DAY 23 – 14 November:

Michelle: And still no change. While the doctors tell us his perfusion is better, they remind us that he is still in grave danger and that he is only alive because of the machines that he is hooked up to. Its good not to have any false sense of hope I guess, but sometimes it’s easier to sit in denial about how precarious the balance is that his life hangs on.

Michael: It is quite something to see one’s child attached to an ECMO machine. Maybe because one can actually see the blood in the tubes. The dark blood leaves the body and flows into the machine where the blood gets oxygenated, and the bright red blood flows back in. In the region of 250ml of blood in total in his body we are told.

The ECMO treatment is new addition to the already crowded room. A new graph for me to learn, new numbers to get used to, new medication for him to be attached to make everything run smoothly. What’s a few more lines in him? He’s already full of them. He is very pale.

Not exactly the start one had in mind for one’s child.