Rage

The ‘chemo rage’ starts.  Zac screams at us and lashes out, kicking, biting, and hitting.  Seb gets smacked in the face with a dinosaur tail that closely misses his eye and I have a few clumps of hair pulled from my head.  The ward sister comes in to check on us and, seeing me sat on the end of the bed in tears says to us softly, “Don’t worry, you’ll get him back.”  We quickly learn that, in hospital, anything goes.  The standards we once upheld for parenting are thrown out the window.  In the early days I had tried to maintain some sort of routine, but this only led to me feeling more frustrated and stressed.  Things definitely felt easier once I had completely surrendered to hospital life.  Want to stay up ‘til midnight watching Jurassic World?  Sure!  Eating a cream egg for breakfast?  Great!  On the subject of food, things also got a little easier knowing that Zac was receiving all his nutrition and calories while on TPN.  The removed a huge stress for us as we had been trying everything to get him to eat, most of the time he point blank refused and we could see and feel the weight dropping off him.