Not Stupid. Anna Kennedy
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hospital accidentally cut through an electricity cable and the emergency generator failed to kick in. As a result there were nurses running around the special-care baby unit, frantically handing out blankets for the babies and operating bellows-like equipment to help some of them breathe. Thankfully, after 20 minutes or so, the power supply was restored.
Patrick didn’t get the all-clear until he was ten weeks old. We were on cloud nine when we were at last told we could bring him home, but we soon discovered life would be far from straightforward. For a start, sleeping was a problem. Having been in the special-care baby unit for the first ten weeks of his life, Patrick had become used to all the beeping noises of the equipment that had helped him to survive. At home, he began to make strange growling noises as he slept and, after a while, it was driving Sean and me round the bend. What was going on?
I telephoned the midwife, who came round to reassure us that Patrick was probably only compensating for the noises he had got used to hearing while lying in his incubator. She suggested we get a clock, wrap it in a towel and lay it next to Patrick as he slept. Thank God it worked!
After Patrick had been home for ten days, Sean’s mother Coral came to stay and to offer support. That day, we put Patrick down for a sleep but, after a while, I became concerned, particularly since he hadn’t woken up as normal for a feed. When I went over to Patrick, my concerns were raised because he looked so very pale. I called Coral in to have a look at him.
Being a nurse, Coral knew instantly something was not right and noticed that Patrick was blue around the mouth. I telephoned our doctor, who suggested I make an appointment to bring him in, but Coral disagreed. ‘We’ve got to get this baby to hospital right now!’ she insisted. As I picked Patrick up he was limp and his head just flopped right back. We rushed outside and I handed him over to Coral, who, by now, was sitting in the back of our car.
I have to say, I drove like a lunatic en route to the hospital, mounting pavements and jumping red traffic lights and, on arrival, I just abandoned the car in the middle of the car park. I grabbed hold of Patrick and ran as fast as I could into the hospital. ‘Someone’s got to look at this baby right now!’ I yelled and, fortunately, right in front of me, a consultant appeared who had tended to Patrick and me while we had been in hospital a few days earlier.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ he asked. He laid Patrick in his arms with his feet towards his chest and his head in his hands. Then he raised and lowered his arms. ‘Come on, Patrick,’ he said before slowly repeating the movement. By now I was frantic and holding tightly onto Coral’s arm, but the consultant remained calm and raised and lowered his arms once more, at which point Patrick took a huge intake of breath. What a relief!
Patrick was treated for septicaemia and given a lumbar puncture – and it was a worrying 24 hours waiting for the results. He was diagnosed as suffering from apnoea, also known as sleep apnoea, a breathing-related sleep disorder that can cause the sufferer to stop breathing up to 400 times during the night. We were concerned to learn it was a potentially life-threatening condition but glad it had been diagnosed early as, untreated, it can be associated with heart attacks and strokes.
Patrick was kept in hospital for ten days. After such a scare I was afraid to take my eyes off him even for a moment, and I often had to pinch his earlobes to wake him up in order to remind him to breathe again. Thankfully, though, we were told he would eventually outgrow the condition.
Nevertheless, for the first three years of his life, Patrick was a sickly child and had to be given so many injections for his various ailments that he began to look like a junkie. Among the setbacks he encountered were a number of chest infections, glue ear, throat infections, vitamin D deficiency, severe croup, whooping cough and a disorder known as rickets, which causes poor development of the bones. I felt we could have had a permanent room at the hospital, since we seemed to be returning there on such a frequent basis. Sean and I often had to give Patrick nebulisers because it seemed he would pick up any bug that was going around at the time.
Because Sean was now working as a proofreader for Middlesex County Press, much of the day-to-day caring for Patrick was down to me and I would often find myself spending the night at the hospital while Patrick was being treated for one thing or another.
When he was two years old we all moved to nearby Acton because our one-bedroom home was no longer big enough for the three of us. Again, we purchased a shared-ownership home, but this time we had an extra bedroom and a garden. Not only that, the lady living next door was a childminder, which allowed me to return to work and, fortunately, despite my prolonged absences, Sanderson’s had kept my job open for me.
Our neighbour got on really well with Patrick and, after working as his childminder for a while, soon got to know a lot about him. Patrick would play with her little daughter but, one day when I went to collect him, she told me that she had noticed Patrick playing inappropriately with the toys. For instance, rather than running a toy car along the floor like most children would, Patrick would turn it upside down and just spin the wheels with his fingers. Meanwhile he’d learned the alphabet really quickly and even knew it backwards.
One day, while sitting in the doctor’s surgery with Patrick, I noticed other patients listening as he recited a Thomas the Tank Engine story, word perfect, from memory. He was only three years old at the time and he was just staring at the wall with no book in sight. What the other patients didn’t realise was that, by now, Patrick had memorised all 25 of his Thomas the Tank Engine stories – each one word-perfect. Sean and I were convinced we had a little Einstein on our hands!
To our disappointment, our neighbour packed up childminding. We found another lady to take over but, after unexpectedly returning early to pick him up on a couple of occasions, we had not been impressed to discover that she had left Patrick outside the front door – which had been shut each time – and that he had been sick, unnoticed, in his buggy.
I took the decision to check Patrick in to an independent nursery at St Mary’s School in Hillingdon but, although I was convinced this would be the best move for him, he had other ideas. To say he hated the experience would be an understatement. Whenever I left him there in the mornings he would scream and scream and scream. He wouldn’t play with the other children, preferring to sit by himself in a corner of the room. He wasn’t getting on at all well. I was, naturally, worried but I put his behaviour down to the facts that he had been so poorly for so long, and that he had become so used to my being with him almost all of the time.
In 1992, when Patrick was three, I became pregnant again. Once again I was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, this time after 31 weeks, and was not impressed when I was informed it was rare to suffer it twice unless I now had a different partner! My condition meant I had to stay in hospital for nine weeks.
Because of this, Patrick had to stay with my mum in Middlesbrough. At first he would speak to me on the telephone but, after a while, he refused to do so, probably because he thought I had deserted him.
Because of my history, the doctors wanted to keep a close eye on me but, after being in hospital for four weeks and seeing other mothers come in, having their babies and leaving, I soon became pretty fed up. Eventually, I was allowed to go home at the weekends, but only on the condition I return to sleep at the hospital each night. At least that gave me something to look forward to.
When I got to 40 weeks, the consultant informed me he was about to go on holiday and that he would see me in two weeks’ time on his return. He told me my baby would be delivered by Caesarean section but he would like me to experience labour pains because I would feel ‘cheated as a woman’ if I didn’t.
Only a man could say that!
After returning from his holiday the consultant was informed I had not experienced any labour pains at all. As a result, on 21 January 1993, he took the decision to deliver my baby by Caesarean section straightaway.
I’d had to have an epidural, which was a weird feeling. Sean was supposed to be present at the birth but he chickened out, claiming there wasn’t a gown big enough for him. Instead, he stood outside, looking through one of the windows and giving me the occasional thumbs-up sign for encouragement.