A scare, and answered prayer

It's taken me several days to steady myself and put in writing what happened last Friday.

My daughter N (will be 4 on Friday) went to bed on Friday night with a bit of a cough, nothing to worry about; an hour or so later we heard a strange noise and found her in bed, writhing in a blind panic as she'd woken up almost completely unable to breathe. She fought hard, we called an ambulance and were taken to hospital.

While waiting for the ambulance with a wheezing, sweaty N in my arms I had the opportunity to write a message on Facebook, just asking friends all over the world to pray NOW... and they started praying.

It wasn't long before a paramedic arrived, administered an initial dose of medicine (he knew straight away it was a severe case of croup), and then we went to hospital.

Literally from the moment I posted that message I saw N improve - it was incredible to watch. By the time the paramedic handed us over to a nurse at A&E, N was pretty much herself again. The paramedic told the nurse: this was a severe case of croup. The nurse looked down at N and back at him, and he just shrugged and said, yeah she doesn't look it does she!

By the time we were seen by a doctor a few minutes later, N wasn't even wheezing any more, just back to a slight cough. The doctor examined her, gave the all clear, and sent us home - just like that, no further medication or anything! I'm so grateful and I know that I saw God at work that night.

Later I felt a bit silly and wondered if I'd overreacted because croup is so common, but a retired paediatrician at my church on Sunday told me he'd lost kids to croup before. That was like a punch in the gut... this really was serious, and people prayed, and God responded.

I'm so grateful.

Comments

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs. They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...

Will Dig Life

Search This Blog