Before Meningitis, After. MAY BE UPSETTING.

Yes, I am quite aware that I bang on about it too much. I'm also very aware that my whole life is now dominated by it. And yes, I know she survived and I am thankful. But...there are some things that cannot be unseen. There are words that cannot be un-heard. There are feelings that cannot be forgotten.

Of course, the bloody great scars are a constant reminder. I could pretend it didn't happen. But the chunk of flesh missing from her hip, like a bite from a small but voracious shark is a big neon sign, every day. And when I made her, when I pushed her out of my body, she was whole. Please do not ever think I hate her scars or think her any less perfect. I love her scars. Because they show she survived. She has never known herself without them, and loves them to the extent that she wants to refuse further surgery on them. I hope she is always as confident, and that she is always strong enough to ignore the superficial, looks obsessed media, and be true to herself. Of course, there's a quandary. Accept her wishes for no further surgery, then when she's 16 have her rail against us, or insist, and make her feel we don't accept her? 

There are some of you who, sadly, will know only too well what it is to see your child being kept alive by machines. It's something no-one should see, least of all a parent. You sit there surrounded by wires and everything you hoped and dreamed for your baby is dust. Of course, shock is a wonderful friend, and, at the time, doesn't let you digest the words of some of the world's top paediatricians when they tell you that "It doesn't look good". Which I have since learned is The Code for "Your child is dying". I cannot, however hard I try, I cannot un-hear that. 

Of course, I feel so guilty for feeling this way when, ultimately, we had a good outcome. My heart breaks so much for those who didn't make it. The little girl in the next ICU bed choked to death on a bloody meatball in her school dinner. So awfully, bloody random. Elizabeth came out of her coma the same day that little girl died. I have thought of her and her family every day since. Her family donated her organs and I remember her mother saying to me that "Five other children have a chance now". Such grace and compassion,  to think of someone else at that time. 

We were surrounded by such wonderful kindness during those days. I remember my youngest brother, white-faced and almost shaking, made his way to the hospital when the news broke. Then when we were setting off for Great Ormond Street, he took his jacket off, plonked it on Husband's shoulders, put money in the pocket and said "There you go mate, you'll need that where you're going". That kindness has never left me, and never will. My other brother and his wife cooked a weeks worth of meals for us and struggled up to and across London with them. My mum and mum-in-law made their way up to London at first light to be with us, bringing PoggyDoggy who had been my cuddly toy as a child, and who had guarded all of my babies. I couldn't let Elizabeth go into this battle without PoggyDoggy.

My cousin made her way across London every lunchtime to be with us, would bring us essentials and care; Then after a long day's work then commute, would go to our flat, feed the cats and generally keep on top of things. All of these kindnesses and more - I don't know how I can ever repay them; Which is probably why I keep giving their children silly little presents. It's also probably why I've started giving blood, joined the bone marrow register and got a donor card, and support lots of charities - the overwhelming NEED to give something back, to try and repay the karma and kindnesses shown to us. I owe a massive debt to so many people and organisations, and I pay back gladly and with a smile in my heart. 

So yes. For me, at least, my life is very much Before and After. But I have never ever thought "Why Elizabeth", because why not Elizabeth? These things happen. Of course...this is probably why I find it hard to leave the house, too. Because these things happen. Stupid oversensitive me has been consumed by it, and I'm a complete nervous wreck most days and freak out at the slightest drop of a hat. I am going to start counselling, as it's pretty likely that as well as being infected with philanthropy I've also contracted PTSD, which I always thought was something only Vietnam Vets got.

Who knew?

Shelter.

Don't know about you, but I believe that a decent, safe home should be a right.  I live in an allegedly developed nation, which once,  rightly or wrongly, ruled over most of the globe, invented a free-at-point-of-use health service, supplies free education for every child, allows its subjects religious freedom, and that the oppressed flock to, knowing their human rights will be protected. So how then is it, that the Slumlord has risen again to inflict misery on those who don't earn enough to spend £125,000 on a tiny 1.5 bedroomed flat?

The housing crisis is constantly in the news, and I for one know just how devastating substandard and overcrowded accommodation can be. It cost us our health, our safety, and it almost cost Elizabeth her life; a study by the housing charity, Shelter, found that children living in poor housing are up to ten times more likely to contract meningitis. To read that was like a slap in the face. And what's worse, is the knowledge that however bad our housing was, there were people in this country living in far worse conditions. 

I'm not going to talk about developing nations and the children forced to live on rubbish tips - that is another subject, and one that is to do with their governments who believe that a nuclear weapons programme is more important than looking after its citizens; or a church that teaches contraception is more of a sin than abandoning superfluous children to the streets, to be picked off by criminal flesh traders and corrupt police officers. 

No. This is about a developed nation that seems to be quite happily heading back to the days when people lived 10 to a room, infested with disease and vermin. And will sit back and let the slumlords charge through the nose for it. 

When I met my husband, the flat was big enough for myself and my two eldest children; Husband and I married, planned to buy after our wedding was out of the way, and live happily ever after. Well, Elizabeth was born 9 months after our wedding day, and in that time, housing costs went through the roof. Pun intended. The flat that had cost our landlord £27,000 was now worth 50k, 85k, 99k, 100k . (Finally sold for somewhere between £99,000 and £127,000 so I believe) How I don't know. It was still the same rotten windows, the same ancient boiler that wasn't checked for over six years, the same six foot square kitchen. However the market is driven, the fact boils down to this. We, like so many others, were now trapped.

As the years passed, and the prices climbed, so the mould appeared, thickened, climbed from the skirting to the coving. Too scared to rock the boat by insisting on gas safety checks, (after all, any roof is better than no roof), we placed carbon monoxide detectors everywhere, scrubbed off the mould and got on with it. Elizabeth fell ill, and got better. She and I developed asthma and allergies, we all lived with dodgy tummies. Every night, I fought sleep, terrified that this would be the night the boiler killed us as we slept. 

We put up with it and worked around everything as best as we could. After all, we had nowhere else to go. We put our names on the council list and just got on with it. Then, after a crisis, came a surprise baby, my son, who quite frankly saved my life. Now, although I support the rights of women, there are certain rights that I could never choose; My son had a right to life that I would protect, and bugger the sniffs of self-righteous indignation that met the news of this pregnancy. It would be a squeeze, but we were squeezed anyway. There comes a point where one more doesn't make much of a difference.

About this time, I had a vague notion that the council just might have been...fobbing us off. After seven years on the list, they had placed us in Band C, which is the "Might get rehoused before you retire" band. Had a neighbour not turned out to be evil personified, I probably wouldn't have pushed it. But I was now at the point of suicidal thoughts and anti-depressants. The neighbour was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. I remember saying to Husband that I thought it possible that we should have been in Band B, if not A. 

Then it was Christmas Day, 2009. We had never been able to spend Christmas in our flat, as we didn't have an oven. Husband and I were at this point sleeping on a foam fold out sofabed in the living room. As I watched my children open their presents I thought to myself how THIS would be the last Christmas we spent in that hole.

Noel Edmonds. No, not in a Terry Wogan way. Noel believes in something called Cosmic Ordering. After snarkling up my sleeve at it, I decided to give it a try. Nothing ventured nothing gained, right? So as her next door cackled through the walls, I managed to keep a straight face as I asked the universe for a decent, safe home, yadda yadda yadda. Then I forgot about it and never asked again, as ordered by, well, Cosmic Ordering. And carried on being the old woman who lived in a shoe, propped up by Sertraline and the occasional breakdown, bidding on council houses that we would never be considered for.

The following May, a local councillor was doing the rounds, knocking on doors, canvassing for votes and pressing the flesh. When he knocked at ours, I was tired and worn out, about to growl "No thanks" at him. But then he spoke to me. He asked me if there was anything he could do for me. I told him that Yes, please come in and see how we live. He came in. He saw. And he was horrified.

He asked to borrow our PC, from which he fired off an e-mail to a different department. From that moment, things moved at warp speed, and I can honestly say that this man, a rare man who actually cares about his constituents, helped save my life, saved our family. My mind was so overwhelmed by our home, the NeighbourThing, that my depressed mind had been telling me that if I killed myself, my children would have more room. But this wonderful man achieved more in five days than I had done in five years.

A housing inspector was sent round, who classified us as statutorily overcrowded. As the goalposts for that have never been changed since the decade they were conceived, that is a rare classification. He told us that the council would be breaking the law by making us live there. And on 19th May, we were moved from Band C to Band A, and would be housed within six weeks. We signed for this wonderful home less than a month after that. My children enrolled at my old primary school. Space to breathe, think, feel. Space for an oven as well. And no neighbours necessitating calls to the police and a panic attack. 

From day one, I have thanked Goodness, the universe, my lucky stars for this wonderful privilege.

So that is the story of our experience of poor housing. And it also brings me to the bells. As you may have guessed, this home was our half a miracle, and one that I will always give thanks for. But it was on hearing those bells that it all hit home. Everything I had asked the universe for, or thought of in passing through the years, we had received. From the area, to the school, to the garden, to the bells. The bells of my childhood. This once notoriously bad-news road was now our home, and I can now sleep. I don't need to spend all night watching over my family any more. 

An anchor, roots, these are precious things. We as a nation are sleepwalking backward to the kind of place Jack the Ripper might have roamed. If you don't believe me, have a look at the Shelter website. I know how poor housing nearly killed my daughter. It nearly killed me. But we were lucky, we got out. For many, their nightmare really is just beginning. 
Shall we stop it now?

Kindle? Kock off.

Books. I adore them. The way they look, feel, smell, sound and taste - so they please all of my senses. (I have to point out that I know how they taste due to often nodding off whilst reading and awaking with a dribbly mouth full of Chapter27)

As my late grandpa was an author and a bookseller, they also please a different, more supernaturallish type sense, and transport me back to childhood, surrounded by piles of books as bemused shoppers pointed at the feral child sat in the RespectableBookShop window, nose-deep in books galore. I learned to read around my fourth birthday. By seven I had read all the 'set' reading books. By nine I was on Jackie Collins novels swiped from mothers bookcase. At ten, I had the copy of Flowers In The Attic I was ploughing through taken off me. As it was a rather maudlin and dirty book, I was never bothered about finding out how it ended. So yes. I love me some books. I love me some reading. Six books on the go at once has not been unheard of.

I also loved my grandpa; he was a gentle pacifist, an intelligent, before-his-time man, who accepted my scandalous existence without hesitation.

My grandparents lived in a house with a massive garden, right next to a church which had the most exquisite bells. Yes, bells. I used to stay the night there at least once a week, and would help grandpa do some gardening in the morning as the bells called the faithful. I made a vow, that one day, I too would live within the sound of the bells, as I helped with weeding and ran shrieking from worms.Grandpa loved his garden, though nanny told me last year that he actually wasn't very good at it, with more enthusiasm than skill. He spent the last few years of his life trying to grow a clematis. It didn't happen, they kept dying. Until the first summer after his death, when it burst into life and was still going for many years afterward.

I was devastated when grandpa died. Cancer. I wasn't allowed to see him in the last few weeks, and wasn't allowed to go to his funeral, as I was "too young to understand". Ha. The fact that I would never see him again  was very easy to comprehend, and I'm actually crying now as I write this, almost thirty years later.

So books, to me, are a sacred link between grandpa and me. I cannot destroy or mistreat a book, and one thing I yearned for during the years in our cramped and horrible flat, was a wall of bookshelves, floor to ceiling with wonderful books. Now grandpa, due to his wonderful forward thinking modernity, would have probably loved one of those electronic book reader THINGS. He wasn't a sentimental fool like me. Antiques were to be sold, houses were to be cleared, books moved on. So yes, I think, were he alive today, I would have bought him a Kindle for his 100th birthday last year.

But today I am sitting here, my wall of Billy Bookcases behind me, stuffed full of books and the odd antique he'd picked up in a house clearance and given to me, and sometimes, I can feel his presence. That half-miracle I told you about? It saved my life and led us to our new home. We'd just moved in, and I'm pottering in the garden - and then I heard them. The bells from my childhood. Our new, decent, safe home was within the sound of the bells. You know in films when a character has their moment of realisation, all the pieces fall into place, the cogs whirr and they have their epiphany? That. Everything I had prayed, yearned, wished for, was Here.

Thank you, Grandpa. I love you. 

The God thing.

Just in case anyone thinks I'm an evil atheist bitch who eats babies and lickle kittens before bathing in the blood of virgin unicorns. I'm not, and I don't. 

I am certainly confused, but that's the story of my life. I think...feel that there is very possibly Something. I often wish I did have a deep faith, but then I get all logical. So yes, I am very confused. But. What I most definitely am though, is anti religion. Not because I hate whatever the Something is, but because ultimately, logic tells me that religion was man-made, by men, for men. Most of whom seemed to have real issues with ladies. And instilling laws which several thousand years ago may have made sense for the growth of the religion (non-procreational sexytime is a sexytime that hasn't made a new devotee) and may have made sense for the health and safety of the religion (one death from salmonella is, after all, one less devotee), but in today's overcrowded modern world...?

I have witnessed a miracle and a half. Not  water into wine type stuff, but something that makes me not quite able to dismiss the existence of Something bigger than us.

If you're reading this, you probably know about my youngest daughter, and how, at 13months of age, she contracted meningococcal septicaemia. Horrifically and severely so. Now, you know she survived, and she's now a gorgeous seven-year-old. But what you might not know is the following, which might be coincidence, might be more, but all of which makes me feel that we are not alone...and I can't quite turn away from this feeling.

On that day, back in 2005, husband was just about to go to the bathroom, when an overwhelming thought popped into his head. Now even I would have done my weewee, but this thought was so overwhelming, that even though he had only checked E 10 minutes previously, he took heed of that thought that said to him "GO AND CHECK ELIZABETH". He checked, and the rash, that awful, deadly, purple rash was starting to march its way across our baby's  face. I called an ambulance and they told me to stand outside so they could zoom straight to me. 

While I stood outside, chainsmoking and shaking with terror, Eldest Child suddenly shook my arm and pointed to between my feet, telling me "Look mum, an angel feather". And there was a pure white feather, that hadn't been there before; Yes, it likely was a pigeon feather, but whatever it was, I saw it, and I was calm. I knew then that she would survive. And even when, at Great Ormond Street, they were telling us that her life was "minute by minute", I just had a peculiar feeling that she would make it. Throughout everything. Through the coma, through the machine that breathed for her, through her emergency baptism, through the pitying looks from the medics, through the wires and the beeps, I knew.

A year or so later, I found out that she had to be resuscitated, and that those two glorious paramedics had thought that even if she made it to the hospital alive, she would have been left a multiple amputee. But she did make it. And she was left, although severely scarred, with all her limbs intact. Once back at our local hospital, every single medic who fought for her life that night came to see her, and they all said the same thing; That they'd seen people who had that disease nowhere near as badly as she did, and that none of them had made it. She was saved by medical science and a bloody miracle. So yes, I do believe in miracles, because I have witnessed one. And a half. Why did we get  a miracle? You can as easily ask why did Elizabeth get meningitis.

There is so much more that I could tell you about that time, but I don't want a TLDR verdict. I also won't bore you with our half-miracle. But I witnessed many things at that time that have made me unable to completely turn my back.

With regard to my anti-religion stance, too many people, throughout history, have used their religion as a shield and a reason to do and say terrible things to their fellow man. From the crusades, to the Inquisition, to the Taliban, to far-right fundamentalist Christian homophobia, and everything before, after and in-between. People who shout how much they love Jesus then proceed to hurt their fellow man with a lack of humility that would leave Lady Gaga reeling. People who stone a woman to death because she was raped. 

I cannot, and will not, have any part of that. IF there is truly a love for Jesus, then he preached love - so ditch the hate. If there is truly a love for God, who is apparently so forgiving and loving, then why commit atrocities in his name? 

I will admit that I prayed that night, I prayed so hard. And on that night that we prayed for our daughter's survival, across London, another daughter was being murdered by her father and brothers as her own mother held her down, in front of two toddler nieces (to warn them against disobedience, apparently), all because their religious and cultural views had become warped and distorted. That was when I turned my back on religion. Because anything that can make someone refuse life-saving treatment for their child, or picket a soldier's funeral with placards of hate, anything that can override a woman's most basic instinct, that to protect her child, anything that can do these things and more...well, I cannot help but think that that Thing is dangerous, and has no place in government, law, medicine or education. When I get snarky it's because some deluded teenager is spewing the hate instilled in them by their local preacher, and one cannot help but wonder if they actually have a clue what they are saying.

So no, I am not anti spirituality, nor have I ever eaten a kitten. But I do love. And would do anything for you.