En attendant la coeur

I’ve said it before here and I’ll say it encore: hearts and surgery mean quite a little something to us. I know what it is to be told your child urgently needs surgery and that he’ll be getting it on Tuesday morning bring him in @ 6am, don’t feed him and how hard it is not to feed a small baby whose relying on you for his food. I know what it is to take a baby into a stainless steel operating theatre and see the big careful hand try to put the huge looking needle thing into this vein to knock him out, I know what it is to watch them struggle and fail and clamp a mask on instead to knock him out while his fortunately and usually for a heart baby pudgy legs flail and I know what it is to leave him behind for those careful hands to repair his dodgy heart. Then you pace 5 and a half hours with no idea whether your child will be living or otherwise.

Thus when I watch this RTE Frontline on Crumlin Children’s Hospital and listen to those mothers describing being turned back at the stainless steel doors my own heart is smashed for them because I know what it is to get through that door and what you face. To turn back, knowing your child has a heart in trouble is beyond contemplation The heart is hidden beneath a curtain of skin, it’s not a leg you can see, it’s not a lump a child can point to. It’s pumping away or not pumping and you can simply watch your child sweat and struggle or have no visible symptom and you simply worry, worry, worry. You don’t live you worry.

No child should wait. It’s that simple. No child should wait because no parent can wait.

http://www.rte.ie/news/thefrontline/

Hearts, lungs and minds — excerpt from sound artist John Wynn’s affecting documentary.

Longer excerpt from Hearts, Lungs and minds plus other curious sound work here.