A happy ending

It's been nearly two months since I posted here, and now that we have our happy ending, I'd like to tell you what happened.

On Valentine's day, my youngest daughter Susie developed a life-threatening illness. She had been sick over the previous weekend, with what she assumed was the flu, and on the Monday was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, with heart failure.

On Tuesday (Valentine's Day) her condition worsened, and her heart stopped beating.

She was quickly resuscitated, but later that evening it happened again. She was then placed on life support, and moved by special ambulance to the Alfred Hospital ICU (considered the best in Australia for heart problems.) At the Alfred she was placed into an induced coma, and was connected to an array of life-saving machines.

A heart biopsy showed that she had  lymphocytic myocarditis ( a severe heart infection). She was given large doses of steroids, and we waited to see if she would recover.

Nobody knew if the cardiac arrests had caused damage to her brain and other organs, though her family were pretty sure she was still "in there". We held her hand, and we talked to her.

After about five days, there were some signs of improvement, and in a few more days she was allowed to wake up - a bit - and she clearly knew us, and could wiggle her toes! Finally her heart and breathing improved enough to remove her from life support, and she was transferred to a cardiac ward.

She spent another two weeks in hospital. There is some damage to her heart, and she has had a defibrillator implanted. No apparent damage to her kidneys or other organs. She is still a bit weak - she lost a lot of weight, and will take a while to recover muscle tone. She now has to take a lot of pills, some of them permanently, but the doctors expect she will be able to live a normal life.

Susie's home with her family now, getting better every day, and looking forward to doing normal things, like driving her kids to school, and going shopping. She hopes to go back to work eventually, at least part-time.

Now that's obviously just the short version of what happened, and doesn't really convey the awfulness of those weeks, and the impact on those who love Susie. Her husband, Edi, was wonderful - he spent most waking hours (and quite a few when he should have been sleeping) at the hospital. The rest of the family - parents, three sisters, and several good friends - took turns to visit the hospital, and did our best to support Edi and their three daughters.

I read a lot of trashy novels in those first couple of weeks, to take my mind off the situation - Georgette Heyer, Nora Roberts, and so on. Then, when Susie was out of ICU, I came home and made her a quilt, with a lot of help and encouragement from a couple of quilting friends.

Events like this have a huge impact, more than you realise when you're running on adrenalin and doing your best to get through it all. Even writing this post has taken a long time, and I'll be glad to put it all behind me.

In the last couple of weeks, I've turned to my favourite form of therapy - embroidery. So don't expect any posts about family history for a while; I'm going to show you what I've been making instead...