Everybody loves bacon

 So I had a stroke of genius as I wandered down the cold meats aisle. Bacon! Lovely smoky pink bacon. I mean, who doesn't love it, aside from the obvious religious objections? Ask any vegetarian what meat is most likely to lure them back to a state of carnivorous greed and they'll cite the sizzly stuff.

Our ongoing mission, as laid out by the dietician, is to get as much protein and calories into him as possible and bacon provides both.

Over the last few weeks he's been going through a fussy stage again. He used to love fruity mush and gorge on pears off the pip. Now he looks at it as if it is Of The Devil. As for vegetables, I have a whole freezer full of uneaten, rejected purees.

So then inspiration struck again - what if I mixed the bacon with the purée?

Oh yes.

I minced some up with some defrosted sweet potato purée and tasted it - weirdly smoky rather than meaty but my consultant says tofs often like strong flavours so this could be a winner.

The first attempt didn't go too well - I didn't mince it fine enough and he spat out the bits but I could tell he liked the taste. The second time I made a larger amount and puréed it finely. He was definitely intrigued. He allowed the spoon near his mouth - even opening it sometimes.

Tonight, attempt three, I'm going to combine it with overcooked noodles - his favourite. Wish me luck...

This dude is made for walking

One great thing that's happened over the last few months is that LG has finally got into walking. It started slowly when he realised he could use his pushcart to get around. He grew more and more confident with that, then started shuttling a few steps at a time - sofa to Mummy, Mummy to sofa. Footstool to sofa, to Mummy.

Then suddenly, a few days ago, he was off. There he was, wheeling his cart around the front room while I tidied up. After a few minutes I realised the cart wasn't rattling around any more and I figured he'd fallen over. I looked round and he was gone - he'd headed into the hallway.

You can imagine my combined joy and panic.

For months we'd been worried about whether he'd do it. He still doesn't crawl and has no interest in it. He even had an appointment with the paediatrician a couple of weeks before to make sure there was nothing physically wrong.

But now, finally it's happened.

This means that, for the first time his appetite has finally started to grow because of his increased activity. I mean, don't get out the tickertape yet - we're talking a few extra bites and not quite so much spoon phobia. Nothing spectacular but enough to give me hope for the future.

It's had an interesting effect on his vomiting too. That random Exorcist style sickness where the whole contents of his stomach come up for no reason - that doesn't happen so much any more. Instead he's only really sick at mealtimes - when he bites off more than he can chew - and at night time when he's lying down.

When he was first born the doctor predicted this. He said that once LG became more mobile the reflux would subside. Unfortunately this improvement has come too late. He still coughs so violently at night that blood comes out. A scope this week revealed that he has chronic inflammation in the lower part of his oesophagus. Despite months of denial and hoping that it wouldn't come to this, we're heading for a fundoplication.

When hospital ate our November

I've been putting off writing this post for months - so much so that I've got a dozen other ideas for posts backed up in my head, but I can't write them until I've written this one. The thing is, I don't want to think about it. I don't want to relive it and tell you how I felt, because I never want to feel like that again.

So here is a bald, stark list of facts to sum up the story.

• At the last operation the anaesthetist noticed that the little guy was looking a bit pale. She ordered a blood test and, as I mentioned, it took about half an hour to squeeze a few drops out of him. 
• Unsurprisingly it turned out they hadn't taken enough blood so, instead of going to his little friend's first birthday party, we went to the hospital to get another blood test.
• That night we got a call at 7pm from a concerned doctor saying his haemoglobin levels were frighteningly low.
• The next day (halloween) we went in and to my shock they decided to give him a blood transfusion.
• I sat next to him through the night watching the shiny bag of blood draining into him trying to distract myself by thinking of vampire-baby jokes.
• They told us we'd be amazed by a sudden surge in energy in him. Instead the next day he became tired and floppy and started running a temperature.
• By the middle of the next day he coudln't keep any of his food down. We were syringing Dioralyte into him and hoping for the best.
• That evening we finally called the hospital. They said bring him in - they put him on a drip to keep him hydrated and nil by mouth to rest his stomach.
• He was due to have a dilatation in 24 hours so now the surgical team at his main hospital got involved. They wanted him transferred so they could assess him too.
• So that's how we found ourselves in an ambulance travelling the 30 mile trip. The paramedics kept holding an oxygen mask to his face - this was the first time I started to suspect that something was really wrong.
• The surgical team took one look at him and declared him unfit for the operation (winning the medical version of the No Shit Sherlock awards)
• Team after team of doctors came to visit him - the gastro team, the surgical team, the paediatrics team, dieticians and physiotherapists. Every hour or so I had to retell his story to a new and different specialism. I still didn't really know what was going on - just that he couldn't clear his lungs.
• Every few hours nurses would come in and suction him. Physiotherapists would pat his body to try and loosen the flem on his chest. All the while his Sats (oxygen levels) were hovering around 80 when they should be 100.
• A week before he had been running around in his walker - now he was more or less tied to a cot, hooked up to the Sats monitor, the oxygen pipe and with a nasogastric tube for his food.
• Meanwhile I lived on the fold-up bed next to him, trapped miles from home by myself for most of the time going slowly stir-crazy.
• I was having my first night off - about  a week after he was taken in - when the chest x-ray results came back and showed "a shadow" as I was told on the phone.
• I spent all night terrified that he had pneumonia.
• And guilty - the reason he wasn't fighting the infection off was because he was so weak from the anaemia - which made me feel I hadn't been feeding him properly.
• In the morning the doctors explained the shadow was "gunk" and the physio was starting to succeed in shifting it.
• He was finally diagnosed with a virus called Parainfluenza 3.
• There was no sign of an infection but he was given antibiotics just in case, which gave him spectacular diarrhoea on top of everything else. We went through about four babygros a day.
• We bumped along the bottom for a while with his condition neither improving nor getting worse.
• Then, slowly, he started to improve.
• He started to eat.
• His lungs cleared.
• He started smiling again.
• Finally his sats levels started to climb.
• And then one glorious day - three and a half weeks after we came in, we were allowed home.

You can imagine his little face when we walked in the door at home - he was laughing, smiling and jumping around in my arms. He had probably almost forgotten where we lived - I know I had.

But it's taken a month out of our lives, and that's hard to recover from. The little dude flourished for a few weeks after that - making up for lost time - but we didn't see any more new milestones for a while. And when we go back to hospital he cries at the sight of a stethoscope.

As for me, I'm still recovering - still making up the lost time at work, still trying to relax and keep calm every time he throws up a feed or has blood in his vomit. The stay in hospital changed everything.

But on the plus side, I learned so much about his condition, I accessed so much support from the medical teams and even met another Tof mum whose little boy was in hospital at the same time. So things aren't so bad. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and all that jazz.