Jasmine Stalker-Firth

After Thursday’s line break it took me a bit of time to calm down. During the whole thing I was quite calm but afterwards I roamed about the flat for a bit and wrote a blog as the adrenalin or whatever that keeps you going through a crisis trickled away. I got to bed around 2am and then I was up at 4am to feed Calista, and then up at 5am and 6am to see to Jasmine, and then up at 7am and 8am at which point we were just up!

Friday afternoon, the chemist rang to tell us that there had been a mix-up with our medicines, so the Vitapro wouldn’t be arriving until Saturday. Now, I have heard that before, so we went to the hospital to get another tub of Vitapro so that I was able to avoid having a big fit on Saturday when the chemist rang again and said that the Vitapro hadn’t turned up (ta-daaaa). I know mix-ups happen a lot so it best to have either a) lots of sleep or b) a plan B so that it doesn’t stress you out.

Sleep seems to be short on the ground at the moment so most of the weekend was spent trying to get into bed and catching up on some sleep.

On Tuesday, we went to talk to the consultant nephrologist about immunosuppressants and the like, post-surgery and to go over the whole transplant process. However, he had a throat infection and couldn’t speak. That in itself can’t be helped, but there was a bit of a mix-up so we were left in the waiting room for two hours before anyone told us. I got a bit annoyed as we hadn’t had much sleep and we didn’t have a plan B. Luckily, we had to have bloods done so it wasn’t a wasted journey.

And even if we had have had sleep, it wouldn’t have mattered because we were told to expect to a gruelling session of talking about transplant. People mean well but sometimes I wish they wouldn’t manage our feelings/expectations for us and build us up so that when we are let down it seems harder to manage. So, Neil and I went to a coffee shop to read the Transplant Chapter in ‘Renal Nursing’. We were scheduled a melt-down and by golly we were going to have one. Melt-down over, we were able to concentrate on eating chocolate biscuits and having a giggle.

I had to laugh in the coffee shop, as the lady sat next to us said, “Oh what beautiful girls. Look at all that hair.” And I said that our girls attract a lot of attention now and I no longer get chatted up. She laughed and said that it gets worse and now that her daughters are 27 she is just the old bag in the background. Oh no, my getting chatted-up days are over! Still, I had a good run.

Yesterday, Neil had to have an operation on his eye so was walking about with a big patch over one side of his face for the day. Jasmine thought that it was one big amazing sticker and was mesmerised by it. Later on that afternoon I got a full 45 minutes sleep whilst Neil kept an eye (chortle, chortle) on the girls.

Calista can roll over now and looks like she is trying to swim when on her front. She also sits in the bumbo quite happily. We are thrilled with Calista but each time she does anything we realise how tough things have been for Jasmine and how far we have come and how far we still have to go.

Next week, we have to meet with the independent assessors so that they can check that Jasmine is our daughter and no one is paying Neil to donate his kidney. I understand why we have to do this but as a parent I understand pretty well why people will do all sorts of things to get their children whatever they need to make them better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 12:28 pm and is filed under home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.