Ring out the old....

Hope everyone had a great Christmas! Elin sure did. Without wishing to cast the inevitable curse that comes with grandiose statements, I've got to say I think it was her best yet! Aside from a bug she was always bound to get, which thankfully disappeared well before Christmas, Elin has been the happiest, healthiest and most relaxed we've ever seen her. That is ALL we ever want for Christmas.

Its surprising, looking back through my posts, how many Christmases didn't work out so well for Elin. I have just realised that three years on the run we had a stint in hospital over Christmas and in other years, she was either coming down with a bug or getting over a bug on the big day itself. One Christmas Eve, a seizure landed her on Children's Ward. Another year she had to stay at home with me whilst Paul did our annual London Christmas visit because she was too ill to travel.

The reason this is surprising to me, is that I don't really remember them. They haven't stuck in my memory as you would presume they would have. As we enter a new decade, I thought it would be nice to reminisce about my ghosts of Christmas past before I sat down to write my Christmas blog post and the only imagery I could conjure up in my minds eye was joyful. I remembered Elin laughing at the wrapping paper on her presents, Christmas balloons, her school concerts, visits from family, cuddles with friends by the Christmas tree, outings to shows and concerts, meeting Father Christmas, I even remember her various gorgeous outfits over the years! But until I really, really focused and checked back through this online diary of mine, the bad times (of which there have been many it seems!) were strangely mute in my memory. 

This is going to sound as trite and glib as anything, but it has made me remember that truly, life and feelings and struggles and bad times are fluid, which is a reminder I really need sometimes.  I'm not trivialising these issues. I have been beyond miserable during these times. I still have really, really, hard moments and struggle to keep my anxieties and emotions in check, which I am not good at admitting or dealing with (but I'm working on that!) Sometimes,  I make lemonade from my lemons and sometimes the only thing I can do is chop them up and put them in a massive gin and tonic!! Unending positivity just isn't always possible.  However, when I look back on the important times of our life with Elin, like Christmas, I can STILL only really remember the good things. Despite the absolute agony of the bad times. I love the human brain for doing that, against all the odds and even when you are pre-disposed to overwhelming worry and anxiety,  it still tries its best to filter out the overwhelmingly painful stuff. Maybe it's partly our determination as a family to focus on the positive, although as I've said god knows that is not always possible, or maybe it's because we know that ultimately, as long as we have Elin happy and healthy and by our sides then the rest of the pain we experience will be muffled, if we can allow it to be.

I know this is not specific to us. I know that when it boils down to it, nobody really cares about presents or turkey or Christmas trees. All any of us want is our health and for the health of the people we love and to get to spend another Christmas with them. I am unbelievably lucky to have some utterly amazing friends and family surrounding me, none of whom I could navigate this journey without. On new Year's Eve this year I will be wishing for a healthy 2020 for everyone we know and love, everyone who cares so much about us and everyone we care so much for in return. It is after all the ONLY thing that will ever really matter. 

Happy New Year folks. Dina Caroll said it way better than I could:

"Ring out the old

Bring in the new

A midnight wish to share with you.

If you're with me, next year will be

The perfect year"

See you in 2020 everyone!!

Elin’s Diary

Welcome to ‘Elin’s Diary’ which I’m hoping to update every Sunday reflecting on the past week of adventures! (Perhaps with the odd post in between, too). It’s been overall a good week for our little sunshine girl. She has been slightly off colour - something I’m putting down to the flu vaccine last weekend but is more likely just a little cold or virus with all the excessive secretions that have been plaguing her.  She even had a rather long nap at lunchtime in school more than once this week! Oh dear Elin how sad! She’s not done that since she was a tiddler.  Apparently she was snoring all over the classroom I’ve no idea where she gets those bad sinuses from! (Me) Although we don’t think she demonstrated appropriate remorse! I think detention is the only way forward.

On Friday I missed an apppintment in the athsma clinic for the THIRD time. I can only conclude that my sub conscious being really, really doesn’t want to go or that any *rare appointment that I have for myself with a healthcare professional just never quite arrives on my radar, even though it’s repeatedly written on my calendar! I’ve never once forgotten an appointment of Elin’s so why I can’t muster up the enthusiasm about my own health to remember a five minute check up is beyond me- maybe I’m scared somewhere in my psyche that I’ll be told red wine causes wheezing!! But I do think that the seemingly endless amount of appointments for Elin in the last six months or so has created a bit of a brain malfunction on my part. Perhaps you can carry around too much information in your head and you sort of short-circuit. I feel a bit like I’ve short-circuited! Yesterday for the first time ever we ran out of one of Elin’s medications. I had forgotten to pick up the new bottle from the Chemist. I rooted through the cupboards in disbelief of my own idiocy even though I knew they weren’t there. As I turned the bottle upside down and shook out every last drop, like in that Tomato Ketchup advert from the 80’s, I felt totally gutted. Elin is so vulnerable and reliant on us being on top of everything. Feeling that you let her down even in a tiny way is horrible. Yes we all make mistakes but being wrong is not one of my strongest points! Luckily for us we managed to elicit every last drop out of the bottom of this medicine bottle- taking us up to first thing on Monday morning where the new bottle will hopefully be waiting patiently for me in the Chemist. This barrage of appointments for Elin we seem to have been experiencing is not necessarily a bad thing though, I’m not complaining, she has an amazing team of professionals around her ensuring that she gets the very best care from all angles and for that we are forever grateful (I just wish my brain cells would stop feeling so frazzled and start working at full power again-if they ever have been)

For example, on Friday Elin got to start ‘Hippotherapy’ again. Sadly this is nothing to do with actual Hippo’s (shame!) and instead is a horse riding therapy for the disabled. Elin’s muscles, joints, spine, head control and pelvis are all given a good workout whilst on the back of a mechanical horse with a physiotherapist. One day she may migrate to real horses, but obviously there is a risk there now she is so big and a lot of responsibility for the back-riding physio to keep her safe. So a mechanical horse it is for now, which mimics the movements of a real horse. Elin loved it! It’s so wonderful just to get her doing something new that she enjoys and if there are physical benefits then all the better. 

 

The Clwyd Special Riding Centre is an amazing place which would never run without donations and volunteers. It blows my mind that this sort of opportunity is open to Elin because people are willing to give up their free time to make it happen. The generosity of the human spirit never cease to amaze me. We are very much hoping this is something Elin can continue to enjoy for some time to come.

Elin’s also had a really lovely weekend because it was her Great Aunty Brenda’s 90th Birthday Party! Wow! That’s quite an age and Elin was absolutely delighted to be out at night! In fact she was so good and so pleased we began to wonder if she thought the party was for her! It was a special treat that big sister and all round favourite person Caitlin travelled back from London for the weekend to sing at the party. She brought the house down as usual but what was lovely for me was to see how excited Elin got when Caitlin started singing. She just adored it. Usually I would shy away from taking Elin out at night because I don’t like to upset her routine (or things just aren’t suitable for her) but I’m so glad we did!!! I realised that I get used to going out in the evening without Elin and you always feel like you are missing a limb. It's a feeling you make yourself get used to for practical reasons but it never really goes away. So it was so good to see the extended family together and have Elin there alongside us. I’ll leave you with some pictures of Elin trying to steal Aunty Brenda’s thunder and wish you a really good week. Thanks for taking an interest in our miracle girl 😊
Ruth x

 

   

 

Xxxx

Mother of all Lists

Today a post I wrote for Clemmie Telford AKA 'Mother Of All Lists', went live on her blog. Clemmie's blog is, in case you haven't guessed by the title, a collection of lists covering pretty much any subject you can think of. Clemmie writes candidly about all aspects of parenthood and beyond and also accepts 'Guest Lists' from other people, covering subjects as wide ranging from dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis or the death of a loved one to tips of planning a great children's birthday party. I am delighted to say my list about living with Cerebral Palsy has now been added to this catalogue of posts. I actually found it quite challenging to write in a 'list' format and struggled with what to include. I think my original 'list' was about three times as long, so editing down to a size people might actually want to read was hard, too! If you'd like to take a read you can find it here:

https://motherofalllists.com/2017/11/10/guest-list-my-daughter-cerebral-palsy/

Happy Friday, folks! x

Why post-natal/post diagnosis mental health support for special needs Mums AND Dads is so important.....

As we exit Mental Health Awareness week I have noticed a plethora of informative, enlightening, brutally honest and sometimes extremely moving, articles highlighting the subject across social media. Perhaps one that piqued my interest the most was an article  regarding post-partum mental health, in particular focusing on parents who did not have the expected birth experience, and for whom things did not ‘turn out ok’ in the end. The article (which can be found here http://community.fireflyfriends.com/blog/article/post-diagnosis-who-looks-after-special-needs-parents?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=post-diagnosis-who-looks-after-special-needs-parents&utm_content=post-diagnosis-who-looks-after-special-needs-parents) inquired ‘Who looks after such parents?’ The answer, in my own personal experience, is nobody.

I don’t think anybody would disagree that support for parents following trauma should be offered as soon as possible. However, due to an extremely underfunded and overworked NHS, this support is rarely forthcoming. My daughter Elin was born ‘flat’ in 2008 following an epic and exhausting labour. All hell let loose as soon as she arrived- my husband was told to pull the emergency red cord above my bed and we waited anxiously amongst the chaos for a cry that never came. We saw only a flash of marble-white flesh as she was bundled onto the resuscitation table next to my bed and ‘worked on’ to no avail, before finally being whipped away and attached to life support, whilst we waited in an empty room not knowing anything for what felt like a lifetime. Her Apgar score was 0 and she was put on a ventilator in SCBU where she stayed as we watched and waited for 11 days until she was finally able to breathe unassisted.

The Midwives who had attended the birth were offered counselling sessions within a week. We were never offered counselling, though we did have the where withal to request it ourselves. I was told that due to high waiting lists we could have an appointment through MIND for December (it was July). So instead we navigated through the following months of horror completely by ourselves: a month on SCBU; then home to a simply crazy number of appointments; massive professional input; weeks spent in and out of hospital; zero sleep; administering several medications a day; tube feeding; watching Elin have seizures daily; open surgery at Alder Hey and finally receiving a devastating diagnosis of severe Cerebral Palsy due to lack of Oxygen she had suffered at birth.

During those dark months we simply survived from day to day. We tried to support one another as our own hearts broke inside us without a second thought for counselling. In many ways it was easier for me, people asked how I was. I was the Mum, I was the one who had given birth and most people understood how awful it had been. But the effects on my husband were equally far-reaching and Dads often seem to be forgotten in post-partum trauma discussions. My husband suffered horrendous PTSD and flashbacks after watching me give birth and observing the ensuing nightmare unfold. It was he who was forced to leave Elin and I in the hospital alone as he informed family and friends of what had happened. It was he who drove home to an empty house and put away the Moses Basket, convinced we would not be needing it (he later told me he drove back to hospital after doing this but never made it- he turned round, drove back home and put the basket back out. He wasn’t ready to give up on our girl). It was him who was warned in grave voices by the doctors that our baby may not make it as I was bathed and medicated in my room, oblivious to these discussions. The first time he saw our daughter through the glass of her incubator, surrounded by machinery dwarfing her tiny frame, he was alone. To say he was traumitised would probably be an understatement. So we both struggled through our emotions after bringing Elin home.

I remember one particular time when I just couldn’t get up from the bathroom floor where I had crumpled. I simply thought I was going to die of grief. Yes, perhaps we could have sought private counselling but it quite literally never occurred to us. Once we brought our baby home from the SCBU there was too much to think about and our own mental health was the last thing on our overflowing to-do list as we cared for a very sick baby.  We needed someone to talk to, to suggest we get help and explain the far-reaching effects of trying to deal with what we later came to understand as PTSD without professional support.

I regularly wonder if we had started counselling in that first six months after Elin was born, would we have had the emotional tools that might have made the following years of devastation perhaps that little bit easier to handle?

Any parent who has received a life-altering diagnosis for their baby in the days or weeks following the birth needs help, it really is as simple as that. An SEN parent friend of mine succinctly explains it ‘It’s like they say this is what your baby has. This is your life now, so deal with it’.

Post- partum/post diagnosis mental health support is SO IMPORTANT!! The healthcare professionals such as the Midwives should absolutely be offered counselling after trauma, but so should the parents. It’s time to find the funding. It’s time to redress the balance.