Why I Love You — Story Time

I phoned the doctor’s surgery six times to get Meli’s antibiotics prescription pushed through. I was told we’d have to wait. Meli is 4 years old. I read the book about the gut my neuroscientist friend recommended and got Meli to piss in a pot so she could be tested to see if she had another infection.

I stood at the reception desk at the doctor’s surgery and asked for the prescription again but was told it still wasn’t ready. I stated my case like a fucking lawyer and could feel the queue of people behind me grow uneasy.

I heard a tut and turned and snapped —

“I’m talking about my 4-year-old doctor!”

The queue giggled at my mistake, they were old people.

“We didn’t say anything,” an old man with a cast on his leg, said, looking hurt.

“I heard you huffing!” I spat.

“4-year-old doctor” the old lady repeated still chuckling.

“4-year-old daughter” I corrected and turned back to the desk feeling my whole body vibrate.

I took deep breaths trying to fight a panic attack as the receptionist spoke, then I turned and apologized to the queue. Only half of them heard me and I felt bad.

“You’re just worried about your daughter” the old lady said and touched my arm.

I walked out and cried because I didn’t feel I deserved her kindness.

I walked through the park crying but didn’t have time to sit on a bench. I felt faint but still had no appetite. People said I looked good, having lost the baby weight. I replied that I was literally dying of stress and they laughed and I laughed in that way we all do when something truthful is said out loud that’s easier to brush off as an unfunny joke.

There was less to do now than when Meli was critically ill — when I was sitting in her hospital room watching her shrink under an unknown illness and I was pushing for her to be transferred to a London hospital. And later taking her to see specialists and Chinese herbalists and reflexologists and homeopaths and nutritionists and talking to psychics and neuroscientists and reiki practitioners and endless pediatricians hoping for a cure.

There was less to do but that didn’t make it any less urgent. Things were not fixed and although it was incredible that Meli was out of hospital and having days at school it was at the forefront of my mind that we didn’t have answers. She was stable enough to be out of hospital for weeks at a time but at home she still spend most of her day crouched in pain, laying on the floor, begging us not to come close.

It had been over six months of hospital admissions and IVs, Xrays, MRIs and the more invasive tests, watching my little girl dull under it all. I had watched her light become so small.

My lovely girl who is the most brilliant of all, who acts out whole movies when she gets bored, playing every character by herself and picks flowers every day to leave outside the house she thinks is haunted, so the lonely ghost will know he has a friend in her. My four-year-old who has reinvented herself more times than Madonna.

And seeing her so ill was my kryptonite. When Meli was born she looked like an ancient aztec being, I gazed at her like she was a secret only I could read. I felt so bonded to her that I couldn’t see that she was separate from me. When people complimented her I shyly shrugged off their kind words because it felt like they were complimenting me directly. I could see no separation.

When she was first admitted to hospital, months ago, Victor stayed with her at night and I went home with the baby. It was the first night I’d ever spent apart from Meli and I felt my every cell turn into a huge wave that fought to leave my body and be next to her.

Each time she was in hospital I fought like a heavyweight, I asked everyone I’d ever met to join my team, I researched and read books on body parts, I demanded things from doctors, I shouted, I bought gifts, I made complaints, I threw money and I didn’t sleep for a millisecond.

It was hard because the doctors couldn’t figure it out and sometimes I felt like they were trying to get her stable enough to be discharged rather than looking for long term answers. I had to shrink my emotions when talking to them, I had to be Meli’s advocate, keeping track of everything and holding conversations with a measured tone. When they were gone the nurses would sing and dance for Meli, they would take away her pain with a kindness that I didn’t have access to because I was in a constant state of terror. They made Meli laugh and were so loving towards me, even though I had endlessly bugged them at the nurses station and checked up on appointments and chased every second of Meli’s treatment and possibly made their jobs harder. They never held it against me, they could see that I was an animal in pain. That I just wanted to scream into the sea but I couldn’t because I was fighting.

A few days later at home I gave Meli her medications, a salt bath, a foot massage, a hot water bottle, a conversation about feelings which was really a thinly veiled attempt at some kind of trauma release, then put the girls to bed.

I watched shit tv, I was too tired to even masturbate.

When Victor returned he was annoyed at me because I had asked for a psychic’s help last time Meli was in hospital.

That was the third hospital admission in three months, the one where I was alone in ER with Meli and the baby at 3am. I held the baby and tried to keep her quiet but Meli developed sepsis again, turned yellow and started having a fit. I ran into the corridor and shouted for a doctor but none came.

I ran back and forth between Meli and the corridor screaming for someone to help, the baby wailing at my chest.

I stayed with Meli but it felt terrifying, nothing was promised. I sat on the hospital bed with Meli lying limp on my lap and the baby crawling above her head and emailed a psychic I knew for help. I was past crying to doctors and praying to god, I was looking further now, searching the earth, the heavens and now the stars for a miracle.

But later, when Victor was back from NY, having arrived to find Meli on a ward, propped up by strong IV medications, smiling, and seeming fine, he said he couldn’t understand why I’d sought the help of a medium.

I would have asked a goddam magician if I’d seen one.

I watched shit tv and went to sleep, too tired to even masturbate.

Having avoided any real time in hospital my whole life, I had also started my year there for the birth of my second daughter.

I had wanted a home birth, similar to the one I’d had with Meli but even better, more refined with candles and beautiful lighting — with Meli arriving sleepy and sweet, still warm from a full nights sleep, to greet a miraculous scene: Priscilla freshly swaddled in my arms, both of us glowing.

I was so confident in my ability to control absolutely everything in the world — even birth — that I had bought a birth pool and hired a home birth doula. But Priscilla was an emergency cesarean and instead I spent my first moments post-birth wondering where my baby had been taken while the doctor asked me if I wanted pain killers put up my bum.

“I’d greatly advise them,” the doctor said, “you’ll be in a lot of pain once the spinal wears off.”

At first I said no, but later, once the upper and lower parts of my body had been stitched back together and Priscilla was in my arms looking the most sad I’d even seen a human be, I changed my mind.

“Oh, we did that,” I was told, then wheeled into “recovery.”

The ward was all fluorescent lighting and Dorito smells with the same air quality as the very back of a packed airplane. It was at capacity and an assault on the senses. The woman next to me was talking to her baby in a very loud, slow, sexy voice.

I had to bust out of hospital after 24 hours. If I’d waited the recommended 4 days I felt sure the environment would have given me the kind of severe postnatal depression that’s hard to come back from.

So I waited at home for my body to repair after literally being chopped in half. It felt unbelievable that I’d ever be able to walk again, but 6 weeks later I could, and I walked straight to meet Lily Kim to set up Story Time because of my own need for connection and my own desire to share and be real and tackle hard subjects through honest stories. And she said yes and became my champion and we made it happen.

And when I started Story Time I thought it would help me because I’d had a hospital experience that left me feeling alone but I had no idea that Story Time would be my lifeline in what would be a year of hospital admissions and appointments with Meli.

I had no idea that other peoples stories would lift me up and make me feel less alone and that their bravery would encourage me to fight for my daughter with a lion’s heart and their vulnerability would remind me to be gentle with myself. As doctors started to find the drugs and treatments that would help my daughter, Story Time became the medicine that revived me.

So as we head forwards with hospital appointments still dotted all around, I want to give a love letter to you. Because the NHS saved my daughter, but once we were home it wasn’t the psychic or the shit TV or the (lack of) masturbation that got me through, it was you.