After her surgery, we were called so we could go see her, she was in an incubator, this tiny little body with so many wires coming from her, drugged up to her eye balls and completely out of it. Not a sight a mother wants to see. Not ever.

The Surgeon met with us and told us he’d found something he’d not expected, something called  Meconium Ileus. Basically the first poo babies do is black sticky tar like stuff (EWWW!) but Lauren’s bowels were blocked up with it. He said he juiced out of her bowels 35 cm worth of it. The most he’d ever juiced out of a baby. He didn’t expect it because of two reasons. The midwives had clearly made a huge mistake writing that she had pood twice (his words). Both times were when they had given me about a 20 minute rest each night for the first two nights, since she wouldn’t stop screaming during our hospital stay. He said in all his time the amount that was in her made it nigh on impossible for her to have passed anything. Secondly, he couldn’t see anything on the X-ray and this was now obvious that that was because it was all clogged up.

This was when he said that this condition was linked to Cystic Fibrosis. I’d only heard of this condition once before and my impression of the condition left me thinking there was no way she could have it. I thought it was a lung disease and killed sufferers in their teenage years. He told us that she would be tested for it and we would meet with a doctor from The Cystic Fibrosis unit from Jimmy’s (St. James’s hospital) soon.

A blood test was taken, and a couple of days later we met with Dr Keith Brownlee. He told us a bit about the condition. Explained why she couldn’t pass the sticky stuff in her bowels if she had CF. CF lines the body with thicker stickier mucus than our ‘normal’ bodies. So that against already sticky poo, the two combined made it impossible for her. He told us that her skin would taste salty. And sometimes they do a ‘sweat’ test to diagnose. All in all, after talking to him I knew deep down she had CF. It was hard and there was always a little hope that it was just a bad dream and everything would be OK now. Jonathan was adamant trying to convince himself and me that she didn’t have it. All the while knowing, what would be would be.

Fri 9th January 2009, Jonathan came down from work to the hospital for lunch time. As soon as he’d sat down Deborah a nurse came over very calmly and quietly and just started talking as though she was saying Hi. She said, “we had a phone call from Dr Brownlee this morning and it’s confirmed Lauren does have Cystic Fibrosis”. Jonathan’s face still makes me emotional when thinking about how deeply gutted he was at that news. I went into auto pilot to help him and told him it would be OK. We knew she did really and from what we’d read about it, it was a really good thing that she’d been diagnosed so early in life. That gave her the best shot. We let everyone know and it became more and more real as we did. Surreal at times. Still is to be fair.