Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Reminder - every day is a gift

It's a while since I updated, but there hasn't really been anything new to report. That's good, I've had a few weeks where it's been easy to pretend that liver disease isn't part of our family life :) Hannah has continued to thrive at nursery - she seems to be friends with everyone and at the parents' meeting her teachers said she listens really well! Why doesn't she listen to me?!? She wants to be able to read and write like Caitlin, so she makes up stories to go with the pictures in books and can do a great 'H' to mark things with her name. It will be time to get the hankies out next week when she does her nativity, and then again for Caitlin's the following week.

Hannah is at clinic at the local hospital on Friday (the one where the doctor asks me how she is doing....) and we had her bloods drawn today. I have also been writing an article about BA; not a personal perspective, but a factual one. As I have been writing, I have been thinking that this disease I am writing about sounds really depressing. And it does. I started to write something about long term outlook and survival and thought, I don't want to write about the fact that there are survival statistics, that some children die. I want to write about the hope that there is, not the worst imaginable. But it would be a lie, and an injustice to the children who have died and their families, especially those who are in my heart and I call friends. I want to write about the hope to protect myself from the reality of the darkest place a parent can go. Up until then, I was writing in a fairly dispassionate way; it was only when I got to that survival part that I thought about those precious children and then CRAP! - my daughter has this, and I want to make it sound like it's all going to be ok.

So I left what I was writing, and came here to write about feelings not facts. As I logged in, I saw how many weeks it was since I updated, and then started off recording that the reason I haven't been here is 'normal life' and a happy, thriving three year old. So what started off as a tight little knot of fear has dissolved into an appreciation of everyday life with Hannah and a reminder that it is something to be celebrated here more regularly.