Pink ears are the best thing I have ever seen on the girl.

Better than any other accessory, any hat, necklace or beautiful dress.

Better than anything.

+++

On Friday Ivy’s haemoglobin took another dive and the paed phoned late.

He said he was never going tell us he was going away again.

I said he’d jinxed us.

The small boy was struggling with asthma

and Immy, having been to the orthodontist at the beginning of the week, was now brewing another nasty staph infection in her mouth.

When the paed phoned

we were sitting in the doctors office, waiting for a script to arrest the bacteria.

It had been a very long week.

So when I heard that her Hb was down to 78, that Ivy was bleeding from the gut

everything started to feel out of control.

+++

We were sent to the hospital the following day for more tests

and when they saw her

she was admitted for observation.

I was cranky that we had to be there,

Dave and the kids were cranky with me

and Ivy was so very sad.

It was miserable.

The whole thing was miserable.

By night time Ivy was not looking so good, her blood pressure was down, her heart rate high, she was pale and exhausted and cold, so cold.

I had a major meltdown

when our nurse came in and proclaimed that we put new meaning to the term ‘frequent flyer’.

It was said as a joke but,

I was so fragile,

hurting so badly, that I took it to heart.

It was one of those ‘this is not how my life was supposed to go’ moments.

Do you have those?

When I was fresh out of high school, I thought I would go to Uni, work for a bit, meet a guy, have some children.

I thought that we would always have enough, be enough for each other and that life, although not perfect, would essentially be fine.

I thought I had done my time as a child.

Living with my father and my brother; all the pain, death and destruction that our dysfunctional family had been through.

I thought my own adult life would be different, easier somehow.

I never considered that we would have so much trouble conceiving, I had no idea about miscarriage, that we would see our new  baby die

and I never imagined life with immune deficiency.

I had no idea about genetics or diseases of them.

I was just a silly kid, with a naive, idealistic outlook

but right there, in that hospital room, I couldn’t understand how life had become so hard.

I knew they were selfish thoughts

and I pushed them away and tried to be grateful for all that I had been given

and I felt so guilty for having those feelings.

Sometimes a good cry is what you need though.

It clears the air, helps you to gain perspective

and after I cried until my head felt like it was stuffed full of cotton wool

I knew that we were where we needed to be,

and that my life was better than I expected, full, rich, definitely more colourful.

+++

Instead of stabilising, by morning it was found that Ivy’s Hb levels were down to 73

and I started to feel very scared.

The decision to give her a blood transfusion was made

and I was relieved, truth be told, that something was going to be done for my pale girl.

While I watched her sleeping, watched as the thick, red fluid ran into her body,

I said a silent thank you to the anonymous person who had donated their blood

and noticed  that her ears were no longer the awful white – grey hues of anaemia.

For the first time in weeks,

they were pink.