The night before port surgery. 

No one ever said parenting would be easy, but I never imagined it would be quite this hard, all the angst and worry, the endless doubt and worst of all, the millions of decisions you are expected to make as a parent. Always wondering and hoping the choices we make are the right ones for our babies. 

I have made the decision to put my son through what will most likely be a pretty traumatic ordeal tomorrow, something that I know will be painful and upsetting for him and something which he is too young to understand at the moment and I am wracked with guilt over it. I keep asking myself over and over, is this the right decision? 

I know that he needs this surgery and once the port is in, longterm it will mean his admissions are far less traumatic with no need for cannula changes every day, but even knowing this and hearing others success stories hasn’t made the decision any easier and hasn’t taken that guilt away.  

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been so grateful to the other CF parents that have shared their stories and shown me pictures of their children’s ports and I feel fortunate to have my virtual family around me providing advice and allowing me to ask questions and I thank them for that.

As I sit here this evening having packed our hospital bags ready for the morning I find myself looking over the list of 35 odd complications the Surgeon gave me, complications ranging from Port rejection all the way through to heart problems like tamponades and endocarditis, I wonder to myself if the risk outweighs the end result. You always hear surgeons say “With every surgery comes risk” but until you are given papers with them listed it doesn’t seem so real and I never realised there could be so many for one procedure. 

I’ve spent the majority of my evening staring at Chester’s topless torso, wondering how different it will look after tomorrow’s surgery, wondering where it will be placed and how prominent it will be. Then wondering how he will feel about adding another scar to his already patchwork body. I guess only time will tell and I am hopeful that one day he will be proud of his war wounds and I will have to tell him off for showing them off to the girls. 

For now I wait and hope that his bed is still available so I don’t have to spend another evening worrying and stressing about putting my baby through another surgery.