More apologies
Okay, so I really was intending to post a bit more. I seem to have got a bit distracted with a lot of forum maintenance though recently – damned thing’s practically a full time job!
On the positive side, I did it! Got to the bottom of my inbox and replied to all those emails that have been lurking there for eons! Yay!
Only a couple of weeks now until my trip down to London with Pinkie (Lisa) for an open-air screening of Brokeback at Somerset House, and then the following weekend I’m off to Brussels for the EuroBrokie meet-up – yee haw!!
Tonight I really should have been doing some some work on a web project, on the grounds that clients generally don’t tend to pay you until you’ve finished doing the work. I kind of got distracted though while looking for statistics on obesity (as you do!) – for some research for a leaflet, when I came across a site that at first nearly sent me scurrying back to the Google search results. When you type in “weight graph”, you get all sorts of weird results, and I found myself on a homegrown website with a child’s hand print background pattern and my first reaction was to back out of there as quickly as I could.
There were some photographs of a small baby though, a small baby in a hospital – or a small (tiny) baby in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit to be more precise. It’s written through the eyes of the baby, Abigail, but Daddy is Abigail’s secretary, note-taker, photographer and technical guru. I started reading part way through the story, but quickly decided I needed to go back to the start and read the story from the beginning.
Abigail was born at 26 weeks after her mum developed potentially fatal Hemolysis Elevated Liver Enzymes Low Platelets (HELLP) Sydrome in August 2001. The website follows the trials and tribulations of Abi’s hospital stay and the setbacks she faced along the way.
I’ve seen programmes on TV before about premature babies and their treatment, but somehow this seems more personal, more real somehow. I’ve spent the last three hours reading about Abigail’s progress and at this point in my reading she’s now 66 days old. The website’s a fascinating glimpse into the world of neonatal care, to the agonies her parents went through with every concern and set-back, and no doubt at the time a way for family and friends to keep up to date with Abigail’s progress.
There’s a bit of a spoiler on the homepage of the site, because it says in a big red scrolling marquee across the page that after 172 days Abigail made it out of hospital and got to go home, but I don’t mind about the spoiler, it just saves me having to skip to the final page to see how the story ends (it’s just as easy to do that reading on the web as it is with a traditional book!).
Tomorrow I’ll carry on reading and see what happened to Abigail on her 67th day, and I’ll try and be good and get back into some sort of regular posting habit here. In the meantime I’ll leave you with Abigail’s story.
