the adlards

On Monday we went to Kirstenbosch to meet up with … uhh … let’s just say Mr & Mrs Smith.
It was fun to catch up with Patrick and Dallah and little Samuel.

It’s been a good day. Presents and baked cheesecake and scones with jam and cream and family and snuggly winter stay-huddled-inside weather in the morning with sunny winter go-for-a-walk weather in the afternoon.

Luverly.

There’s no tea quite as good as hospital tea. When the Sister came in at 5am yesterday I was sleeping on my camp mat on the floor of Sophie’s room (she had the candour to laugh once her eyes had adjusted to the dark). If you need to wake up in that situation there’s not a better way to do it.

After the manic sedation-related behaviour of Thursday evening, Friday was relatively calm. Sophie was badly affected by the sedative all day on Friday. On Thursday she was happily doing all her puzzles, on Friday she could just manage the big four-piece ones. She also couldn’t walk, which is perhaps the better measure of sedation, and was very sad and weepy. It’s very difficult seeing your little girl struggling like that. She’s slept for at least half of the last 24 hours and is much better now.

The blood for testing was supposed to be drawn between the MRI and wiring up on Thursday, but because that dragged on pretty late there were no pathology drivers available when the time came, so bloods were to be done on Friday while Sophie was sedated for removal of the electrodes. Probably unsurprisingly, there was some missing co-ordination and we wound up having to take 12 vials of blood for testing while Sophie was wide awake. Being held down by her Mum & Dad. Nice.

Blood samples have gone to labs at Constantiaberg, Palotti, Red Cross Childrens Hospital and some overseas. Results should trickle in over the next two weeks or so.

The humour highlight of our visit was without question the electrode removal … so blood had been taken and everyone (everyone who wasn’t staff) was a little shaken, when in comes a nurse sent to remove the electrodes from Sophie’s scalp. She sort of hovers over Sophie for a few seconds, then says, “I don’t think I’ll just pull them off, it looks like it might hurt.”
So help me.
It’s true.
To her eternal credit, while my jaw was still on the floor, MGW calmly looked at her and said, “Ummm, usually they put something on them first to dissolve the glue.” After a brief period of consultation, the nurse reappeared with gloves, swabs and acetone. She had a stab and concluded that we’d need to sedate. I had her leave her tools in the room.

We didn’t want Sophie sedated again just to remove the electrodes so Michelle & I did it ourselves. Just like last time. The trick is to do the minimum possible to remove the electrodes. This takes some time. Acetone stinks, is freezing on the skin because it evaporates before you have a chance to actually do anything with it, is toxic and can bring on seizures, and doesn’t actually do the job very well. When the electrodes are off, the glue on Sophie’s scalp is still very much in place. It’ll take a month to get the 20-odd blobs off and out of her hair bit by bit.

It is very good to have her home and see her smiling again today (and doing puzzles). And eating sausage.

It’s that time again. Sophie’s on the bed across the room with a loom of wires glued to her scalp and her head bandaged like Chief Inspector Clouseau in a particularly poor disgweez.

It was supposed to be a smooth-running day at the doc’s - admit, sedate, MRI, X-Ray, bloods, wire up, wake up, play with puzzles and watch DVDs, sleep with the monitor (hmmm, reminds me of someone I once knew), wake up, sedate for removal of electrodes, go home.

The first sign that things might not be as they seemed was when we arrived at admission to be told ours wasn’t one of the set of neatly printed names arranged on the counter. I looked. It wasn’t. We then discovered that - quelle horreur - we were also not among those only-slightly-unfortunate individuals who had had their names entered on the system, just not printed out or arranged.

We were sent to sit in no-mans land with the truly unlucky ones. The ones who might well have walked in off the street on the off-chance they might cadge an MRI and a bit of free coffee. I don’t like waiting to be called. I called two of the specialists’ rooms and we were called out from our spot on the sea of green carpet, to discover that November, when we last went through all this, was just too long ago to warrant keeping our records, so we’d have to capture the admission again from scratch.

Now I’m a good-humoured guy and can take all this in my stride. And smile. And say, “Thank you”. I understand bad systems and processes. We got upstairs to the neuro ward and our room was in use. Now that’s a whole other thing, see? Admission smission, but I don’t put down my bags, I settle. I’ve enjoyed something of a nomadic existence, and where I’m putting my stuff matters to me, not because I want it to be permanent, but because it is transitory and I want to enjoy it while it lasts.

It may have been transitory but it lasted rather longer than anticipated. Sophie built all her Barney puzzles, as well as two sets of nursery rhyme puzzles and a nondescript set of ELC puzzles, and read her two new books from Scott - all whilst being closely monitored by yours truly who needed to make sure that if she needed to go it happened into some sort of receptacle.

She didn’t and eventually the MR unit was ready for her. She had what looked like about 8cc of chloral hydrate and dropped off to sleep on the way to the unit. We had a little wait there for the machine to be free, and when I put her onto the slidy bit she woke up. “At-choo!” said Sophie. “Where’s the bed?”. It is a little confusing waking up somewhere you didn’t fall asleep with a sedative active in your system.

I took her back to her bed. “At-choo!” said Sophie. “Where’s telly?”. In the other room. “Gone. G-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ne.” 5cc chloral hydrate. “At-choo!” said Sohie. “At-choo! At-choo! At-choo!” .. “I don’t think the sedative’s working,” said the doctor, “she’s pretending to sneeze”. 10cc Chloral Hydrate. “Want movie n-o-o-o-w”. Much thrashing and very worrisome overdose-like symptoms (to father, carrying her in his arms) and then collapse, MRI, X-Ray and back upstairs to wire up for the eeg.

Which all brings us to now. With Sophie sleeping peacefully with enough chloral hydrate in her system to fell an adult rhino. This dad’s hoping she sleeps it off rather than waking to treat me to an adult rhino dose of grump.

“The Doctor Will Sue You Now” - rivetting previously unpublished chapter (Matthias Rath attempted litigation) from Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science:
http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/matthias-rath-steal-this-chapter/

The more people who read this the better - spread it around with reference to the original source.
While it does nothing to excuse the idiocy of the recent South African political stance on HIV treatment, it reveals the influence of other players and lays blame appropriately.

While it’s sad that it couldn’t be in the original book, hopefully many many more people will get to read it with its free release online.

I’ve just had the most incredible 13 years of my life. Thanks MGW.

Did you have fun at childrens’ church, Jo?
Yes, but I missed story time. But that doesn’t matter because it was Jonah and the whale.
And you know that one, right?
Yes, and it’s a bit boring.
Well, next week it’ll probably be one you don’t know.
Like what one, Daddy?
Well, like Isaiah and the octopus (MGW and I dissolve into fits of giggles).
What’s that one about, Dad?
You’ll have to wait and see love.

Emily stood up in her cot and our dear, sweet, Josie said “Ag, man.”

The downturn’s not bitten too hard here yet (witness the prime lending rate sitting at 14% - down, but not down) and work’s still ticking over at an almost civilised pace. Nonetheless, discretion being the better part of valour, MGW and I have planted a vege garden.

Everyone knows that the true sign of recession is the scarcity of high quality organic vegetables and we’re not going to be caught out by that one. Oh no. Well, maybe … we’ve only actually had a pak choi and seven strawberries so far, so technically we haven’t yet avoided the queues at the local organic market. Or any market.

Now when you read “vege garden” I’m willing to bet that the image that pops into your mind unbidden is nothing.at.all like our reality. You’re seeing a nice little patch of tilled earth; neat rows of leafy things, some carrots, some lettuces, maybe a row of trellis for peas. Let me disabuse you.

There are, as one ventures into market gardening, a great many questions to be answered: what to plant? where to plant? how to fertilise? when to water? from whence the water? So many questions, in fact, that actually getting started turned out to be rather difficult. Finally, in desparation, we went out to a nursery and bought one of everything they had. First question answered.

When one has a couple of barrow-loads of seedlings entirely dependent on one for their wellbeing one begins to feel a certain obligation to think about how such care might be accomplished. On reflection we decided that we probably lack the constitution required for regular weeding, for digging, for unnecessarily repetitive bending-at-the-waist and for heavy lifting so we acquired a trolley-load of plastic buckets, drilled holes in them, filled them with Kirstenbosch compost and put them on trestles in a weed-free mostly-sterile courtyard.

We’ve designed a very-cool-almost-automatic-grey-water-recycling crop watering system but haven’t quite implemented yet, so still have the rather dull chore of watering buckets of veg twice daily. Which reminds me, it’s been hellish hot (for Cape Town) the last couple of weeks. Just a shade under 40 degrees quite often.

When raising veg in buckets (with holes) in 40 degree heat, nutrition becomes a problem. For the plants. The colour of the water draining from the buckets gets clearer day by day as the nutrient value of the soil is diluted and rinsed away. The popular answer to this problem is worms. A little piece of worm heaven in a nice cozy warm barrel where vegetable scraps from the kitchen rain down on a regular basis as if by magic. Strategic holes in the barrel allow worm excreta to drain out into a bucket for application to the veges. Problem solved. Or so the theory goes.

I’m not sure our vege garden is cost effective.

I imagine myself sitting quietly somewhere, reading …

I like lime season. MGW reckons lime season is why I haven’t come down with the lurgy that’s doing the rounds. All that good ol’ natural vitamin C.

Actually, she maintains it has more to do with the way I dilute the freshly-squeezed lime juice. Gin, vodka, tequila-with-a-splash-of-cointreau … . She may be right.

Either way lime season is way too short.