The August Bank Holiday weekend last year was very special. On the Friday Leah was transferred from the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit to the beautiful purpose built Adolescent Ward in Bristol Children’s Hospital. Leah had spent five long hard weeks in isolation. She now had a lovely single ensuite room on the adolescent ward.
Although Leah wasn’t allowed to mix with the other patients, she could move about the ward and use any of the facilities when the other patients weren’t using them. She would now be allowed unrestricted visiting, so her sisters could plan a trip over from Ireland. In the Transplant Unit the only visitors allowed were myself, her daddy and her boyfriend.
Emma B. from Limavady and her boyfriend Nic were there to help us move. Nic’s mum Kerry was waiting to welcome Leah to the world outside BMT. Although Leah was still ill and weak, we were all so happy and so excited. We felt that the worst was behind us and now it was onwards and upwards.
Leah’s own consultant, Dr C who we adored, was on call the whole weekend. This was a real treat. Doctors visits over the weekend were more leisurely, with plenty of time for conversation. On one of these visits, Dr C was examining the palm of Leah’s hand, looking for signs of GVHD, when he said very seriously “I see a tall dark handsome young man in your life.” He was of course referring to Nic and we all had a giggle. Everyone was so upbeat.
A few times over the weekend Leah and I went exploring our new accommodation. Leah was very weak and tired easily. She wasn’t yet up to a game of air hockey.
We had a laugh when we discovered that the ward juke box had quite a collection of Irish rebel songs and we sat trying them out.
Leah’s appetite was still poor and she was prone to vomiting. She was still being fed directly into her central line via TPN. However on the Bank Holiday Monday her TPN ran out and there was nobody available in Pharmacy to make up more. Dr C shocked me by telling us that we could go and spend the afternoon and night in our room at SAMs House, the Clic Sargent family hostel.
Leah was so pleased that I couldn’t show how I really felt – scared. Even though I’m a nurse and our room in SAMs House had a phone with a direct line to the hospital, I was worried that my daughter was too ill to be left in my care. I didn’t tell her how I felt – she didn’t need to know.
We were dispatched in a taxi with several bottles of high calorie, lactose free, Fortijuice food supplement drink, that Leah had no intentions of consuming. All she wanted was her mummy’s home cooking.
This presented another dilemma for me, as in order to buy food, I would need to leave Leah on her own for approximately 40 minutes. So, with my heart in my mouth, I walked as fast as I could to the local Co-op and bought the fixings for Leah’s favourite dish – chicken fried rice. She could only eat a small quantity, but she said that it was the nicest meal she had ever tasted.
She had a lot of tablets to take at bedtime:
I tucked her into bed that night, kissed her and told her I loved her. She slept soundly. For the first time in five weeks she wasn’t connected to any drips and wasn’t being woken by nurses coming to check her vital signs.
Me – well I must have seen every hour on the clock! I had become so used to the beeping machines, the lights, the hustle and bustle of the hospital, that I couldn’t cope with the silence and the darkness. It was almost like bringing a newborn baby home from the hospital – I had to restrain myself from getting up periodically to check that Leah was still breathing. All the while I was berating myself for feeling like this and thinking how ridiculous I was being.
We returned to the hospital in the morning and resumed inpatient status. That one night outside the hospital had given Leah such a boost to her morale and helped her to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel.
My Journey: 