I never much loved Christmas. I liked it don’t get me wrong, but It was never my favourite holiday. However as time goes by I begin to find a better appreciation for it.
In 2015 December I was in hospital for three weeks and I’d never feared missing Christmas until then.
I’d been admitted on the 3rd of December with a stomach bug. I thought it was nothing, I didn’t really realise the effect it was having on me, neither did everyone else!
In October that year I’d been diagnosed with cancer, and all of my bad cells from chemotherapy were dying, but so were my good ones, which made it harder for me to fight the stomach bug.
So we got into the car and headed of to the hospital and straight to the children’s Oncology ward. Everything seemed fine at first, but we stayed the night to be safe. The next morning I felt very tired and drained, but I mostly thought that I was just hungry, so I ate some breakfast and had my blood pressure and temperature tested. That’s when everything went down hill.
The nurse who took the tests was still in training and I’ll never forget the look of shock on her face. My blood pressure had plummeted to a dangerously low level, but she just pretended that everything was fine. I knew that something was up when the head nurse rushed in to re-take the test, because “there must have been mistake”.
My blood pressure had dropped dramatically to a point where all of my organs were slowly shutting down. Within what felt like a minute, there were 4 nurses, 4 doctors and 3 consultants all crammed in to my tiny hospital room all trying to treat me to keep me alive.
1 nurse was pumping fluids in to my arms to try and slow down the organ failure, 1 nurse continually took my temperature, whilst another took my blood pressure, and the 4th nurse still in training, told me to carry on talking to her.
Whilst the nurses worked on keeping me alive a doctor furiously tried to get a cannula connected to the veins in one of my hands. The other doctors just talked about what to do, the consultants just watching over everything quietly.
I didn’t know at the time what was happening to me, but shortly afterwards I learnt that I had nearly died that day. Surprisingly during it all I felt calm, it was easy as everything slowed down.
Finally after stabilising me the medical staff put an oxygen mask onto my face and hooked me up to pain medication, and even more fluid. Then I was wheeled to intensive care (ICU).
At the ICU I had a heart scan and multiple other tests, and was surrounded by even more equipment and expert medical staff. The stomach bug had also attached itself to my picc-line, which was there to give me chemotherapy. That had to be that taken out of my body and re-placed because it to was infected.
I spent two nights in the ICU before I started to get better, eat food again and drink. I found out that I’d had blood poisoning - the dreaded Septicaemia - and a dose of pneumonia for good measure, all of which had accumulated over the period of a week. The pneumonia didn’t get found until I’d had an x-ray, I hadn’t been breathing properly and one of my lungs had collapsed. All of this happened to me within a single week!
After being treated in the ICU I was finally on my way back to the children’s Oncology ward but I still wasn’t getting better. After even more tests they found that the area of my chest where my lung should be nicely inflated, was now full of fluids and that I would have to have surgery to insert a tube into my chest to drain all of the fluid out. I was in terrible pain and the tube wasn’t taken out for ages.
This is about the time that I got to week two, and I slowly started to panic about Christmas.
My parents weren’t panicking as Christmas was the least of their worries. However my parents did everything that they could to organise Christmas for us all in under a week.
Despite everything that had happened to me, it was one of the best Christmas’ that I’d ever had. Coming home on the 23rd of December I’d never been so thankful.
After going through all of that I had a new found respect for Christmas, not just thinking about presents or food (but if you do that’s totally fine), but thinking about family and friends and how supportive they are. Being thankful for my health and being able to celebrate Christmas with them all.
So this Christmas enjoy the little things, because you never know how long it will stay the same.