Another occasional spectacle to be enjoyed from the 8th floor - balloons launching at dawn from Royal Park


EXCERPT FROM MASS EMAIL TO FRIENDS

"Rose is in hospital again, everybody. That's why you're not hearing from us . . . she's been "in the wars"!

We're in the Royal Children's for Rose's 5th admission. She's been very unwell for the last couple of months, and this is her 3rd admission in the last month. Last Friday things seemed to get far more complicated than any of us wanted, when she was found to have pancreatitis. (Bloody hell!!!!!!!!!!)

Luckily the pancreatitis seems to have quickly resolved . . . Her pancreas was behaving normally again after only two days of resting her gut. The illness is such a rare occurrence in children that the doctors hadn't thought to test for it, though they'd been scratching their heads over why Rose just didn't seem to be getting much better or happier over a couple of longish hospitalizations. (She's had all kinds of other complications over the last months, which are just too involved to list here! She's working her way through the medical dictionary, we reckon.)

We took her in to Emergency again last Friday after she had failed to crack a smile all day, and a very on-the-ball doc thought to test for pancreatitis.

Some of you already know that Rose's longterm outlook is that she's likely to need a liver transplant within 12 months, probably as early as the first part of next year. Our task until then is to have her gain as much weight as possible. She's still way too skinny, but we hope that now we have found and beaten the pancreatitis, she might get back on track again. She has a naso-gastric tube so we can tip lots of fortified breast milk into her, and also so we can give her her many daily medicines without stressing her for hours at a time.

This all sounds very medical, so here are some recent photos of her and the family - unedited, because I just don't have time to pick over the photos! I wish I could say that the photo of me is an amusing optical illusion, but I'm afraid I'm looking this haggard all the time at the moment. No time for vanity! We're doing OK, despite the worry."