Day 10

Well today is day 10 - the last day of the second most critical timeframe for Ness. To survive the first 72 hours is awesome, but days 3-10 are the statistically highest time for a secondary bleed. That is, for a stroke. When she is fully awake she is bright and lucid; her speech is good and there are no signs of physical damage. Yet she has had a severe brain injury and her headaches are persistent and high on the pain scale. They have scanned her repeatedly (the first time she tried to crawl out of the machine because the noise of the MRI was so unbearable) but found nothing to operate on. This is worrying. But - her slow improvements are positive and that is what we hang on to. Her partner Brett has been amazing - so calm, positive, gentle, and kind, and so thoughtfully managing the requests of all who love her and want to visit. While it's good for her spirits to see people, it is a strain on her and she needs to rest so after my first visit I'm content to love her from a distance and let her get on with her healing.

I'm grateful to my brother-in-law for reminding me of my blog...there are a lot of messages and posts happening on Facebook and that is great as a way of communicating with lots of people but I found posting here yesterday very comforting and quiet. So I am going to keep posting here as she gets better and take the opportunity to scan some old photos that I have so that when Ness is better we can laugh over them together.

So here are some I took when I was in year 12 and doing photography for my HSC art project. Ness was an apprentice chef by then, living out of home and having a life completely different to mine. She is/was always way more cool and sophisticated than me and I think I have always felt a bit in awe of her because of it. I'm sure she'd disagree and I guess that's why we're still friends after all these years.