Botox, more surgery and another curve ball

It's always great when a plan comes together and the beginning of this year has seen all the frantic and stressful attempts at trying to get some co-ordination around Daisy' care paying off at last.

As we near the end of March she has already had two hospital stays involving multi-disciplinary teams and we have started getting some more plans and answers in place as a result.  The first stay, which I blogged about here)  involved surgery to assess her airway and remove a second set of adenoids.  She moved onto the neurology ward, via the urodynamics day ward and spent 3 days hooked up to a telemetry machine.  Daisy was amazing - not only had she started the week having to endure another anaesthetic and surgery, she then had to have some very painful tests on her bladder, closely followed by having EEG electrodes glued and taped to her head.

Rarer than rare and a confirmed diagnosis

Last week Daisy had her whirlwind, multidisciplinary admission into Great Ormond Street where, following gargantuan planning and co-ordination efforts we managed to compress the equivalent of a month's worth of consultations and procedures into a 5 day stay.

The week started off under the ENT team where Daisy had an airway assessment (some scar tissue on the larynx but structurally OK) and removal of her adenoids.  This was the second set of adenoids she had removed, 6 years ago the first set were taken out together with her tonsils but very rarely they can grow back, and as we know with Daisy rare is a word she is very fond of!

The unwelcome house guest

A stranger turned up here a few months ago, we hoped they would be a passing house guest but it appears they have taken up residence and turned our home upside down.

Daisy has epilepsy and epilepsy has us in it's grips.  It's turned our world upside down and when we thought things really could not become more complicated, they did.

This is the house guest you loathe, some of our others, like TPN and Catheters and Stomas, we've grown to accept and they have become part of our lives, fitting in to our routine so that we were able to have some sort of an existence.  But epilepsy is anti-social, seizures come without warning, they disrupt plans, throw you off guard and turn you into a gibbering wreck.  When Daisy had her first few seizures a good friend wrote to me and said that she could cope with all the issues her daughter faced but the epilepsy was the thing that had tipped her over the edge.

Another milestone ticked off

The day Daisy was born she was stabilised and then rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit, not knowing what the future held I asked our local priest to come and baptise her on that day, a sort of holy insurance policy...

When she came home two months later we held a blessing service for her on the same weekend as her big brother's Holy Communion, so it was an excuse of a big party to welcome Daisy to the world and to mark Theo's transition from his baby years as he grew up.

Having studied Anthropology at University, I have always been a big fan of these rites of passage, marking transitions into various life stages - being catholic helps as we do ceremonies like this pretty well.

I didn't dare hope that one day I would be able to see Daisy make her First Holy Communion, so much has gone on in her life since her arrival in the world it seemed a distant goal.  But today, with the odds as always stacked against her, loaded up with intravenous pain relief and anti-seizure medication I am able to say that ALL my children have now make their Holy Communion.

Learning a new vocabulary

Over the years we have added to and expanded our vocabulary of medical and special needs terms - in the early days it was the language of NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) with NG feeding, cpap, jaundice and corrected age creeping into our conversations, then it was genetics speak, then Costello Syndrome speak and before long we found ourselves holding our own with Daisy's doctors as we spoke about gut inflammation, fluid balances, neuropathies and myopathies, stomas, catheters and TPN.  You know you're an intestinal/bladder failure parent when you know all the reference ranges for your child's main blood tests, or you start photographing the different shades of bile that they produce from their free drainage, or when you get excited because their fluid balance chart adds up!