emergency

Alfred Is Coming

/ annamurray / Leave a comment

Soooo funny story. You know how C has quite a high level of anxiety? Yeah. That. And last week, or maybe the week before that, we were talking about cyclones. Some of you will know where this is headed, but indulge me. C was really worried about cyclones and the possibility of a cyclone and us being in a cyclone. 

“You know what?” I said. “Cyclones don’t actually come this far down the coast. I have never experienced a cyclone in Brisbane. We get the cyclonic effects of more wind and rain, but that’s as far as it goes. We’re safe from cyclones here”.

Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. 

Sunday. Wow it’s windy today, isn’t it? It’s like autumn has been waiting for March to happen and then, BAM. Autumn has entered the building.

Sunday afternoon. Facebook notification the QPS is live. Huh. That usually only happens around extreme weather events. How far north is Great Keppel Island? NO IT’S E’S TURN NEXT YOU JUST HAD A TURN.

Sunday evening. Glenn trying to talk to me while dinner is on. Never a smooth conversation, but this was about the news about the weather. The storm chasing guy is having conniptions because the cyclone that’s off the coast (what?! Oh wait that makes sense now) is set to make landfall in a few days (ooh yay more cooler weather) and the eye is set to pass over Redcliffe. Wait, what?! Redcliffe? That’s, like, really really close. Like, we could be there in an hour or so and we know people and CYCLONES DON’T COME THIS FAR DOWN THE COAST but apparently now they do. Girls kept eating dinner. Oblivious.

Monday morning. On the way to daycare someone passed us, talking on the phone. Talking about taping up windows. A sudden realisation hit that C was going to be hearing a lot of talk about cyclones and emergencies and cyclones and disasters and flooding and cyclones and high winds and destruction and general excitement from others as well as, most likely and could even make a bet on it, gross exaggeration on the part of many of the boys and not a few of the girls, that would have C – who takes most things quite literally – actually thinking that whatever these kids were saying, would happen. Like that the school is going to be washed away. Or that snakes are going to be flung through bedroom windows. Or that we’d be walking in sewage. Ugh. I don’t know. But I know that there is a part of society that seems to be peculiar to boys of a certain age that will make the experience as gruesome as possible. I needed to talk to the girls.

Sure enough, the word “cyclone” made C wrap her arm around mine like a pretzel. “Remember, mummy and daddy will do everything we need to do to keep you girls safe”. I’m still really worried about the cyclone. “This is just a prediction. Often when they develop, they reduce and become just really big storms”. Oh good. That’s what’s going to happen here. “But it also might do as the professionals are predicting, and come in and be a cyclone. We have to be prepared”. I’m really really worried about the cyclone.

I think I managed to reduce her fears by enough that she could function, at least. School was fine. I suspect she is not the only kid in her class with anxiety. She came home happy and unphased. Phew. Of course, I had watched much of one of the live emergency services sessions and gone to the recommended websites and looked at what we need to get and talked with Glenn about it and found the resource on preparing children for it. Thank goodness it is just one highly anxious child. E and S seem most concerned about whether I will let them play at the park, regardless of their level of sickness or the level of wind.

Glenn went to the shops twice. The first time he was surprised by how few people there were around the shopping centre and how busy it was inside. The second time, he started sending me photos of the lines inside, and reporting on the lack of this and that. Pre-cyclone panic buying.

Tuesday. All the girls are sick. Glenn had an early start but thankfully an early finish as well. Blueberry and chocolate pancakes for Pancake Tuesday. I was not at all sad that all the girls had to be home, but girls not at school or daycare meant my plan of doing some shopping early in the day had to change. A shopping trip with well girls is hard enough, let alone a shopping trip with sick girls in a busy and slightly panicky shopping centre before a cyclone in an area not used to cyclones. Thankfully, Auntie J offered to pick things up for us and no way am I turning that one down. It was such a help. C was still worried that the cyclone will hit now. Not until Thursday, we kept telling her. Is the cyclone coming tonight? No. Tonight will be fine. 

Work. Yeah, remember that thing that pays the bills? I had already had to bail on the daily work. I was very glad to be having a delayed job to do, due Thursday. Hm. I also started to worry that I would not be able to complete it on time. Deeeeeeep breaths. Okay. Power is likely to go out Wednesday afternoon. Unlikely before then. Okay. So Monday evening I had started it, a civil case involving a car hire claim following a traffic accident yawn sorry what ooh that was interesting. I still had a good chunk of it to go on Tuesday. Like, possibly three hours of my time. With sick girls. And a deadline thanks to nature a day and a half earlier than official. Deep breaths. Then amazingly, after morning tea on Tuesday, girls were watching movies and NOT fighting and building cubbies and NOT screaming and actually working out those little things like your leg is touching me or your ear is in front of the screen I can’t see. Wow. I snuck to the bedroom where I work and thought I would just get a little bit done but I finished all the typing. All. The. Typing. Emailed work to say this is the situation. Checked and submitted the job after girls were in bed Tuesday night. Satisfaction. Relief.

Random weather. Clear skies. WINDY. Clear skies. Dark clouds. Sunny and windy. RAIN. Sunny cloudy sunny cloudy sunny cloudy sunny windy.

Emergency plan sorted out. Sure, we need to do things like put all the loose bits of everything on the balcony into some storage solution, and washing needs to be done now before the power goes out and before the weather requires it be not outside and candles let’s make candles and what activities do you girls want to have available when we have no power, but mostly, which movies shall we make sure to download so that if we have no internet you can still have something to watch.

Trying to follow the advice for dealing with children. Trying to stay calm. Trying to be honest about what’s coming but reassuring them that we will get through this. Once Glenn was home in the afternoon, there was a real feeling of we have the whole family together. We are hunkering down together. We’ve got this.

One Year Ago

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[Trigger Warning: infant trauma]

I haven’t been able to write for a while. The stuff of our life was just too much for a bit. I’m hoping to get back into it, but I couldn’t let today pass without writing something.

One year ago, I had an accident with E. She was 2 months old, just shy of 9 weeks. I was out walking with her in a carrier, down a street in which I used to live, and tripped. I fell on her, breaking her femur.

When it happened I was sure I must have damaged her grossly and irreparably, that she would have damaged organs and broken ribs and internal bleeding. And because she was so little, it was so hard at the hospital to work out the extent of the damage. No way to know what was sore, where to check first. But the staff – what felt like a huge cohort of staff but was actually probably more than usual but not the dozens my emotional memory remembers – the staff were wonderful. Calm and thorough and reassuring. In our emergency bed area, E was checked over thoroughly and I was asked questions and they narrowed it down to a broken leg. Which still leaves me gobsmacked, that what felt like the whole of me including excess pregnancy weight fell on a tiny baby and all that happened was a broken leg. A very fixable injury. I stayed with her in the hospital from the Monday until the Thursday morning when she underwent non-invasive surgery to have a double leg hip spica cast put on. It stayed on for just under 4 weeks and now we just have checkups every 6 months. That’s it.

And, as we moved through the horror and fog and new reality of those few days, we came to realise that although it was horrible that it had happened to such a tiny and helpless baby, it was much better for it to have happened to her at that stage of development instead of later. She was still in the sleepy newborn stage so I wasn’t battling naps or trying to tire her out so she would sleep. She hadn’t started walking or crawling or even rolling so there was nothing to try to control there. She was still so little that hoiking her around with the cast on wasn’t such an effort.

So, there was much that turned out for the best. The best, considering the initial moment that began the whole thing and was an accident and unavoidable but still something we would rather not have had to go through.

But, my goodness. So much in my head of the memories of that time and the horror and the panic and the pain and the relief. 

The relief that I had delayed her 6 week checkup due to a lockdown and she’d had it at 8 weeks instead, so she was still up-to-date with her vaccinations but we also had a recent weight for her.

The relief and gratitude we felt that, unlike C as a baby, E took a dummy and she took formula in a bottle and she didn’t need to be held or fed or rocked to sleep and she was much more of an on-schedule baby.

The relief and gratitude we felt for the kindness of the staff. Volunteers like the one who came around calmly with a Medicare form and only asked for Glenn’s name and date of birth and then took care of all the rest. Or the daily parade of volunteers offering to be with E if I needed a break when the last thing I wanted to do was leave her but they were so kind nonetheless. The nurse who took care of C in the emergency department, making sure she was fed and entertained and cared for. The succession of emergency department staff asking if I was ok and should I have an X-ray myself, actually? The different women who had to ask me on subsequent days how I was, or what happened, seeing my uncontrollable tears and put an arm around me and helped me feel like a person who had had a terrible accident and not just an auxiliary person attached to a baby in traction. The night nurses who didn’t wake me when E needed a feed but fed her themselves from the stash of expressed breastmilk or formula.

The confusion – which persists – as to how I fell on my right side but somehow still managed to break E’s right leg. The horror and panic and relief, all mixed in and simultaneous and hasn’t gone away yet, when the triage nurse asked about E’s head, had I protected it, held it as I fell, landed on it or did it hit the ground, what sort of surface was it that we landed on.

The physical pain, like the sting of hand sanitiser being my first indicator that I too had fallen, or, hours later, finding the mud all down my side where I’d taken the fall, or growing numb in my forearm as I held E still for nearly 4 hours while everything was sorted out like finding traction weights small enough.

The panic, like wondering what number to call to make a hospital appointment in an emergency. Or forgetting E’s date of birth or middle names.

The horror of putting a newborn in such pain. A shaky cup of tea that I nearly spilled all over myself as Glenn took C to the Starlight Room and the staff applied a nerve block to E and I was finally alone with myself for the first time all day and the enormity of what had happened kicked in: I went for a walk and nearly killed my newborn.

And then, how to tell people? ‘Nothing to worry about’… no. ‘Everyone’s ok’… no. Not really. ‘Please don’t worry, but’… Everything I tried was hard and wrong.

The saddest memory I have though is not being able to hold her. She was already a snuggly baby, and the natural instinct when a child is hurt is to hold them, but there was none of that. At most, we could hold her hand, but the traction and then the cast made anything else difficult. And I longed to hold her close to me, feel that heavy weight of a sleeping newborn and heal us both.

We both healed, of course. I had marks on my hands for a time where the scabs had been but I can no longer see them. Because E was a baby, all her body was doing was growing and building so she was cast-free within a month and then doing all the normal baby things. The last few months she has started climbing everything she can, and has started walking in the last few weeks. It’s amazing what can happen in a year.

The Stuff of Our 2021

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This year has had it all. Some was expected, some not. And some aspects (yes, I’m talking about the pandemic here) that we hoped would be over just kept coming back in different forms.

Here is our 2021 in numbers, result compared to expectation.

Most exciting: new baby (1/1). The best. 

Most horrible: accident with new baby. Never expected. One horrible accident, and one that turned out to be not so bad but was still nerve-wracking when it happened. (2/0). 

Concerts: (3/? Thanks to COVID we never knew what to expect). 3, that is, that I was brave enough to attend with the girls (Glenn has performed more than that). Each has been a learning experience and I feel tonight’s NYE Pops concert I did the best. Naps, food, sleep, all worked out fairly well. Anxiety level for me was very very high but I’m so glad we went. And both girls behaved beautifully.

New appliances: ooh there were so many. It was really the year of the new. We knew we would be buying a new mattress – the old one had deep troughs on either side from years of use (and, let’s face it, pregnancy). We were not expecting to replace the toaster, kettle, microwave, vacuum cleaner battery, printer, laptop, or fridge. (So, numbers… how many is that, 8? 8/1.) It has been an expensive year. I would like it to stop now. 

Sickness: there has been some, of course – hello daycare. There was the Gastro Experience of September. There has been the No It’s Not Covid Cough of December. There have been other sniffles that have gone away after a week of resting at home, just like doctors and mothers say they will. Amazing.

And then there are the things of life that cannot be numbered. The joy in seeing each girl grow to be more themselves every day. The frustration of adult-young child communication. The immense delight seeing the love between our girls, and between all of us. The worry – oh the worry. Worries. When C is ‘just a bit nervous’ going to daycare. When E doesn’t reach a milestone as early as C did. When there’s a lockdown due to a cluster of Covid cases in our area. When I can’t give either girl the attention she needs. When C doesn’t pick up small objects or sharp objects and doesn’t understand the danger they pose to E. 

This year has certainly held surprises. Some delightful, some not. Some scary, some not. I feel we’ve handled it the best we could and have definitely grown through all these experiences. Like everyone, I am hoping for more of the good stuff next year, and less of the not-so-nice surprises. Please and thank you.