All that comes with it

Our neighbor Eric is having a bit of a clear out. He told me the other day that he has thrown out over thirty old reel to reel tape recorders; don’t worry though, he still has ten left that he’s keeping hold of just in case he needs them.

Eric is a bit weird.

That’s ok by me though as over the past few weeks he’s been gradually giving me his collection of comics, chunk by chunk. This has culminated today in him handing me a large suitcase full to the brim of such delights as Spider-man, Conan the Barbarian, and Transformers. Six hundred and eighty six comics in all. That’s me busy for a while then.

On an unrelated note, Amy and I cleaned up the front yard this afternoon. There was a tarpaulin in the corner that has been there since I used it to keep her wendy house dry before I constructed it. I decided that 9 months was about enough time for it to be kicking about so I started to put it away; only to find half of Huddersfield’s snail population hibernating in it’s folds (did you know snails hibernate? Well they do. To stay moist while they sleep they seal their shell opening with a dry layer of mucus called an epiphragm. Who said this blog wasn’t educational?!).

Amy has a fear of snails, in fact she has a fear of most things that creep and crawl. Before I could put the tarpaulin away I had to clear off all the gastropods (see, there is that educational thing again). At first she kept running away screaming, claiming they were all going to come out of their shells and bite her. After a while though she became more confident that she wasn’t about to get savaged, and by the end she was picking them off herself.

It’s a good job they were snails we were moving and not slugs. I’m not sure seeing her father running around in circles, flapping his hands and shrieking like a girl would do much to help her overcome her phobias.

I was having a conversation with the student nurse who was looking after Evan this afternoon. We were talking about her training and she said that she found her mental health placement very interesting but she didn’t think she could do it for a job because “You need to be a special person to be a psychiatric nurse, you have to be strong inside”.

She’s wrong. It’s the children’s nurses who have to be the strong ones.

Sure my job can be distressing. We cover the entire spectrum of mental illness from suicide attempts to the acutely psychotic. But I can’t even imagine how devastating it is to watch a child you have developed a strong relationship with slowly slip away, then come back into work the next day and do it all over again.

Before I had kids it used to really irritate me when people used to say “I couldn’t do your job, I care too much so it would really upset me” - Oh yes, does that mean I don’t care? I’m the one who’s out there trying to help people while you sit in your office caring too much you pompous pillock. But since Amy, and now Evan, was born I know that I couldn’t be a children’s nurse, or a child protection social worker, or even a midwife – I would just care too much, it would destroy me.

A couple of days ago Claire’s dad challenged me to promote a charity on my blog. Initially I was going to go with goodgifts.org, an excellent way of giving to charity and buying Christmas presents for those awkward relatives at the same time. However, given recent events I’m going to switch my allegiance to Great Ormond Street Hospital, the UK’s most prestigious children’s hospital. Interestingly enough Great Ormond Street hold the copyright to Peter Pan (J. M. Barrie left them the rights to it in his will). I just donated a tenner, why don’t you? And while you are at it, lets hear about your favourite charity on your blog

The thing strapped to Evan’s foot is the sensor for the oxygen saturation measuring machine. I admit I tweaked it amateurishly in Photoshop, but the diode on it truly does make his toe glow like that.

Things are very much as they were before. He’s still on oxygen and still feeding sporadically. The doctors are reluctant to go down the nasal feeding route, as are we, so we’re going to persevere with the breast feeding. No one has actually mentioned staying in for another night, but nor have they mentioned going home either. I’ve come away in order to pick up Amy from nursery, but the doctor should be with Kerry about now so I expect we’ll find out more about what they want to do soon enough.

Both Kerry and I would be a little concerned if they asked us to go home tonight as his oxygen levels still occasionally dip below 90 when he moves his head away from the air mask or when he falls asleep. We’ve been told to judge his wellbeing by “watching the baby, not the monitor” but that’s quite hard to do when the bloody thing keeps going off like a car alarm. Still, we haven’t ever had the impression that the medical staff were taking any risks at all with Evan so if they told us to go home we’d probably trust them. Don’t think we’d sleep that well though.

We haven’t seen a great deal of the nursing staff, mainly because he doesn’t require all that much nursing. Kerry and I make sure that the facemask is pointing in his general direction and alert the staff should we have any concerns so there is not much left to do. We do have a student nurse allocated to us, probably because Evan’s a straight forward enough case and so she can’t do much harm. She’s ok, but I wish she’d stop saying “Of course dad you’ll know this, what with you being a nurse”. I keep telling her I’m not that kind of nurse and, unless Evan suddenly starts developing a schizophrenic episode, I’m just as clueless as the next guy, but it doesn’t seem to sink in. I guess she just doesn’t want to patronise me.

Amy’s a little puzzled about what’s going on, and she didn’t sleep at all well last night. She’s not at nursery tomorrow so my mum has kindly said she’ll have her for the morning. I’ll take her to visit Kerry and Evan in the afternoon, and then perhaps spend some quality time with her as she’s missed out a bit the past couple of days.

I’m going to get her from nursery now and then take her to the hospital. I’ll let you know if there have been any developments when I get back.