When 200 miles feels like 2000

When we moved to Exeter in 2015, we were pregnant with our little boy who would have been our third child, Rudi. Sadly we lost him at 22 weeks. We were living in a new place, with no family nearby.  But we were lucky, our neighbours helped us out, friends rallied round us, my best friend did a twenty four hour round trip just to hug me and our Mums both came down to stay.

But those 200 miles could have been 2000 when we were in the hospital losing our baby.

On Thursday night we had a call from our family in London telling us that our one year old nephew Zayn (who was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer) had a terrible reaction to the chemo, his liver had failed and he was taken by ambulance from Worthing to Kings College Hospital. If we were still nearby, we would have called friends to have the kids, got in the car and headed straight over there but again, those 200 miles represented a gaping chasm, we couldn’t leave immediately and turn up in the early hours of the morning with the kids.

After a sleepless night we took the children out of school and travelled down on Friday morning, our friends and family put us up and kindly looked after the kids and we visited Zayn in hospital. It was hard in so many ways, it was heartbreaking to see him sedated and plugged into lots of machines and it brought back memories for us both. Rudi and Zayn would have been the same age, we thought that nature can’t be so cruel as to take two babies from our family.

As I watched the cityscape morph into yellow fields of rapeseed and rolling hills on our journey home yesterday,  I felt that ache of hopelessness. We had kissed Zayn, hugged our sister and brother goodbye, both feeling so terribly sad that we can’t do more. We can’t wave a magic wand and make Zayn better and, living in Exeter, we can’t be there physically to support them. We have to do it all from a distance, phone calls to check in and visits when we can.

We can all only do what we can.

Zayn is incredibly lucky, he has the most amazing care at King’s College Hospital and they have managed to stabilise him. He is still critical but he is fighting, we are all hoping and praying that he will come through this one small victory at at time.

Send positive vibes, prayers and thoughts, a little positivity goes a long way.