The first was a phone call from a nurse. She said something about not being able to stabilise him. She said “you need to be here”. Need. She told me she was a parent too. I understood immediately.

The second was face to face. The doctor took us to one side. He said my son needed to go to another hospital by helicopter, but that his blood pressure was too low. He said we needed to know that he might die on the journey. Die. There it was. 

It was a conversation he must have trained to have. He was matter of fact, and left no room for doubt. He avoided offering false promises. Then they packed him up and took him away. And then the long wait through the night for news, dreading the phone ringing. 

The third was much later, after we’d been in hospital for months. The surgery had saved him, but the sepsis was still making his body fail. There were small improvements, followed by major setbacks.

I knew his consultant well by now from his daily visits. He asked to speak to me away from the ward. We went into a room and he shut the door. There was another doctor there, and a nurse. 

He explained the context, which I understood very well by now. He said he wanted me to know that they were doing everything they could, and that they would keep trying. But they were now dealing with regular setbacks, and each setback was life threatening. 

He said that my son might never leave the hospital, and he wanted me to know that. He asked me if I understood what they were telling me, and I said that I did.