Blessed

I can't stop thinking about a mum that I spoke to at playgroup this morning. She has a daughter the same age as Rosie. In fact, we first met at Sing & Sign classes when the girls were about a year old and have bumped into each other off and on. She lives in our new neighborhood and I've thought it would be nice to get the girls together to play sometime. English girls take a long time to befriend but we've been on the road to becoming friends.

We bumped into each other when her daughter started at Rosie's playgroup last month and have chatted every week. She was heavily pregnant with her second baby and today she brought him to playgroup for the first time. I was so excited to see a newborn. There's nothing like that warm, tiny bundle of baby. Her little boy is three weeks old and as she breastfed him we talked and she told me that they've recently discovered that the baby is blind. This in itself is a horrible blow but they are afraid that he might have a serious degenerative disease that would affect his brain. He would slowly slip into a vegetative state and wouldn't live for very long.

I looked at this tiny, perfect boy and couldn't believe that anything could be wrong with him. His poor mother is obviously torn up but also numb with shock and grief and pain. I know that their first child had a serious problem with her heart but has now, after treatment and operations, made a full recovery. I cannot imagine what they have been through and what they're going through now. I feel so incredibly lucky to have two healthy children. These kinds of things are a coin toss. There's no fault, no reason, just bloody awful bad luck. It could have just as easily been us going through it.

The baby is having an MRI tomorrow and they should have some answers then. As if this wasn't hard enough already they're up against the clock. If the baby doesn't have the degenerative disease it means that he'll need to have an operation on his retinas that can only be performed before the age of six weeks. NHS is usually wonderful in such a drastic situation. I hope they live up that reputation now.