Discharged

My girl is out of hospital and home. 

Over the last couple of days she's been unplugged from the various blinking, beeping, and puffing machines.

Last week’s terrifying talk of intensive care seems an awful long time ago.

I knew she was getting better when she dropped a baked bean from her dinner onto the ward floor, and was concerned that she was “minus one bean”.

Yesterday and today was mainly concerned with answering questions, over and over again.

“When am I going home?”

later amended to 

“What time am I going home?

changed to

“Will you cancel my dinner because I’ll be going?”

panic-changed to

“But what if I’m still here and I’ve got no dinner?”

The nurses were primed to provide the right answers. Food arrived shortly before we got the all clear to go, and in true Magnus Magnusson fashion (I’ve started, so I’ll finish), my daughter sat and polished off her meal while we waited, clutching her bag of medicine and discharge letter, watching her. Smiling. 

My girl is out of hospital and home.

Video is Charles Bradley - Good To Be Back Home

Corner

Oh, oh, oh, what a difference a day makes.

She's turned the corner. My daughter's infection has started to shift. Air is getting into that left lung. Oxygen has been reduced from nearly 60% to 28%.

She's perkier, more anxious, and more nosey about her ward neighbours.

My lovely husband is at the hospital and has sent me home. He is dealing with the return of her repetitive questioning (which I was thrilled to see come back, but probably wouldn't have been after six or seven more hours of it).

I'm bloody well going out. Yes, 'out' out. I'm on the train to that London to see a couple of friends perform in their band The Disappointment Choir. I am not disappointed about this.

I am going to have a MASSIVE gin, meet some long-time-no-see mates, catch the train home (setting phone and watch alarms so I don't sleep past my stop), and then get approximately 10 hours kip.

Today has, and will continue to be, a very good day.

Video is The Disappointment Choir - Heartstrings/2½ Minute Love Song

Curve

My girl's struggle with pneumonia continues slowly. My struggle to present my best bright and breezy game-face to her also continues apace.

Yesterday there was talk of ITU and intubation. There's been less talk of it today, and my heart rate has gone down accordingly.

Antiobiotics have been switched. The ward has echoed to the sound of a succession of sinewy female physios drumming out a rhythm on my daughter's side and back with resounding cupped hand pats and manipulations. My girl has been blowing through a straw to make bubbles in a jug of soapy water. Her observations are being taken frequently and assessed carefully.

Despite the stubborn infection not wanting to shift, she's been more like herself  today. Typical trademark random conversations have occurred, when she previously wasn't saying much at all. The one that amused the nurses the most was a sudden worry on my daughter's part that Michael Jackson's doctor might be charge of measuring out her medicine (what the actual fuck?). Also, out of the blue, she told one doctor that "the matron was horrible to children and beat them". He seemed somewhat relieved to hear my quick explanation that my girl was talking about a character in Hetty Feather, a Jacqueline Wilson novel about a Victorian foundling hospital which I'd been reading to her at her bedside. Not referring the sister in charge of Ward 5 at Milton Keynes Hospital, who seems very nice.

Friends have helped keep little brother entertained with playmates. My husband has helped with shuttle runs, provisions, and general superhuman steadfastyness. Yes, that is now a word, I just wrote it.

Steadfastyman* and I are doing a tag-team switcheroo tomorrow. (*Autocorrect turned this into Steadfarty man and I was tempted to leave it, as it's actually very accurate). I need my bed for a night. I need the next couple of days to continue the tiny upward curve they've taken today. And I definitely need them be curvier, and more upward.

Puffed

Pneumonia. Her left lung was very hazy on the X-ray and there's essentially a lot of gunk stuck there that needs to shift.

My daughter is on oxygen through a nasal tube. She's still not getting enough air into her gunky lung by herself. Her shape from her scoliosis, her poor muscle tone from her Prader-Willi Syndrome, and her daintiest of dainty and infrequent coughs being too damn dainty and infrequent, are all complicating matters.

We're waiting for the strong antiobiotics to kick in. In 24 hours, if hands-on physio, breathing physio, and the meds don't shift the gunk, a decision may have to be made to do a chest drain.

"I feel grotty, Mum," my dark circle-eyed girl told me. "I just want to get better."

In that brain-bamboozling way she has of random conversation shifts, she then said: "When you went to get our things earlier you missed a lion." I looked at her in alarm, thinking she had suddenly started hallucinating. "I think Daddy would have said if there had been a lion on the hospital ward, sweetheart," I said, patronisingly. "There was a lion," she insisted, and of course I found out later she was right. A person in a furry suit kind of lion. One of those 'supposed to be charming but actually quite creepy' type of things you see visiting children's hospital wards. Like clowns. Or One Direction. (I'm not going to even mention Jimmy Savile).

Another sofa-bed vigil is about to start. I think there may be less vigil-ing in my vigilance tonight because I'm cream-crackered. Not as cream-crackered as my pale and poorly girl, though. She's puffed her way through her breathing exercises today, with great difficulty, and she's all puffed out.

I just want her to get better, too.

Can't be doing with mobile phone-posting a video tonight, so knock yourselves out by Spotifying Puff The Magic Dragon. Or something by Puff Daddy, I suppose. But the dragon one will be better.