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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СКАЧАТЬ lying awake just like me and occasionally I could hear their muffled sobs. We smiled at each other during the day and silently accepted each other’s grief by night.

      Life on the unit wasn’t just about sadness – there was hope and light too. Doctors walked around in white coats splattered with water shot from pistols by the children who were well enough to play, and the nurses, who worked harder than any I’d ever seen, were endlessly cheerful. Christmas also worked its magic on the ward just as surely as it did in any other place filled with children. Decorations were strung across the walls, nurses played carols on the radio and Father Christmas visited the children each day to hand out presents. If Hannah was sleeping when he came, she’d wake to see a Barbie car or a colouring book, a doll or a fairy wand, in the stack of presents which slowly piled up beside her bed.

      I liked the fact that the doctors who clustered around her each morning to assess her progress – the consultant Dr Williams, a registrar, senior and junior house officers and various medical students – were followed by a man with a red jacket and a huge smile. Just like every other four-year-old, Hannah loved Father Christmas, and although she was too sick to express her excitement I knew she enjoyed his visits each day.

      He was something comfortingly familiar – just like the duvet, sheets and pillows Andrew had brought from home after Hannah had told me the hospital ones were too scratchy. To minimise the risk of infection on a ward full of children who were so weak, I had to wash the linen each day to stop bugs breeding and soon realised we needed more supplies to keep up with the constant flow of clean laundry. But I knew the familiar smell of our washing powder would comfort Hannah, just as Father Christmas would – a bright spot in the day, a few moments for her to forget.

      But after nearly a week in hospital a nurse came to deliver bad news just as Andrew arrived with Oli and Lucy.

      ‘There won’t be a visit from you-know-who this afternoon,’ she said in a low voice. ‘There’s no one to do it, unfortunately.’

      I looked at Andrew – with his big belly and smiling eyes he’d be perfect for the job.

      ‘Will the costume fit me?’ he asked as he looked at the nurse.

      ‘Size nine boots OK?’

      ‘I’ll squeeze into them.’

      The nurse took Andrew off to get dressed as I turned to Oli and Lucy and breathed in their comforting smell while I cuddled them – Oli, a toddler of nearly three, and Lucy, a bouncing baby of fifteen months. I had missed them so much, and seeing the energy and life shining out of them was like seeing shards of light glittering across water – something everyday suddenly become magical.

      ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Oli asked as he looked up from the colouring book he’d found.

      ‘He’s gone to the car to get something. He won’t be long. Shall we draw a picture for him?’

      Oli picked up some crayons as I jiggled Lucy, happy to feel her in my arms again, and waited for Andrew to come onto the ward. But as I watched him walk up to the first bed I suddenly realised that I might have made a mistake. Would Hannah recognise her father? She was an intelligent child, advanced beyond her years in many ways after being diagnosed with dyspraxia when she was two and a half. The condition was a bit like dyslexia but affected movement and coordination. It meant that Hannah had been late learning to walk and dress herself, but her language, as if in compensation, had developed quickly and she was also very sensitive to other people’s emotions. Hannah could say ‘octopus’ before her first birthday and have long conversations about the plants in the garden by the time she was four. When my granny had fallen over one day while they were out for a walk she’d even calmly insisted to a passer-by that she could look after her.

      But it was too late to do anything now because Andrew was walking up to Hannah’s bed and all I could do was hope that she didn’t recognise him as he chuckled, ‘Ho, ho, ho’.

      ‘Father Christmas!’ Oli squealed as he jumped up.

      I got up with Lucy as Andrew sat down on the chair beside Hannah’s bed and Oli climbed onto his knee, listing the presents he wanted while Lucy sat in my arms, refusing to go anywhere near the strange man in red. When Andrew had finished with Oli, he turned to Hannah and held out his left hand towards her. She looked at him silently and I held my breath.

      Very slowly, she lifted her right arm and pushed her hand into the space between the bed and chair where her father’s was waiting for hers. Their fingers met in mid-air.

      ‘You’re being a very good little girl,’ Andrew said softly.

      Hannah’s mouth curved into a tiny smile as she looked at Father Christmas and I knew this one piece of magic was still safe for her.

      It was New Year’s Eve 1999 – millennium night – and after two weeks in hospital the intensive phase of Hannah’s first cycle of chemotherapy drugs had ended a few days before. But while I could hear people getting ready to celebrate outside on the streets of Birmingham, inside the hospital everything was quiet as Hannah lay almost unconscious. Two mornings ago the nurses had noticed her vital statistics weren’t normal when they did her usual observations – her pulse was rising, her blood pressure and oxygen saturation were dropping. The doctors knew immediately that Hannah’s heart was struggling and a cardiologist who’d seen her had told me she might be suffering a temporary side effect of the chemo. She’d been put on new medication but Hannah was still dangerously ill and was now on morphine to control her pain.

      As the soft thud of music from outside weaved through our hushed world, I thought of all the people getting ready to see in midnight and wished Hannah could be among them, ruddy faced and smiling. Then I thought of Andrew and the children at home and sadness filled me that we wouldn’t be celebrating this milestone together as a family. Instead we were far apart and Hannah was lying still on the bed with her eyes closed, barely conscious, oblivious to the nasal canula running underneath her nose to give her oxygen, the feeding tube running up it or the central line attached to her chest. Three sticky electrode pads were attached to a heart monitor which beeped softly and a SATS probe on her finger constantly checked her oxygen levels.

      All I could do was pray as I sat beside her, willing her back to consciousness. I felt angry and disappointed. How could this be happening to Hannah when she already had so much else to fight? After the hustle and bustle, the rush of emergency when we had first arrived in hospital, the silence now felt overwhelming and all the questions I had been asked since that day rolled in a constant stream through my mind.

      There had been so many of them. Did I breastfeed? What type of bottled milk did I use? Did I warm it in the microwave? None are proven links to leukaemia, but as I searched for a reason why Hannah was now even sicker I focused on the questions I’d been asked and why. Surely I should have been able to stop the unseen enemy which had sneaked into our life? I must have made some mistake and allowed it in. Hannah was my child. My job was to protect her.

      The questions almost consumed me – my mind going back and forth as I looked back on our life and tried to pinpoint where I’d gone wrong. I remembered how I’d only breastfed Hannah for a couple of weeks after she was born because I’d gone back to work. I hadn’t had a choice about it, but now I wondered if I’d harmed her in some unthinking way at the very beginning of her life.

      I’d longed to be a mother when I’d met Andrew eight years before. I was twenty-five and knew I was ready to fall in love and start my own family after returning from a year travelling in Australia. I’d been brought up by my grandmother after my mother had died when I was five, and although my childhood had been strict СКАЧАТЬ