I've been thinking more and more about mental health issues and emotional welfare over the past few months. When you are so bogged down in the diagnosis, the medical stuff, the "just getting it all done" it's easy sometimes to forget the wider impact of what is happening. Day in day out we take for granted the pain and discomfort Daisy goes through, the interventions she has to tolerate, the discomfort she constantly feel. It's been part of her life and our lives for as long as she has been with us and in our determination to keep Daisy away from hospital Andy and I have become experts in many medical procedures and interventions. When she was discharged home from the neonatal unit we soon learned how to pass a naso-gastric tube so that we could avoid midnight drips to A&E to get one passed, later we learned how to change her gastrostomy button, then when she needed TPN to survive we learned how to administer the intravenous drip and drugs that keeps her alive, change the dressings around the line, manage her ileostomy stoma and catheterise her mitrofanoff stoma into her bladder.
