a new regime, she sleeps a lot, and she can't stay in her wheelchair for more than two hours before she's worn out, but she's so happy and so much straighter, it was all worth it.
The x-rays are astonishing, her spine was so badly distorted that her right ribcage was in her pelvis, and on the left, her spine almost touched her ribs, and now she's so much straighter with two titanium rods down her spine. Feeding her is so much easier, she's able to breathe without struggling and the improvements will continue over the next year, as her body adjusts to its new shape.
I'm sitting in one of the side rooms of an orthopaedic ward in frenchay hospital tonight. My middle daughter is sleeping fairly peacefully next to me at the moment, but tomorrow morning, if all goes as planned, she'll go down to theatre for a major operation to try to straighten her spine a little. She'll be on the table for between five and seven hours, so we're not looking at anything simple.
Currently, she has a 120 degree scoliosis, making her backbone look rather like a hairpin bend and putting the right half of her ribcage into her pelvis. This doesn't make for easy breathing, squishing her right lung and stretching her left lung as it does, so the surgeon is hoping to make sufficient correction to allow her to breathe properly.
Those who know me, will know that she's not my natural daughter, but having fostered her for the last eighteen years, I think of her as one of my own, and the anxiety and fear I am feeling now is just the same as if it was one of the other two.
In some ways I'm glad her understanding is limited - she knows that she's having an operation, and she knows a bit about what that entails (she had a double hip replacement operation when she was nine), but she doesn't understand the implications of the surgery, nor does she know that the recovery time could be six months or more.
I'm doing everything I can to ensure a peaceful and stress-free time for her, and I'm determined that she won't know how worried I am because that certainly won't help her at all.
After a long time away, I'm back again, like the proverbial bad penny.
It's been a somewhat strange time, so much has changed, so many things have happened and I have now emerged, butterfly-like (ye Gods, that's a hell of a big butterfly...) into another new phase of my life.
In a year or so things will change again, but for now, I can sit relatively calmly and take stock.
#1 daughter is fairly settled in her new job, living a little way away with her boyfriend/soon-to-be-husband. They have worked everything out, aiming to get married on or around the 23rd April 2010, and probably starting a family not too long afterwards if all goes to plan (I'm WAY too young to be a granny!!!!!!). She graduated on my birthday last year, and I don't think I've ever been so chuffed.
#2 (almost) daughter is as happy as she's ever been. We've managed to keep her living with us, though at times it was a bit of a battle, and now things are settling down into a peaceful routine again. She made the transition from school to day centre very easily, and is having the most fantastic time making new friends and having fun. She has a new respite placement too, one where the people running it actually care for her. She's safe, loved and lovely, and I couldn't be more pleased. The one blip on the horizon is the scoliosis operation scheduled for February 5th - 7 hours under anaesthetic scares me to death, but because her understanding is limited, she remains blissfully ignorant of my fears for her.
#3 daughter has a social life that defies belief - she goes out more than she stays in, staying with friends, going to gigs and festivals, and working now too - and still she finds time to study for her A levels, and run a campaign to become one of the school officers. She's an amazing girl, the change of schools could have been a time of anxiety, but she entered into the challenge and has grown beyond belief.
I'm so proud of all three of them.
As for me, after 6 months of tests and worrying about my eyesight, I seem to be in the clear for now. I have to wear glasses all the time (at least I do if I want to see things in focus....), but I can handle that as I have to handle to stockings etc..
Happy days ahead....
So a 2.45% payrise is not enough for the teachers of Britain (or at least, those in the N.U.T.), they want 4.1%.
Teachers do work hard, there's no denying it, but they are amply recompensed by good holidays, and salaries already far in excess of a vast portion of the workforce, and yet that is not enough for those alledgedly instilling education and good values into the youth of today.
'Stop working, and you'll get what you want' seems to be the maxim of those on strike - what a splendid example they set to youths all too eager not to do anything.
I have NO sympathy for the teachers now, not one jot.
It's official, Spring has arrived!
Well actually, rampant frogs have arrived and are laying down clouds of frogspawn in the pond. Every time I open the porch door, there's a splashing flurry of legs as the frog scoots away, all embarrassed at being caught in the act.
It's not looking as if it's going to be a particularly floral Spring, it has to be said. Youngest daughter was at best, disparaging, about the one-and-a-half miniature daffodils that finally managed to make it into the daylight, and the mass of celandines which cheered up the front garden last year are conspicuous by their absence. Even the ever-blooming rose seems to have stopped.
The magnolia tree is starting to bud with a degree of enthusiasm, but whether said buds are going to be leaves or flowers, remains to be seen. After last year, and the somewhat harsh cropping it received at the hands of the mad axe-man, Steve (under the guise of pruning it), I will be very surprised to see vast numbers of flowers, although it wouldn't take very many to beat the seven it displayed after the 'trim'.
Rather splendidly, the Christmas cactus I had as a gift two years ago, is positively vibrant, with new leaves exploding onto the scene, and a second flowering. Until now, it's never even hinted at a desire to spread, and the whole thing has taken me completely by surprise. I have absolutely no idea why it should have happened since the only change is that it now lives in the bathroom, but I'm not complaining.
Being ill is really beginning to tick me off.
Not that I've ever enjoyed it, quite the opposite, I dislike intensely the curtailment of my freedom, my inability to do what I want to do, etc., but now I have to put up with things that used to work fine, not working at all, or deteriorating before my eyes.
My sight is a prime example. For decades now, I've had perfect vision, I could see anything and everything without straining, I could happily switch between short and long distances at will, and I never needed to fret about seeing things in dim light. Suddenly, that's not the case. I now wear spectacles pretty much all the time.
This in itself wouldn't be a major problem, if I was really able to see properly with them, but I'm still struggling. I have a pair of 'varifocals' (I think), that are allegedly meant to cover all eventualities, but I can't drive in them as the weird foggy bits turn my head to mush. So, I also have a pair I drive in - they work fine, except for reversing into parking spaces, where I find that I'm better off not wearing any glasses at all.
Craft work is a nightmare - if the light isn't perfect (which it almost never is), I can't see the bitty things I want to use, and I wouldn't like to confess the number of times I've dropped beads recently, so my multifunction glasses are meant to sort that problem out. Once again though, they fail, the blurry edges make my head ache, even though I've been running them in for eight months.
Then there's the 'reading' glasses that I ought to wear, but I lost.... In reality, I put them down somewhere, and I can't see where I left them!
Thumper, one of our rabbits died in my arms this evening. He was 7 years old, a beautifully fluffy, grey and white lop-eared bunny that we've had since he was so tiny he sat comfortably in the palm of my hand. I can't seem to stop crying for him, and for Bloemph, our other rabbit, who has never been alone for more than a couple of nights.
I miss him.
Every one of us makes daily decisions about people and things, based on our own perception of the situation at the time. We don't always make the right decision, and by the time we've made it, or by the way we made it, it's often too late to recover what we've lost.
Friendships lost through misunderstandings are the hardest to deal with, there's rarely 'closure', so they fester at the back of our minds, occasionally popping up to remind us what we've lost.We find ourselves going back over our reactions to situations and regretting being unable to talk it out. Did 'they' really mean that when they said it? Was that their intention? Should I have said something differently? Did I jump to the wrong conclusion? Should I have let that one go? If I'd said something in a different way, would things all be fine now? Should I have given the benefit of doubt, and not allowed my judgement to be clouded? Maybe I shouldn't have been so thin skinned - should I have swallowed my pride?
Now, it's too late, time has pottered on, as time so often does, and the deep friendship is no more, perhaps there are occasional words which pass between us like ships in the night, but memories of fun, love and support still remain, and the regret of loss will never leave me.
My youngest isn't really young any more, at 15 she's a self-confident and capable young woman, but some things still shake her composure and one of those is examinations. In November she sat her GCSE Maths as part of the top set in her year. It was a harrowing time, the first time she'd sat an exam that REALLY mattered, and she was very afraid that she'd fail, or at best do badly.
I'm thrilled to be able to report that she passed with flying colours, and is now in possession of an A* Maths GCSE Certificate.
She's not a great one to put herself forward, and I was only told about this by a friend who noticed it and recognised my daughter....
We've had lots of rain, lots of warmth, and plenty of sunshine, all of which have combined to create a perfect growing medium for the wildflower seeds Steve scattered on the rough 'rockery' patch.
It was always going to be somewhat hit or miss as to whether it turned out to look good or not, we didn't know what would grow (if anything), or, as the soil there is really poor, whether we'd just be looking at a bare patch with a few tired weeds.
As it happens, we have the most spectacular patch of green, with stunning oranges, reds, occasional purples and blues, and judging by all the buds as yet unopened, the best is yet to come.
The apple tree is still going great guns too, as you can see in the background.
