The baby who was Meant to Be (part 1)

On the weekend we celebrated the 3rd birthday of my baby, our little cherub. We had a morning tea in the backyard with friends and families and sugar-filled delights, and he got spoiled with lots of wonderful presents. And after all the running around, cleaning, baking, shopping and organising that make parties so much fun for parents, Fixit and I actually did enjoy the proceedings which were nice and casual. Pics here if ya wanna see. (Note to self though. Only 1, make that o.n.e., party a day for my kids from now on. Climber had a schoolfriend's 6th birthday party the same afternoon and ended up spewing in bed at 11.45pm from sugar overload. Noice!!!)

To celebrate the fact that my little cherub is now 3 (three!! - where did the time go?) I thought I would tell the story of his passage to the world. Because there's nothing like a birth story, is there?

Cherub was an accident a surprise! We had not yet got to the point of having the second child discussion, although I was feeling ready. Fixit was feeling like the finances were too awful for us to have more kids, which they were but then again if we'd waited till the finances were good we would never have procreated, ever. I guessed very early on that I'd been knocked up, I was visiting my Mum in Sydney and just got the urge to buy folate tablets. So after I got home to Melbourne and did the test there was a sort of painful "how are we going to manage" conversation. And then not too long after that conversation we went through this incredible health saga with Fixit and the money thing just kind of faded away.

Fixit got a Deep Vein Thrombosis (a DVT) for no reason that we could ever find out. But the problem was it didn't throw up any leg DVT symptoms. It just started sending blood clots quietly up to his heart and lungs. So for quite a while he was feeling awful and breathless, but not in an easily-diagnosable way. So maybe its asthma, maybe bronchitis, lets check out his heart, try ventolin, try antibiotics. And even when finally the leg presented symptoms and we had a firm diagnosis, the breathlessness was not really taken into account so he was sent home to be treated via the hospital in the home system with blood thinners. And then luckily, a very conscientious junior doctor from the GP service we'd been seeing rang us up because he just happened to have been standing near the fax machine and seen the DVT diagnosis and he remembered seeing Fixit and the asthma and he said it's probably nothing but I just want to be sure, could you go the hospital for a nuclear lung scan so we can rule out P.Es (Pulmonary Embolisms or blood clots in the lungs), it's just to be on the safe side. So that's what we did. My friend Astrid took Climber, who was just 2 at the time, and I went with Fixit but kept my distance from him and the nuclear ray machine because I was pregnant.

Next thing we know, it's straight to emergency for Fixit, he's not coming home because his lungs are 75% covered in clots and he could die at any moment and they don't even know how to treat him because his heart and lungs are by now under so much stress that one more PE could finish him off. And suddenly I'm hugging him like mad because we're both so frightened and the possibility of a few minute nuclear rays doesn't register any more.

I've just realised I can't finish this in one hit, especially not on a Monday which is a v. busy day. So at this thrilling point in the narrative, I have to say ...to be continued...