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.
