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SIMON JAMES BRUNTON
19th July 1982 - 18th April 1998
Hey! Who's the cool dude in the glasses?
Home for the weekend
We'd gone into hospital on 26th March and they were now saying we could go home for the weekend on 17th May!
It also happened to be Vince's birthday, how wonderful it would be to be home for his birthday. Wow, we couldn't wait!
We packed our bags and went home on the Friday night and weren't due to come back until the Sunday evening. Freedom!
Leaving the hospital proved to be quite an ordeal because Simon was now confined to a wheelchair.
After the operation and the meningitis Simon had been struck by a complete left-side palsy (like someone having a stroke),
he couldn't talk to us at all and, (we found out much later), he had double-vision. It was only because of our basic
knowledge of sign language that we were able to communicate with Simon at all, none of the staff could. We were only able
to communicate with Simon by means of a 'finger squeeze'. He would squeeze our finger if the answer to a question we had
asked was 'Yes' and not squeeze our finger if the answer was 'No'.
One evening Vince spent an hour trying to communicate with Simon, feeling so frustrated and helpless because he couldn't
understand his son. Eventually Vince found out that Simon just wanted to watch a video! After all the frustration they
still managed to laugh about it because Vince now had the job of trying to find out WHICH video Simon wanted!
Anyhow, now we were going home and we were not going to let a little obstacle like a wheelchair thwart us, so we left
hospital on the Friday evening excited, but fearful. This was the first time that we would not have the support of nursing
staff 24 hours-a-day.
We arrived home and had a very quiet evening in, settling down to bed reasonably early. In the early hours of the morning Simon
developed a fever and was getting worse, so we made the decision to go back to the hospital. We thought that the chemo drugs
were probably affecting him much quicker than anyone ever imagined they would. It was never any good 'going by the book' as far
as any of the cancer kids were concerned, they re-wrote the book every single day. So after less than 24 hours at home we headed
back to the hospital where, as it turned out, we were to stay until the 4th October '96.
When we got back to hospital Simon took a turn for the worst and was extremely poorly for the next month. I won't go into all the awful
details, but he had to be given everything intravenously because he was constantly vomiting, which caused an almost total blockage in his oesophagus.
His weight went down from 54kgs to 45kgs and he was so ill that he almost died twice during that time. As he slowly began to improve he was fitted
with a nasogastric tube to put food directly into his stomach.
Simon was never keen on his NG tube......so Daddy had one too, a drinking straw!
Since the night before Simon's original operation both Vince and I had been at the hospital constantly, through both choice and necessity.
Once you've spent a long time in hospital you get to see behind the facade of total efficiency and see things for what they really are.
You no longer have a blind faith in the system and it's staff. On at least a couple of occasions things would have turned out so differently
if we hadn't been right at Simon's beside when things started to go wrong.
If either of us went out it was for the 90 minutes it would take for us to drive home, pick up the post and some supplies, then get back to the hospital.
We only did that about once-a-week because no sooner were we off the ward, than we wanted to be back again. Thankfully, we were given a side-room on the
ward that one of us could sleep in and the other one would have a foldaway bed right next to Simon's bed. We would take it in turns to do 'night duty'.
Nothing was as important to us as our children and our priorities were to make sure that they were alright. Bless her heart, Amy had stayed with so many
relations over the past couple of months and she never complained to us about the amount of time she had to spend away from us.
Inseparable Buddies
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