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| Chapter 1 - Admission |
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I awoke confused and upset in a small hospital bed in a cramped room full of medical equipment. Max was lying next to me and close to dying. |
This was all too much to comprehend. |
“This is not real. This has got to be a dream.” I pinched myself. |
It was a dream! The relief was palpable. I awoke at home in the comfort of my bed. It had all been an awful nightmare. I’d never had a dream as traumatic as this one. |
What is wrong with me?. What on earth made me think that Max could have leukaemia? I was disturbed by both the content and intensity of the dream. |
I sat on the edge of my bed, sweating from the experience and tried to make sense of this distressing scenario. Why had I imagined such grotesque horrors. Nightmares like this were surely unhealthy? |
After reflecting for a couple of minutes I looked up and noticed that slowly the room and walls were starting to fade and dissolve. I became very frightened. What was happening? I wondered if I was having some sort of breakdown. |
I awoke confused and upset in a small hospital bed in a cramped room full of medical equipment. Max was lying next to me and close to dying. |
The mind can play very cruel tricks. Dreams like this happened to Sara and me many times after Max's diagnosis. Denial is a very common reaction to trauma. We never consciously denied the existence of his cancer and tried hard to face each hurdle as it presented itself. These dreams seemed to be a subconscious plea for denial. |
At the age of fifteen I remember walking down a local path with a friend and discussing if we would be able to cope in extreme situations in our future lives. We wondered if we would ever be in a war and if we were, would we survive the horrors, would we be brave? We did not know. We then discussed the worst thing that could happen to you in civilian life. We concluded that it would be if your child had leukaemia. Would we cope? Again we did not know. |
Life can be cruelly ironic. |
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| Copyright © 2001 |
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