They day before we were due to be admitted to hospital I was exhausted. I felt like the air around me had turned to jelly – I could barely see straight and it was an enormous effort just putting one foot in front of the other.
“I think I'm getting your cold,” I told the Man.
Man sniffled and did a little man-flu groan. And I realised that we were both overcome with nerves. With him it had come out as a sore throat and sniffly cold, with me it was like being hit over the head. It's happened to me before – once on the first day of a new and especially scary job, I nearly fell asleep at my desk.
My friend, who's a counsellor in training says my body is releasing cortisol, the “stress hormone” which seems to be doping me up to the eyeballs. I decided to go clothes shopping – it seemed like a nice, shallow activity to pass the time, but I came over all dizzy in the Zara changing rooms and thought I was going to faint.
Of course LG is blissfully unaware of this, and is charging around the house full of energy. You can see him learning, growing and developing almost by the second. New words are exploding into his brain. “Shoes! Car! Bus! Apple!” He's reaching, grabbing, soaking up everything he can.
A few days before I'd taken him to the beach, removed his shoes and watched him get to know the ebb and flow of the sea. Then I grabbed him and threw him up in the air. His giggling little face was framed by perfect blue sky and my brain took a little happy snapshot. Then the voice of doom piped up inside and said: what if everything changes after Monday? I shrugged it off, and shoved the thought to the back of my brain, but that sort of thing sticks around. Which is why you end up having funny turns in mid-price fashion shops. Switching off is easier said than done.
Operation day: 12pm
LG has been down in surgery for three hours now. I'm sure they have decided to go open rather than keyhole and I can't help thinking: why on earth are we doing this? He's happy, he's growing well, he's discovering new things about the world. We were told this morning that the cells in his oesophagus which might have been pre-cancerous actually aren't. Our boy is having his stomach sliced open and we don't even know if it's going to do any good.
Meanwhile we wait upstairs on the ward. The baby in the bed opposite has a machine which emits a squeaky beep, and it has been doing so for over an hour. There is no natural light, foul nappy smells are emitting from the cubicle next door and there are only stiff, plasticky chairs to sit on. Somewhere a poor kid is groaning, and an adult is explaining over and over, with mounting stress, that "you can't eat yet because you have a sore tummy." All this wears down a parent's nerves. We're crammed together like wobbling water balloons full of fear and after a while one of us will burst.
In the future I will write about the good things - the wonderful staff, the surgeons' skill, the kindness of the other parents and the wondrous fact that this is all paid for by the NHS. But that's not how I feel now. Now I just want my little dude back so we can start facing up to the new normal and find out whether we're doing the right thing or not...
Operation day: 9pm
The wait became unbearable about half an hour after I finished that last entry. The groans-and-beeping rubbed my nerves paper-thin. Then I read some random Facebook appeal about a missing boy and the sight of his little smiling face on the posters turned me into a blubbering mess. I fled to the canteen.
I imagined all sorts of things the surgeons might be doing – fighting to revive him, repairing some disaster, or discovering a new dark mass in his abdominal cavity. Eventually the phone rang – my wonderful man who had stayed by the bedside had spoken with the surgeons. Everything was fine – they had done the surgery laparoscopically and he was in recovery. It had just taken a little longer because of scar tissue from his original surgery 19 months ago.
And there he was, in recovery and too weak to even cry. His temperature was high, his eyes puffy and his little hands shaking a little from the morphine. Every few breaths he gave out a weak little sob. But the incisions were tiny – one less thing to worry about.
Now all we have to worry about is how this will change his eating. And that's why I'm still not sure if we've done the right thing. We've taken a toddler with improving reflux and a healthy appetite and deliberately set his eating back several months. We don't even know if it will improve his oesphageal motility. Did we have any right to mess with his recovery?
The decision is made, the stitches are set.
Now it's nearly 10pm, and he is sleeping. Hoping tomorrow is the start of something new and exciting. Whatever it is, we'll deal with it.
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