Harrison gets his menu choice

Think Harrison likes to keep me on my toes. About 12:45am I woke to the sort of smell which should only belong in the bathroom..... Harrison was muttering something through his mask and pointing to his bottom. You can guess what had happened! (Apologies if you're eating when reading this!) So at 1am Harrison was in the bath and I was changing his sheets. His night nurse had chosen the perfect time to go on her break!! Because Harrison is on the BIPAP machine overnight, we have to have a nurse present in our room all night to watch him. I'm used to it now but it did feel a bit odd for the first couple of nights.

These photos of Harrison on his BIPAP shows you what a contraption he has to try to sleep with. He fusses for ages before he settles with it, which is hardly surprising really. The reason for the extra tubing is to allow for a filter which fits in between the air that Harrison breathes out and the hole which allows his germy air to be released into the air we breathe. Our GP surgery called Bernard today to tell him that the swab taken from him the other day confirmed that he too had swine flu. We've spent the day pretty much like every other day in here - eating, medicines, television, physio, more eating, medicines etc. Oh and the IV antibiotics were stopped today so the cannula came out late this afternoon. There will be no excuses for not being able to eat, work or wash now! Not all visitors to our room are getting completely gowned up now, but they are still wearing masks; although there are various versions. The most popular is pictured below:

There aren't any works of art to show you today because we haven't done any! Instead we did a double sided penguin jigsaw puzzle, which is quite tricky to explain when your 'student' finds the concept of single sided jigsaw puzzles confusing. That kept us quiet for a very long time. The school assistant, now appraised of Harrison's favourite topic, gave us a space quiz and wordsearch which Harrison finished in lightning speed (and got all the answers correct. Thankfully, I had been given an answer sheet, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to mark the quiz!). She had also searched the internet and found Harrison a Star Trek wordsearch. She has been absolutely brilliant at trying to engage our slightly stroppy pre-teen. Harrison has been slightly more talkative today and he apologised to the school assistant for being stroppy the other day. His weight hit an all time low today but I think it will be on the up again tomorrow as he has eaten really well today (relative to yesterday). The highlight of Harrison's day was when I was allowed to leave the premises and buy some mushroom ravioli for his dinner. We were rapidly running out of options, so anything was worth a try. They cooked the pasta on the ward for him and he managed about a third of the packet. Guess what he's going to have for lunch tomorrow..... It was lovely to see him enjoy eating something at last, but went so fast that I didn't have time to take a photo. I'm afraid it's a bit of a mish mash today but I just want to get it uploaded before the broadband goes off.....