The kindness of others...

Firstly thank you for those caring messages on my last blog post which described how our 21 month old granddaughter went from healthy to fighting for her life in a short time frame. It is now one day short of a month that she was admitted to hospital and although still in Intensive Care, she has made so much progress. It is also one day short of 2 weeks since little Carrie had her left leg amputated above the knee. This was done as a last resort in the hope that, with the leg gone, the rest of her body would start to recover; there was just too much dead tissue in the leg. 

It was very confronting of course but I needed to be strong for my daughter and son in law. The kidneys are still not functioning and will have a permanent dialysis line put in in a procedure this week. This will mean that the little one can then go to a ward. The doctors are confident that kidney function will return to normal in a 6-8 week time frame. Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Speech Therapy and Music Therapy take up a big part of Miss C’s day and best of all is that she is eating and drinking. She wasn’t impressed when a therapist limited her food intake to 10 teaspoons at a time and demanded that her mother keep spooning out the yoghurt...to no ill effect thank goodness 😀. 

Because the life support machine ECMO has been known to cause brain damage, Carrie had an MRI on Friday and results were normal. Great jubilations! 

I mentioned the kindness of others...spiritually, so many people, many are strangers, have been praying for Carrie and her family, her parents’ workplaces have been very accomodating work wise, the daycare centre delivered 3 big bags of food, toys and books and are not charging fees. ( in Australia parents are mostly charged whether the children attend or not 🤨) 

To help with the day to day costs plus extras involved such as travelling to an from their home just to the north of Brisbane, mortgage etc, one of DD1’s friends started a Go Fund Me page. 

A quilt and a book were given to Carrie as a gift from Soroptimist International...beautiful. 

An Australian company which sells a range of sleep toys heard of Carrie’s plight and wrote a lovely message to DD1. 

Needless to say DD1 was very appreciative of the offer of an amputee sleep toy...
Carrie’s beloved ‘Raffy’ the Fox has been with her during this ordeal...there he is on her left side.

And now she also has Raffy the Fawn whose left arm is missing...

And there is a Canberra based group who make superhero capes for children in hospital Capes 4 Kids. I contacted them about their pattern thinking I would make one for Carrie and in the future make some for the charity...

So of course accepted the offer of a cape for Carrie...

As I said, the kindness of others is very humbling and uplifting at the same time. 

This has become my favourite photo. Carrie has been lifted from the bed, along with all the tubes and lines and placed on her mum in the armchair. Those cuddles are just so special. 💕💕

One of those bumpy patches in life.

I haven’t written a post for a while; the last ones were written using hotel wifi in Copenhagen, saved as drafts and then published when our 3 SIM cards worked in various Baltic ports. But those posts were just about Ireland and I fully intend to write posts about the rest of our holiday as they make a great record to look back on. We have been back at home for not quite 2 weeks 

and this post is about what has happened since we’ve been home. 

We arrived home on the Saturday night and on Sunday night DD1 let me know that her little girl had a cough and was coughing until she vomited. The little one was taken to the doctors on the Monday and she was diagnosed with a virus probably caused by teething. The doctor apparently wasn’t perturbed that C’s temperature was 39.9. DH and I visited them on Monday night and C was a bit grizzly and wouldn’t eat. But at 2am Monday morning she woke up crying and was inconsolable. 

Our son in law once again took her to the doctor and this time the appointment was with the family’s regular  GP who immediately diagnosed pneumonia and organised an ambulance to take C to their local hospital. This hospital confirmed the diagnosis of pneumonia and X-rays showed a partially collapsed lung with fluid. 

The local hospital did not have the paediatric specialists that were required so C was transported to the large children’s hospital here in Brisbane. On arrival she suffered cardiac arrest but was resuscitated. 

Within hours she was again heading towards cardiac arrest and the decision was made to connect her to a life support machine known as ECMO. This requires surgery to open the chest and connect the heart and lungs to the machine. This was to save her life. The medical team met with the family late Tuesday night to explain the procedures. 

That was then they broke the news to us that C had developed sepsis. Google it, it is scary. I was the only one in the family who knew about sepsis; my favourite nurse in Call the Midwife died from sepsis. In C’s case hers developed in the fluid in the lung. 

While the ECMO kept her alive, the doctors could concentrate on wiping out the sepsis and the little one was put into an induced coma. The particular bacterium causing the sepsis was identified and so they knew exactly what antibiotics to target the infection with. The sepsis has now been defeated and C came off life support on Sunday. 

It has been a nightmare as you can imagine. The family have all pulled together to help DD1 and her husband. 

The medical team are gradually changing the sedation ready to eventually bring her back to full consciousness. The sepsis damaged the circulation in her left leg, amongst other damage, and the doctors have warned the family that it is a 90% chance that C will lose the leg. We have an extremely long road to travel with our little girl and her poor parents. 

I took this photo yesterday when I was sitting with her. She is well covered up as she is on dialysis until her kidneys start to function again and apparently people get cold during dialysis. 

The staff asked my daughter to bring in loved items so the baby blankie that I made her last year when she was born, is folded ready for when she’s conscious. 

We’ve been encouraged from when she was in the induced coma to talk to her, sing to her, touch her and read to her. I do that each day. I’ve been telling her funny stories about her mummy when she was a little girl. After all, that’s what grandmas do 😉😍. 

And this was today’s photo. 


With the change in sedation, she had been opening her eyes and today she looked straight at me for a few seconds but I don’t think she really took in who I was. Poor little love. 😞