Human NRG

You want heart-warming tales of courage in the face of adversity, triumph against the odds or optimistic faith rewarded. Look somwhere else.

Some parents maintain an eternally optimistic outlook in the face of terrific trials (Sarah Bickle I salute you). The wife is like that most of the time. My glass is always half-empty. And when I'm tired, like now, the glass is cracked and dirty as well.

Tiredness, the curse of new parents, is omnipresent when you've got a seriously ill child and never more so than whenever the boy is in hospital. It's no different this time. It's a pretty crap life with a seemingly endless series of trials to be overcome. You never celebrate sucess (as people who want a good kicking like to say) as the next trial is upon you before you've time to think and the next half a dozen are easily visible in the distance.

You want black and white. You want right and wrong answers. You get shades of grey and no clear cut answers. You need to be a statistician to properly compute the relative risks of all decisions. Instead of doing it for strategies for the fourth down (or whatever was recently in the news from America), economists should give us a formula for treatment options for sick kids.

Which is to say that after hours of waiting for the anaesthetists to decide one way or another, the risk of not doing the brain scan was considered to outweigh the risk of doing the scan and the chest infection turning into pneumonia and intubation in intensive care. Nevertheless, they did take pains to tell us that the anaesthetic could leave him the same or make him worse. Yet another Hobson's choice.

The scan happened very late afternoon. The boy was pretty perky when he came back. But late at night when I left him, his heart rate was on the climb. Doesn't bode well for the night.