Tuesday 14th December

Today officially turned out to be pretty rubbish.

I called NICU this morning as usual. I can always tell how well the kids have behaved by the enthusiasm of the nurse on the other end. I could tell today's report was going to contain the word 'bag' at least once, and indeed it did. My heart sinks every time they tell me about Willow's latest episode. I think what makes it worse now is that we are always comparing her to Stanley, who is doing so much better. A few weeks ago, he was doing pretty much the same thing as Willow, but we didn't think as much of it because Willow was still fighting for her life on the ventilator.

When I got into NICU after a day of painting ceilings (bathroom ones that is, not Michelangelo-style Italian frescoes) and working in the office, I had a feeling something was going to go wrong. Stanley didn't seem quite right, and Leela said he hadn't been crying before his feeds, which he'd been doing like clockwork the last few days. The doc had a look at him; and squeezed a load of yellow sticky stuff out of his eyes. He gave Stanley a quick MOT and everything else seemed ok, until he then decided to stop breathing and needed resuscitating with 'the bag'.

He's obviously got some kind of eye infection, so the doc stuck a needle in his arm to take some bloods to test, to rule out anything more sinister. While all this was going on, his sister then thought she'd test out her monitors by doing what Stanley had just done. So, a couple of extra nurses were called over and bagged Willow too.

Although, on the whole, they are so much better than they were five weeks ago, it really hit us hard today. We should be used to seeing all this happening to our children, but it seems worse now in a way. This is because they are no longer just very small, helpless creatures; but they are now our son and daughter, who we've really grown to know and love in these past few weeks.

We needed some junk food on the way home, so we went for the only thing that would cut it today. And KFC did the trick, supplying us with its finest ever offering of a Zinger Tower meal and a portion of Hot Wings. Comfort eating at its best.