The woes of last night

Last night was a pretty poor night.

Raphael coughed incessantly; Annie was very tired and had to work today so she abandoned me early in the night to look after him and went to sleep in the living room.

He can make the most horrific coughing sounds. They can sound like he is vomiting (complete with squelching fluid sounds) which makes it really hard to know whether I need to get up or not. Of course both Annie and I usually both wake up when he makes this particular sound but we both pretend to sleep to see if the other is going to deal with the situation. I usually win at this pretending to sleep game but of course tonight Annie wasn't there so I had to deal with it.

At one stage I thought I heard him vomit so I dragged my "pretending to sleep" body out of the bed to check on him only to find that he was "crossing the river" (Crossing the river is a Chinese saying that we use to describe a flow of snot that has passed the mouth). But he wasn't just crossing the river, he was crossing a waterfall, a big waterfall, a waterfall of massive ectoplasmic proportions that would have sent shivers down the spine of any self respecting ghost buster. So after mopping him with a box of tissues, I went back to sleep. Well, I went back to pretending to sleep anyway - because of course this did not stop him from coughing for the rest of the night.

The following morning I stopped his pump and went to do my morning business only to find that in the two minutes of me leaving the room he has managed to rip his tube out again. This time he managed to leave the tape perfectly in place. He had managed to moisten up the tape so much that it just wasn't sticky any more. You can see how much tape we put on him; Annie and I thought we had found a fool proof system to prevent him from detubing himself. Of course the master detuber found yet another way to foil our attempt (Raphael: 12, Mum and Dad: 0).

The tubes that are in him are called long term NGTs. They are supposed to last a month before needing to be replaced. The longest he has kept one in for was three weeks, but then he detubed himself three times in the following week to make up for it.