Hudson's Story

Christmas eve. 2024. Your first Christmas. Your first eve. 

Only 4 months old my love and here we are spending the evening in ED. Just a few hours before that everything was fine, or so we thought. 

 

I come to tend to you after you wake from your nap to see those big, beautiful eyes that you look at me with, just covered in cloudiness. My mind racing with a heaviness in my heart and worry that is riddled with palpitations. All I can think as a mother, as a nursing student. is the worst. you can’t see anything anymore. What has happened and why!? 

We rush out the door to the hospital and before we know it, we are faced with a congenital glaucoma diagnosis, and we are suddenly booked to go in for urgent surgery interstate. The week is a whirlwind of unknowns and my heart breaks for you and all I can do is cry when you fall asleep but smile at you when your awake, so you don’t see me sad or scared. I don’t understand what this will mean for you, or what I can do to stop this. 

Surgery day: My heart breaks handing you over to the nurse in your little white gown, there should not even be gowns this small. I break down crying as soon as the nurse walks away with you in his arms, no one prepares you for something like that. To let you go and to have to put my faith and trust in strangers to care for you, hours go by we can’t eat or drink properly, can’t think, without tearing up, everything reminds me of you, all I can think about is if you’re okay, are you scared, in pain, and if you a crying for me or daddy, all I want to do is scoop you up and hold you back in my arms and tell you it’s ok mummy is here.

The phone finally rings! your out of surgery, everything goes somewhat to plan, now it’s just a wait and see from here. The surgeon tells me, the surgery is not a 100 percent success rate for this type of surgery, and that there could be a possibility, a likely one for more surgery in the future the rest is a blur so much so, that I had to ask your dad to get the surgeon to tell him it all over again. 

We race down to see you and there you are, eyes all covered up in bandages and hungry, my heart breaks in pieces but the relief of feeling you being handed back to me is something else I will never forget. Fast forward almost a month. You're laughing and smiling and returning to your old self again, we go to another appointment after returning back to the state. The 2nd appointment, and now your pressure has gone up again... we are due to fly back out to Melbourne next week as I write this for another review. 

What will happen, only the future holds and all I can do is continue to find ways to make you smile each day, to cuddle you and tell you how brave and strong you are and how proud we are of you but especially how very deeply we love you and believe in you. We don’t know what’s going to happen but I know that you will never have to go through any of this alone, your daddy and I will be there cheering you on bud and walking beside you the whole way and finding every possible way to support and enrich your life wherever we can and remind you when you need it, you are not your diagnosis, it may be a part of you but it is not who you are. 

You are Hudson. you are strong, resilient and our absolute everything. 

Love Mummy and Daddy.