“Two more sleeps til my operation, I’m scared I might die.”

Ted’s words today came at me like a very sharp kick in the guts.

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Anticipation is indeed something that can terrorise even the littlest of people.  Knowing Ted, this is why I chose only to drip feed tiny bits of information to him about his operation. I don’t know how he made the correlation between his surgery and the very real risk of death but he did. And it was a very sad thing to hear.

We are doing our best to put his mind at ease, all the while hiding our own very real fears. This is a challenge in itself. One of the hardest things on the day of surgery is making the very long drive out to Westmead pretending to be chipper for Ted’s sake but feeling the dread building with every kilometre. Such a hellish drive. Then the long walk to the anaesthetic bay, that’s another journey we try to make fun for Ted while fighting back massive sobs.

Today and tomorrow we have to wash Ted in this weird pre-op stuff that smells like flea shampoo (he is Staph A positive) but it has the added bonus of giving him cute hair: 

Rich and I will spend the day with Ted tomorrow being an only child for a day, doing fun things ahead of Wednesday. Wednesday won’t be fun. Today after dropping Tabitha at school at 8 o’clock in the morning I let Ted have this green frog cake full of sugar and rubbish. Just because.