3.12Kg George’s weight today

3.12Kg George’s weight today
We took George for a check up at St Thomas’ today and it’s the first time he’s been weighed since we left hospital on Thursday and he’s up to 3.12kg. This is great and it looks like his “failure to thrive” has been overcome.

He’s healthy enough to keep us awake for much of the night – I do wonder if he would have kept to his happy sleeping pattern if we hadn’t been disrupted by hospital. His face is rounder and although he still needs to put on some fat in his body, he’s looking much better.

The check up didn’t really tell us anything – except his weight – although the doctor did another ultrasound scan and measured the hole (5-6 mm apparently – or about a quarter of the size of his heart). He’s certain now that surgery will happen, but couldn’t offer any explanation as to why it had been cancelled, when it would be or what would govern the answers to these questions.

We did find out that surgery meetings are on Wednesdays (next Wednesday’s boxing day, so no meeting) but even when I asked him when we’d get a date for surgery, he didn’t say it would be after one of these meetings. He said it would certainly be in January, but then booked us in with another appointment with him at the end of January – saying that IF the surgery was before that, we could cancel the meeting – implying it might not be January.

He did say George was no longer an emergency case (which ties in with something somebody said while we were in hospital – that if we went home, we wouldn’t be blocking a bed, so we wouldn’t be considered urgent). I suppose that’s good and I understand why they can’t give us a date.

What I’m puzzled by is why they can’t give us a date for when they CAN give us a date.



Pointless products
We ran a few errands in Soho after the hospital. There’s a market stall in Berwick st which never seems to have anyone serving at it. Many times I’ve stood there with a bag of groceries in one hand and a fiver in the other for minutes on end and nobody’s come to relieve me of my cash. This is very rare in Soho and you’d think it’s commercial suicide… still, month after month, the stall is there, loaded up with tempting goodies…

Further down - in Chinatown, there’s another curiosity I’ve never worked out. All the Chinese restaurants have strings of huge bright orange squid hung up in the front windows. Now, I’ve never been served anything in a Chinese restaurant that had big lumps of orange squid floating in it – and I’ve never seen big orange squid on the menu, so what are they? Decoration?