medical

Brain surgery

/ jess / 8 Comments

Ben had brain surgery last week. It was an elective operation, in which electrodes were inserted into his brain. These are connected to a battery pack about the size of a cigarette packet on the right side of his tummy. The idea is to try to reduce his dystonia and therefore give him a bit more control over his body. It’s called Deep Brain Stimulation.

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Ben spent a week in hospital after the surgery. He was discharged yesterday and is now back at home – recovering well but still in discomfort. We are relying heavily on paracetamol and films.

We chose for Ben to have this surgery. We entered in to it open-eyed – we knew the risks and we knew it would be hard. We hope that the benefits of reducing Ben’s dystonia, and therefore his disability, will outweigh the pain and disruption of the procedure. We thought hard about whether the gains would be enough to compensate for Ben never again being able to trampoline (in case the wires that now run down his neck snap), and not being able to swim for three months.

Having a child go through major surgery and recovery sends you into a hole. The intensity of the emotion and the level of care required is enormous and exceptional.

It feels all wrong to spend your child’s life taking so much care over who looks after them – we have never previously left Ben with anyone except trusted family, carefully chosen carers, at nursery or at school – then leave them with a group of doctors and nurses who you have only just met, and who are going to do unthinkably invasive things to him while he is unconscious. These places are so weird – full of people for whom this is all in a days work, while James and I are reading Ben knock-knock jokes and trying to convince him and ourselves that everything is going to be okay.

The six hours that Ben was in surgery felt like being in the eye of a storm. Everything calm and controlled, but filled with anxiety and waiting for the call to say he was in recovery. I tried not to dwell on the thought that if Ben’s brain was damaged for a second time I would never forgive myself. Then the call comes, and in we go, and the storm sweeps across us all.

We only really emerged from the swirl of hospitals, and cannulas, and exhaustion yesterday. Here are a few thoughts as we come into the light.

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When Ben has been in hospital previously, we only had one child and this time we had two. This made a bigger difference to our ability to cope than we expected. Someone who knows Ben well needed to be with him all the time – partly because he was sensitive and sad, mainly because he can’t communicate with anyone who doesn’t know him beyond crying. I had created a rota on a geeky spreadsheet to ensure there was always someone with Ben and someone with Max, but the reality of organising it was so tricky.

The easiest solution was to largely have me or James, or both of us, with Ben and for Max be with family and carers. We knew he’d be confused and annoyed, but hoped new Playmobil pirate sets and promises of cake would get him through. And it did for the first few days. Then, he realised that he hadn’t seen his dad for three days and Ben wasn’t at home. He didn’t understand why last week he’d been on holidays with the four of us hanging out all day, but now he never saw his parents in the same place, his brother was in this mysterious hospital place, and we kept trying to offload him on other people. He was so confused. At one point the fact that both of our kids were struggling nearly broke me. Things improved a bit once Max started visiting Ben at hospital, realised he wasn’t too far away and just looked like Mr Bump, and found out that hospitals have not only play rooms but also cafes that sell croissants.

I am raw to Max’s feelings about all of this. He shows such insight and accommodates so much. On the day before surgery, he asked where we were going to be while he was staying with my sister. We explained (again) that we would be at the hospital with Ben, that he was having brain surgery, that we hoped it would help Ben control his muscles. His first question was, ‘Will Ben be able to eat after the surgery?’. No, he won’t. But the three-year-old is asking all the sensible questions. Be still my heart.

Pulling together

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Our family is kept on the road by us all pulling together. For eight days I have spent up to 15 hours in a small room of a hospital. Sometimes with company, largely on my own with Ben, reading The Twits for the sixth time and eating fondant fancies for lunch because I can’t leave Ben for long enough to buy a sandwich. It’s not been that much fun.

But being James has been quantifiably less fun. James did six night shifts with Ben in a row. We were meant to alternate but the kindness of my husband and the frequency of my tears led to him doing every night. These were nights of Ben being miserable, almost no sleep, frequent observations and intravenous antibiotics. This last week, our family has been kept together by this man.

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Ben and James developed an amazing kind of symbiosis from spending all of these hours together in adversity in a small room. By the end of last week James knew what Ben wanted or needed from the smallest facial gesture or the subtlest wriggle. He knew when Ben wanted to be held, or how to get him to sleep. Oh man, these boys of mine.

Meanwhile, our families have been at our beck and call. My sister Maddy has once again proved that her capacity to sit in hospital rooms for hours is one of her most valuable skills (photo below of Ben and her just before his surgery). Along with looking after Max for days despite him almost continually insulting her.

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It will be okay

So here we are. We’re on Day 9 and Ben is well as he could be. It’s all held together with Calpol and constant entertainment, but we’re home.

A few weeks before the surgery we had a party to celebrate our new house and summer. It was our normal combination of friends, prosecco and semi-naked small children. Uncle George brought his decks and at some point before bedtime he played this song: Can’t Do Without You by Caribou. James and I went to Latitude Festival in July and we arrived, via horrific food poisoning, an emotional final assembly at Ben’s school and six hours of Ipswich traffic jams, to Caribou playing this song on the main stage. I love it.

As we then danced to this song in our garden at our party a few weeks later, with James holding Ben and Max jumping around, I had a moment. A little bit of clarity that Everything Is Okay – Ben is happy, our family is amazing, and we can all dance together at a party with our friends on a summer evening. I imagined looking at us from the outside and thinking ‘they look happy, that little family of four’.

As I sat in the hospital room when Ben was in surgery I listened to this song. As I stood in our kitchen at midnight during the last week, having just returned from the hospital but needing to make Ben’s meals for the next day before I could go to bed, knowing that I needed to be up at 6.30am to get back to Ben and James, I played this song. I imagine that many people associate this song with taking drugs on dance floors, but it’s become my anthem of Deep Brain Stimulation. I absolutely cannot do without my little gang of boys, we just need to get through this little patch of discomfort.

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‘I feel sick’

/ jess / 3 Comments

I am having an incredibly boring couple of days. Ben has vomiting and diarrhoea. It has unfortunately coincided with the days when we do not have help from nannies/carers and Max ‘settling in’ to a new nursery. Obviously Ben can’t go to school. It’s not really possible to look after both kids so James had to take yesterday off work. As always, my work gets pushed aside.

Any parent is familiar with the curious mix of boredom and worry that accompanies having a sick child. Max’s developing speech means he can now tell you a lot of what he thinks or feels, so when he woke up vomiting on Saturday night he could scream ‘I sick!’. Over the next few days he could tell us that he felt sick, that he needed a cuddle, that we needed to be gentle when we changed his nappy. It’s not fun seeing him ill, but amazing that he can be so eloquent about it.

That’s the first time we’ve nursed a speaking child though an illness – we are much more used to a child who is unable to say how they feel or what they want. Ben is often sick; when he vomits we have to wait and see whether it’s a sign of illness or just another bit of reflux. It became clear yesterday that he was ill and couldn’t go to school. So ill that we stopped all food and he had small amounts of dioralyte (though his gastrostomy tube) while watching hours and hours of TV. Today he woke pale and quiet and withdrawn. By mid-afternoon today he’d had half a banana (whizzed up in the blender and pushed through his feeding tube) and was complaining that Bob the Builder was unsatisfactory entertainment so hopefully he’s on the mend.

James and I know Ben so well we can generally tell by his movements, facial expressions and noises whether he is happy or not, whether he’s in pain or content. But we never know what’s coming – he can’t tell us he feels sick before the inevitable puke. He can’t tell us he’s hungry to indicate his tummy is ready for some food. So we just have to guess, and sometimes that means what goes in comes right back out again. So. Much. Wiping. And entirely homebound.

Earlier this week Ben had a general anaesthetic in order to have some tests. Other people can have this scan without sedation but Ben would move too much. It meant a whole day in hospital while we prepared for and then he recovered from the anaesthetic. Ben’s five weeks in hospital after he was born has left us with a strong distaste for the artificial light, overheated rooms and lack of control of a stay on a ward. It never gets any easier leaving Ben after he’s been anaesthetised (he’s had two operations related to his gastrostomy), sitting around eating M&S sandwiches while wondering what’s going on, worrying that he’ll wake up and won’t know where he is. It’s horrible when they do say you can go and see him because he’s confused and upset, and looks tiny in the massive hospital bed.

One of the questions his assigned nurse had asked in the morning was whether Ben could talk. We said no, but that he understood speech. Throughout the day we told him who each new person he met was and explained what was going to happen. Ben hates any kind of fiddling (he cries when he is weighed, even though this only means being held by me while I stand on some scales) but after 45 minutes of ‘magic’ cream on his hands and a lot of warning, he was surprisingly okay about the cannula being put it. They took blood at the same time as preparing for giving him the anaesthetic. Ben has a yearly blood test to check he is getting all of the necessary nutrition, something he finds traumatic. At least this reduced the number of times he’ll need to be pierced with a needle.

In the afternoon, as he recovered and waved his bandaged arm around, he started complaining that the entertainment was not up to scratch. A sure sign that he was on the up. He then whinged when the nurse came near him with a pulse/sats monitor. His nurse understood what he was trying to say, ‘You said he couldn’t talk, but I’m in no doubt what he means.’ Indeed.

Hearts and minds

/ jess / 2 Comments

There are unique challenges to parenting a disabled child. One of them is that your role as a parent is blurred with so many others: physiotherapist, occupational therapist, speech and language therapist, nurse, teacher, advocate interpreter; so many things to consider and activities that the simple mothering can get buried under the tasks you feel should be doing but would actually be done better by someone who had actually trained as a physiotherapist/teacher.

The other complication is that there are so many people involved, all in slightly different ways, so our lives are full of us explaining Ben to different professionals with slightly different emphases. This is true through from the apparently simple (what should we be feeding Ben?) through to the specialist (what drugs should he be on?), and with varying degrees of medicalisation. It’s one of the reasons why we would rather wait longer to see our usual Consultant rather than a new doctor.

Ben was in hospital for the first five weeks of his life. To begin with we could do almost nothing for him except sit close and stroke his hand – his care was in the hands of incredibly specialist nurses and doctors. As he got better and bigger the intensity of medical intervention decreased and we did more for him. I recall someone describing this period when their own child was in NICU, saying they realised that their parenting and nurturing would start when they were the best person to meet their child’s needs, but in the meantime their child needed medical professionals more than they needed a mother. It could have been Martha Wainwright, who I shared a breast-pumping room with at University College London Hospital. There’s nothing like pumping milk to force intimacy with strangers.

Once that initial, horrific, period was over Ben still required medical input but what he really, really needed was loving parents and James and I have tried our best to do that well but it’s not always easy.

Ben is seen by 19 different professionals or clinics (e.g. therapists, various hospital consultants, community doctor, nurses, dietician, social worker). Some of them we see annually or every six months (hospital clinics), some he sees weekly (therapists), so over the course of 2013 he had over 150 separate appointments. Many were at home or nursery, but I was there for the vast majority of them. I try hard to cull any appointments that we don’t need, and many of them are with lovely people who we enjoy seeing, but still that’s a lot of time each week which isn’t spent just hanging out with Ben, doing things he enjoys, being a mother.

We live a life where people say things you would prefer not to hear (‘we don’t have the luxury of being able to take children as disabled as Ben’s) and many things involve protracted, energy sapping bureaucratic ordeals (getting a Statement of Special Educational Need), all of which I handle better if I’ve had some sleep, and unfortunately this is one of the things Ben finds difficult. So on any given day it’s likely that I’ve been up during the night and that has inevitable effects on the quality of my parenting and my ability to cope. Unfortunately the likelihood of me bursting in to tears increased exponentially when I was pregnant with Ben and is now directly proportional to how tired I am. So there’s a fair amount of weeping some weeks, along with a lack of tolerance for people not helping us when they could. It also might lead to me sitting on a chair crying with Ben in my arms, and a Consultant sitting on the floor in front of me, wiping my tears.

Some of the appointments involve reviewing every aspect of Ben’s life, so our choices as parents are laid bare and discussed. This is often helpful, and with people who we trust and value their opinion, but not always. And we sometimes have to stand up for what we think is right despite their views. Which means Ben doesn’t need to have a blood test now (which he hates) just to check something which no-one’s that worried about.

One of the implications of this scrutiny, and of the complexity of Ben’s condition, is that aspects which aren’t particularly medical become medicalised in all of our minds. We were worried about Ben’s weight last year and had numerous conversations with people because his feeding is difficult, but it eventually became clear that we just weren’t feeding him enough. And that was because we were thinking of his feeding routine like a medicine chart, rather than what a 4 year old boy might eat. When we started putting Petit Filous down his gastrostomy tube, he got fatter. It’s not rocket science, but it is difficult to see the wood when you’re surrounded by trees and feeding tubes.

Christine Burke, who led a training session I attended earlier this year, said that the key thing for professionals involved in the lives of disabled people is that they come to work with their head and their heart. The best people we see (and there are many) are very skilled at what they do, but they also understand something of what our lives are actually like, and respect our views as parents. They explain options to us and leave us to make choices. They don’t call other professionals about Ben without talking to us first – both because that might be seen as rude, and because if they actually asked me I would be able to answer their question immediately. There also happens to be a direct correlation between how good people are at their jobs and how much they ask about Max – because they appreciate that Ben is part of a family, and we are parents to two children.

The worst thing anyone can do is come to work with only their head and see some aspect of their interaction with us as merely a task in their day. I am Ben’s mother and I will fight for what is right for him, and I may be exhausted (I may start sobbing) but you had better appreciate how special he is.