Christmas, blink and you might miss it

One thing is for sure. No matter how hard you try, Christmas in hospital will never even come close to what you can do at home. Too much is out of your control and very few people truly care for the plight of those in hospital at Christmas. Most people are far too wrapped up in their own Christmas festival of over indulgence and alcoholic inebriation to even spare a thought for those who have no choice but to spend their holiday incarcerated at the hands of their illness.

It was a difficult day to watch. Harder still to partake in. A small handful of people who would never normally choose to be in the same room as one another were all sat around the same hospital bed, and then the same dinner table. Vicki seemed to be nonplussed by it all. An early visit from Santa had delivered some lovely presents courtesy of a charity that specialises in this kind of thing. Christmas dinner was less than ideal. It took several attempts to ascertain that only the children would be catered for at Christmas lunch. OK, this is fair enough, but when you're 40 miles from home, it's far from easy to bring it with you, especially as there is only a microwave on the ward. The canteen open, but only doing chicken meals. Great. Hardly the lavish meal that we would have gorged on at home with all the trimmings. In the event, the ward was awash with Turkey dinners, so we needn't have brought up any food! You can't win.

After dinner we settled down to a bit of karaoke fun, but Vicki didn't seem too interested, she just watched. She was still tired after the relentless eye drops. I wasn't in the best of moods for reasons that I won't discuss on here. So all in all, a Christmas day to forget. And then of course you're faced with an endless barrage of well meaning people asking "Did you have a nice Christmas?" Strangely the minute you say "no", they lose interest and make their polite excuses and withdraw. So it seems that you have to have a nice Christmas, or you must be some kind of social pariah, a Christmas leper. This just served to deepen my mood even further!

Vicki has had another blood transfusion and more platelets and seems quite lethargic and uninterested in anything. She's starting to eat again, but remains quite distant from anything else. I think being hospitalised over this time of year is just the worst thing a child can imagine. Even a cynical non-believing 15 year old! Hopefully, now that ordeal is out the way, she's start to brighten up and then hopefully be able to come home for a few days. Lets see what the New Year brings.