Tri4Joe

For several weeks I’ve been hoping to write a positive comment on Tri4Joe about Joseph’s progress. Something along the lines of “he’s fully recovered, and back to his old self again”.

The truth is, unfortunately, that he’s is only recovering very slowly. In fact, there are times when we look at his tummy with its scars and tube sticking out and wonder what we’ve done to our beautiful little boy.

It’s now well over a month since his operation and we’ve had several emergency trips back to hospital (three in one week!) in order to fix leakages and the resulting skin damage caused by stomach acid burns. We have a nurse who comes to our house every day to dress his wound which takes some of the pressure off of us.

Every night Joseph wakes up screaming at some point – he was howling from 1am to 6am the other night, although I think that quite a bit of this “performance” was more cinema than reality TV.

On the plus side, Joseph’s face is much better now without his nasal tube and his breathing is better since his airways are not irritated. He also suffers a lot less from trapped wind.

It’s been an especially difficult month for Colette who has been more or less trapped at home and unable to have much of a life (at least I can get distracted by work). We’ve had to stop all of Joseph’s routine (physio, etc) because he is too fragile. In addition, he has not been able to do anything physical at home so he has regressed a lot physically – I think it’ll be a long time before we see him “walking” in his trotter again. I think that part of the reason why Joseph is awake so much at night is a result of his lack of exercise.

We have had some fantastic support recently. Our friend Mary-Anne flew over from the UK to spend a long weekend with us (as if she didn’t have enough on her plate with triplets to look after!). We also had Colette’s Aunty Joan here with us last week over from Ireland who is, as always, a huge moral support and thoroughly spoils Joseph and Colette.

We’re off to the Ardeche this weekend with our friends Guy and Helyn. We can’t wait for a well deserved few days break away from home.

I’ll try and be a bit better at updating our blog over the next few weeks. We’ll have plenty to talk about: Joseph’s continued recovery, Mark and Dave’s progress at the Cape Epic, and last but not least, a weekend with the ELA at the end of the month which, we recently found out, Professor Yanick Crow is going to attend!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 9:24 am and is filed under Joseph's Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.