Happy New Year!

We're home! We got back last night after leaving Great Ormond Street just after five. Trains back to Norwich involved a change, a traipse across a footbridge and a coach journey, so we went to Cambridge instead, where Aunty Bin and Kizzy picked us up and drove us home.

This is Shane's mum updating his blog while he watches films. (I'm not going to be popular when I go and suggest a walk down the drive and back, but I have my orders from the doctors.)

Here's the full story of our amazingly brief trip to Great Ormond Street.

We travelled down by train on Tuesday, waved off by Kizzy and Zoe, who took care of her for a couple of days before Aunty Bin could take over. I have heard tales of bowling, cinema, and seen a lot of items from Top Shop and Next in Ms K's bedroom, so I reckon those girls had a great time.

We felt quite at home in the Patient Hotel, having had our dress rehearsal, and it was good to see Shane looking so cheerful.

Next morning, we were once again on familiar ground as we checked into the Cardiac Day Ward at 7.30. Shane even had the same room as before.

In the hour and a half before he went up for his operation, he had a stream of visitors: Cameron the anaesthetist, Ann Black the consultant anaesthetist, Lesley his nurse on the Day Ward, Mr Muliathu his surgeon, and Rosan, who would be looking after him in Intensive Care afterwards. Rosan turned out to be Welsh and, better still, from the Rhondda, only a few miles from where Shane spent his first three years. Everyone knew that Shane had found waiting for his op and then having it cancelled at the last minute very difficult, so they had come to make sure he knew he was in good hands.


At nine, Lesley and I took him up to theatre. Cameron made sure he went peacefully to sleep and I wandered off to wait for news.

Shane knew that celebrities often visit GOSH and was hoping to see one. Apparently David Beckham and the Saturdays had been in just before Christmas. Unfortunately, Shane was still in theatre when, passing through reception, I came across members of the Royal Ballet in their Tales of Beatrix Potter costumes. I took photos for him.

Shane was suspicious that these might have been ordinary people in costume, but I had sight
of their muscly calves and reassured him that they were definitely dancers.

Shane's op took five hours. At half-past two, Lesley took me up to Cardiac Intensive Care, where Rosan was already taking care of Shane. He was still asleep and not breathing by himself, with loads of tubes and machines attached. He said it was OK to show this picture.

I wrote in the earlier blog about his breathing problem, which was soon sorted. Rosan took care of him until eight, then Laura took over at night, and Gail was in charge the next day. By the late afternoon of Thursday, the breathing tube and the horrible nose tube had been removed and he was ready to move to the High Dependency unit on Ladybird Ward. In a ward of four boys, he was the oldest by about ten years. Gradually, he began eating a little and looking more cheery.

On Friday, he was out of bed and taking a few steps.

By this stage, Shane was unimpressed by his costume and the remaining tubes.

He dreaded the three drains in his chest coming out, but he was given some happy medicine that was so effective that, although he was awake throughout, he now can't remember a thing about it. (I'm finding it harder to forget quite how much tubing there had been inside him!) Later our friend Sally, who is an anaesthetist at the next-door neurological hospital, came to visit, which he loved.

By late afternoon on Friday, all but one canula, the line in the side of his neck and the pacing wires attached to his heart were all removed and he was moved on to the ordinary ward. Actually, he was moved to a palace: his own room with en suite bathroom and TV.

We both slept through the New Year, although I have a vague memory that the nurse who came in to check his blood pressure etc. at 2am was wearing a sparkly hat.

On New Year's Day, the doctor came round at eleven, asked if Shane was eating, walking and taking his medicine, and hearing that he was, said, "Well, what's he still doing in hospital?" Several things had to happen before we could leave. There was one last echocardiogram to make sure that his heart was fine. A letter had to be written. Drugs needed to be prescribed and collected from a pharmacy that was in New Year's Day mode. And the dressing had to be removed from his main wound. We were expecting a ghastly sight. Instead, there is the thinnest, neatest pink line and the nurse said, "Well, there's no need to cover this up again." So when we finally left at about five, he didn't have so much as a sticking plaster anywhere.

Neither of us could really believe that three days earlier he had been on a bypass machine while someone rummaged around inside his heart and now he was walking out of hospital by himself (mumbling to the last that he thought someone should have supplied a wheelchair as in American films).

So now we're at home on a diet of endless re-runs of Jaws, Aliens in the Attic and Hole in the Wall. Please do visit to spare us from another celebrity in foil!