we dont die easily, my family

my son should not be alive. my sister and i should not be alive. my mother is the middle child. she has an older sister, and a younger brother, and none of them should be alive.

my grandparents were married during WWII. he was an american soldier serving at a desk post in the UK, she was a british girl doing secretarial duties for the military. their first child was born in the UK, the next two in the US. they lived in a little town in colorado, hours away form any hospital, and my grandma had to walk to the well every day for water. my grandma had a negative blood type, while my grandad was positive. all three babies are positive, and not a single one was affected. that in itself is a miracle.

it gets better.

my grandma was in a wheelchair for most of her life. she had what the doctors at the time called muscular dystrophy, though after my own search into the matter, im not sure thats what it was. no matter. she was informed at some point that because of her illness, she would never be able to have children, at which point she informed a rather startled doctor that this was ok, as she already had three.

so. my mother who shouldnt be alive waited until 35 to have children. during both pregnancies she suffered morning-noon-and-night sickness for the entire 9 months. for her troubles, her first pregnancy ended with a doctor having to stick his hand up her hoo-ha to turn the baby, in front of an entire class of medical students, because she was at a teaching hospital. very possible that i wouldnt have survived had i been born a few hundred years ago. the second pregnancy ended in a half hour labour, with a baby born in the nurses station at the hospital because there was no time to get to the delivery room. there was barely time to get out of the wheelchair and onto the examination table. on top of that, my sister's cord was wrapped around her neck and she had started breathing before she was born, so she had to have gunk suctioned out of her lungs. she ended up catching pneumonia 3 times before she was 2 i believe.

and i didnt have a trouble free childhood either. when my mum was pregnant with my sister, i pulled a bowl of hot soup off the table and had to go to the hospital cause i was burned form neck to knee. at about 18months i was jumping on my parents bed, fell off, and hit my head on the corned of the window sill. i somehow managed to survive that with only one stitch. at three, i had a temperature of 40C (104F) and was vomiting so badly no medicine would stay down, and the only help the doctor could give my parents was advice on what to do if i started convulsing. they ended up giving me a cold bath to bring down the temperature, but when the 'cold' water is nearly as hot as the fevered child, ice is needed. at which point i was evidently suffering hallucinations or something, because i distinctly remember believing my parents were trying to kill me.

somehow having managed to survive all this, i would at very least have been one of those pale, fragile, sickly women after the birth of my son without the miracles of modern medicine. i had high blood pressure for the last couple of months, and was in hospital being monitored twice a week until he was born. at which point i lost probably 2L of blood, tore badly enough to need possibly 30 stitches, and my blood pressure decided to go higher than it had even been before.

im just surprised i didnt end up with some sort of infection. although the antibiotics they dosed me with at the start of the labour probably had a lot to do with that. i do not heal easily or cleanly. a torn hangnail, cleaned, and bandaged with antiseptic cream, will ooze pus for at least a week. a scratch on my leg will stay at 'scab' without progressing to 'scar' for a month, and the scar will be visible for years. despite lack of infection, things were not all that great. 'things' were difficult and painful for over a year, thanks to my bad healing.

but at least im alive. my son has a mother, and my husband was not widowed 3 months after his wedding, and left in a foreign country with no family and a newborn.



my son had a fever this week. he reached 40.3C and we had to strip him, put a cold wet towel on him - which i had to keep turning over because the side touching him got hot - and dose him up with medicine to bring the temperature down. he insisted he was cold. it took him about an hour to drink a cup of VERY dilute juice, which would normally take him about 30seconds. and all he wanted to do was snuggle. he was so hot it was physically uncomfortable to hold him because i almost felt like i was being burned. then, during the night, i was woken up by screaming, and found a hysterical child in a sweat soaked bed. he seems to have inherited his fathers ridiculously high fevers followed by hallucinatory dreams when the fever breaks.



im glad my grandmother defied the odds and all her children survived. im glad we live now, instead of some hundred years ago when my chances of survival would have been so much lower. im glad my son seems unaffected by his fevers. im glad my husband survived everything that happened before we met. HE should not be alive. but God is good, and everything happens for a reason.