Fear of the Known...

There are a lot of different kinds of fear... but I think I am learning that the single worst kind of fear is fear of the familiar... or fear of past experiences.

People are afraid of all kinds of things... but to be afraid of something that you have already experienced is a palpable fear made even stronger by the fact that you already know how horrific the experience is...

And this is the position that I find myself in now... I am afraid of reoccurance.

In September last year Nicola had to have surgery to have a gastrostomy button put in, and while they were in there they did a fundoplication. The gastrostomy was fine, there were no problems there at all... but because of an already weakened oesophagus, one tiny little stitch pulled... and that tiny little stitch nearly killed her.

When it pulled it tore her oesophagus and filled her plural cavity with air and fluid, collapsed both of her lungs, gave her pneumonia, and caused an infection so massive that she needed to be taken into theatre every other day to have them surgically clean the infection from inside her chest... that was on top of the two intercostal chest catheters that she had had surgically inserted to help stuff drain away.

She spent many many weeks in intensive care on life support hovering on the brink of death before she made a slow but steady recovery... months in hospital before we finally got to take her home again...

And then a couple of months after she was discharged, she developed a giant paraoesophageal hernia through her fundoplication... and we were given the news that the surgery had to be done again.

To say I am scared is an understatement.

It has been a year and I still wake up at night hearing the sound of the ventilators alarming on her ICU bed.

I can still remember how it felt to have the entire team of ICU doctors descend upon her bedside to tell me that *IF* my daughter survived the next 12 hours, then we would talk about what to do next... but it would be best to bring my family down now to say goodbye.

The thought of going through all that again... living just to get through every single hour and never knowing what was hovering on the next horizon... the thought of going through it again is a faint cold fear unlike anything I have ever experienced.

I do NOT want to do it... I do NOT want to risk it... but at the same time, I know I have no choice...

How do you prepare for something that may quite possibly kill your child? How do you willingly hand them over to the anesthetists, not knowing if you will ever get to hold them again... to look into those beautiful eyes, to savour sweet kisses and warm snuggly cuddles...

How do you go through with it when every fibre of your being demands that you run as fast as you possibly can in the opposite direction?

Well... I guess I will find out on Tuesday...