Word in the Hand

Now that I can start to see improvements in my son's health, the visit to the Hospital restaurant is turning into something of a people watching experience. As they say - all human life is here. And I am learning the trick of seeming to look one way whilst my gaze is concentrated on another. Today I watched a young woman following a complicated ritual surrounded by the ebb and flow of the staff and 'sleeping in parents'. I had a hunch, based on prior experience, that this was someone with an eating disorder and my observations seemed to prove me right. She was very calculating in her design. She took a table for four and put something, a coat, bag, briefcase (she did appear to be staff rather than visitor) on each of the chairs. Then she made two visits to the counters returning with the basics of four meals which she set out in front of each chair. When she was happy with the layout she sat down and ate the first of the meals, disappeared; returned with an extra coffee whi...

One thing that has changed in hospitals is that they don't wake you up at dawn for whatever reason they used to. You may get woken up at other times but that's on a medicinal 'need to know' basis. Because of his illness crossed with being a teenager, my son sleeps on and on and on. Unfortunately Catholic guilt stops me from lying in the bed next to him, even if I am reading, even if I am tired too. So when I hear the staff starting their changeover circuit, I get up, fold the bed back into its space and tidy up, as if in readiness for a military inspection; after all this I don't want them to think I am a bad mother. After saying hello and finding out which nurse is 'ours' for the day (they are all lovely but they have their own ways and we have learnt to adapt ours) I head out into the main hospital and down to the restaurant for breakfast. It started off feeling somewhat unnerving, knowing that everyone around you is either staff or other parents sta...

The Children's Hospital is in an old Victorian building, better suited to the old days of large wards with the beds lined up in military fashion down each side and, you can imagine, a matron who didn't stand for any nonsense! Our ward has been split up into cubicles with three sides and a glass partition onto the corridor. The children here are all chronic cases of one kind or another so need to be in isolation as far as it can be managed. The cubicles start off bare, then an incubator, cot, bed or theatre stretcher appears with or without a child. Then the child, hopefully with family. Various monitors, pumps and other apparatus are wheeled in - beeps, buzzers, counters and flashing lights illuminating the effect of what the illness is having on the child's health. Parents hover nervously in the background feeling they are in the way or pose forcefully over their child like a defending archangel defying the doctors not to do their best. Walking up and down the corr...

Wh en I began this blog, it was Lent 2008. With the cycle of the Church I am reminded that although I am on this journey towards… often the path spirals back on itself; allowing me, allowing all of us, to revisit a time, an experience, a preconception or two. In the introduction to the blog I said that it would be about my faith, that there were parts of my life that I would not share, that I regarded as personal. And yet, as the year has gone on, this has shown itself to be false. If my reflections were only based on scripture study and preaching a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ philosophy then they would be no use to anybody- even me. Perhaps I do not report specific incidents, mention names, place and dates but my faith is my life therefore something of my life is surely in every posting. And that is as it should be; after all I do not leave God in the Tabernacle, at the door of the church, at the door of my home, at the door of my heart. God’s around and about me interfering with every...