Mother's Ruin

I was looking forward to posting about my week yesterday and all the lovely things that had arrived on my doorstep. At 5pm yesterday, a beautiful, sunny, warm evening, I kissed Jimmy goodbye as he left the house on his way to the Skatepark with his young mates. Mr Marmalade and I then settled down to roll 100m of dot and cross paper for BillieJane with whom I bought a wholesale roll to split with. About 5.30pm Mr's phone rang which wasn't unusual or surprising as he was the Duty Fire Officer on Call for this region. It was an emergency phonecall, but unfortunately, not of the type expected.

By 6pm, he was in an ambulance on his way to hospital with Jimmy, who on arriving at the Skatepark just under an hour earlier, and looking for something in the hedge, had happened upon a full 750cl bottle of Tesco Value Gin, and drunk the lot. In one go. He then lost control of all his faculties as you can imagine, and in panic, one of the older boys had wrestled his phone from him, looked up "dad" in the phonebook, and called. Thank goodness! I was left at home in hysterics, completely forgetting about my own forays into the world of drunken abandon at his age (half a bottle of gin, laced with a packet of disprins being my choice of poison back in 1982!).

An hour later, Mr M called from the hospital in tears. Luckily they were tears of relief. The hospital staff had made the unconscious Jimmy comfortable, wired him up to a drip of saline and various monitors and from there, it was a question of waiting until he sobered up enough for them to feel that it was safe to discharge him. My Mother-in-Law meanwhile had arrived at the house, and together we waited for the next call, worrying, drinking tea, and discussing the why's and wherefore's through terror and tears. It was pretty frightening. But it's funny how life works, because trying to distract myself for just a moment, I looked on Facebook, and there was a message from a friend I haven't seen in years, who used to share a flat with The Italian Connection and I, way back when. Although her message only mentioned my sewing, it put things into perspective somewhat, because she is the mother of a child who spent a good deal of his early childhood in hospital until undergoing a life saving operation made possible by his little brother. I remember them telling me at the time, that although this operation would save their son's life, there was a 5% risk that he wouldn't survive it. That's a huge risk when dealing with the life of your child, and last night gave me the tiniest glimpse of what that must have felt like for them, how strong they must have been, and how much worse my situation could be in that moment.

After Mr M's next call it became apparent that Jimmy wasn't going to be discharged any time soon as he was still 'asleep'. Mother-in-Law and I went to the hospital, and between 9-10pm Jimmy slowly began to come round. What a bizarre thing to see your 13 year old 'baby' in such a state! In between his sobbing over Bob Marley's untimely death, singing of old Clash songs, and wondering where he was, he was very grateful that his Grandma had promised to take him to see "Horrid Henry" during the Easter Holidays. A soul trapped between boyhood and manhood, and very confused. It was sad.

The whole evening was sad.

Around the time we arrived at A&E, another child was trolleyed into the Resuscitation unit. She was 14 and in the same condition as Jimmy had been in. Her parents didn't know. She was on her own. On asking the nurse if this was "common" for a Friday night, she replied "It's our bread and butter". A while later, another young girl was trolleyed in. I don't know if she was intoxicated too, but she was badly injured, braced and screaming having been in a car accident in which one of her companions had died. There was a policeman waiting outside to question her. They couldn't find her parents because they didn't know who she was.

Now in the cold light of the next day, Jimmy ofcourse can't remember a thing, and annoyingly thanks to the Saline drip, doesn't have a hangover! Everything he knows about the incident is what we've told him, what his friends have told him, and the photographic evidence i've shown him. He hated seeing himself wired up in hospital and I think that's the thing which has hit him hardest (which is precisely why I took the camera with me!). Sheepishly sloping about today, I hope he's learned his lesson. In some ways, hard though it was for all of us, the extremity of his actions this first time, might have been the best thing to happen. He just didn't realise the effects that much gin would have on his body or his mind.

We always knew that there would be drunken teenage incidents, but we didn't expect it to be so soon, and we certainly didn't bargain for the abandoned gin in the hedge! Don't even ask why he drank from this bottle - we have absolutely no idea, and Jimmy is unable to furnish us with an explanation either. It's a mystery to all as to how anybody could be so stupid! But if there's any lesson I can pass on from this, it's to make your children aware - before it's too late - of how much stronger spirits are to beer, which is the comparison that Jimmy was using in his mind. I know it might sound obvious, but it didn't occur to us that 1 pint of beer = 1 pint of anything in the mind of a child, and we've been so focussed on Jimmy's other "escapades", that the 'liquor lecture', just didn't happen until after the event...