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From the giddy holiday highs to the lows!  As you know we kicked off these school holidays with a birthday celebration at Stradbroke Island…time travel forward just a short distance to the end of school holidays and you’ll find us we’ve now taken up residence in the paediatric ward of a local major hospital!  Because mucking around with mates and a soccer ball is as worthy way as any apparently to break your tibia AND fibula! Yep! Teenage Boys!!!

Anyway.  We’ve been through the heart fluttering dash to emergency, the bone chilling reduction in A&E, the prep for theatre, the truly jaw dropping…’I can’t believe this is how our Friday night turned out, now I’m sleeping on a chair fully clothed in a kids’ ward listening to my precious boy cry out in unmedicatable pain’ (yes apparently his break defied standard pain relief!).

I was on my way out for dinner when I got the call so I have nothing with me.  I am pointed to the tiny ‘parent’s kitchen’ where I am encouraged to forage food and beverages for my son and myself and I am faced by the picture above.

Wow!  This is what they feed sick kids! And their parents who, in their own way, must be all living one of their worst nightmares, a child sick/injured enough to be in hospital! Yes of course I knew that already but there’s nothing like a fresh firsthand experience to ram that message home again.

Here is my son, with one of the most severe breaks they reckon they’ve seen (well done Ol!), being pumped with analgesics of all flavours and facing one of the biggest healing battles of his short life to date and they want him to subsist on white bread with squeezable margarine and squeezable apricot jam and orange cordial.  Not a single piece of fresh fruit.  Not anything that was alive or even had a recent history of being alive!

Hospital lady arrives to collect the menu from my son indicating his choices for the day, Ol looks at me and says, ‘No thanks, Mum’s got the food covered!’