Hannah’s Choice: A daughter's love for life. The mother who let her make the hardest decision of all.. Hannah Jones
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To keep myself lazy busy now I’m home and everyone else is back at school, I’ve been watching my new favourite film – Mamma Mia! It’s brilliant, cool and fab all at the same time. I like the dancing and the jokes but most of all I love the singing and can’t decide which is my favourite song. It’s great when the lady sings ‘Does Your Mother Know’ to her boyfriend on the beach, but I also like ‘Honey Honey’ because it always makes me laugh when Sophie sings ‘You’re a doggone beast’ and giggles.
The songs are cool and I’ve been sitting in my room reading the words on the CD cover and singing along. Sometimes I get up and dance a bit too. Head banging is my favourite thing because it makes me feel dizzy, although I sometimes have to sit down if I do too much. But it feels great while I’m doing it, and that’s what counts, isn’t it?
Of all the systems, processes and cycles that make up the miracle of human life, perhaps the most amazing is the heart – the power house of the human body which keeps the brain and organs fed with blood. An adult heart beats on average between 60 and 100 times every minute of every hour, day, week, month and year of a person’s life, however long – a feat of natural engineering that has never been surpassed by the bridges, rockets or machines built by people.
Since New Year we’d known Hannah’s heart wasn’t pumping as effectively as it should have been. But as time had passed it had become increasingly clear that the problems were not being solved by medication. Hannah was still tired, weak and out of breath – the classic symptoms of heart abnormalities – and I was terrified when the doctors told me she was suffering mild heart failure. I tried to stem my panic by telling myself the term was a catch-all which covered a huge range of possibilities from sudden, severe and fatal heart failure to temporary symptoms from which a patient can recover. Heart failure can mean anything from a weakening of the muscles of the heart to a virus which disrupts its electrical signals or a glitch in one of the valves. No one knew what was causing Hannah’s problems and I simply didn’t dare consider they might be anything other than temporary.
But as she rested after her second round of chemotherapy, Dr Williams and her cardiologist Dr Wright decided they needed to do a more in-depth scan to give them a fuller picture of what was happening. Hannah had had scans including ECGs to measure the electrical activity of her heart and mini echocardiograms which used sound waves to create a picture of it, but now the doctors needed to know more.
‘Is my heart still poorly, Mummy?’ Hannah had asked when I told her she was going to have a special X-ray.
‘The doctors aren’t sure so they want to look very closely,’ I told her.
‘Has my heart got bugs like my blood?’
‘We don’t think so, but Dr Wright will use his special machine to find out.’
‘Will he make my heart better?’
‘I hope so, Han.’
A couple of days later we were taken to the X-ray unit, where Hannah lay on a bed as Dr Wright smeared gel onto her chest before pushing a probe across it. Working around the central line coming out of her chest, he guided it until a picture appeared on the monitor beside Hannah’s bed. Before now the scans had only contained blurry outlines and shadows but this one was giving us a far more concrete image of what was happening inside Hannah’s body. Andrew stood close to me as we watched her heart expanding and contracting, the blood rushing in and out of it in waves of blue and red across the screen.
Pressing buttons as he moved the probe across Hannah’s chest, Dr Wright freeze-framed images to take detailed measurements. Lines and shapes, trapezoids and rectangles appeared on the images to give an exact assessment of Hannah’s heart rate and function. Numbers popped up on the screen and I stared at them, willing the figures to give us good news, praying that it wouldn’t be bad.
When the scan was over the doctors went away to talk before calling Andrew and me back to see them. Their faces were serious as we sat down.
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