Alice's lip repair: part one

We arrived at the Evelina Children's Hospital the afternoon before the op having walked from Victoria via St James' Park and Parliament Square, which was very pleasant and made us feel more like tourists than the parents of a baby about to undergo surgery. The Evelina is part of St Thomas's and is brand new - it looks great when you go in, lots of bright colours and art and entertainments, including a working helter skelter. The levels are all named and coloured after different bits of the natural world - Ocean, Mountain, Sky etc - and you ascend to each one through an atrium in lifts named Sun and Moon. So far, so unlike a hospital. But once we were on the ward and waiting in a very small and hot play area for Alice to have her pre-admission check, it did feel suddenly more institutional. Alice eventually had her weight, heart rate and blood pressure checked and we hung around for a while longer while the theatre schedule was confirmed so we knew what time to give her the last feed, before going over to the hospital accommodation on the main St Thomas's site.

We had a tiny room in a flat of about six rooms with a shared kitchen, toilet and bathroom. And although it was probably no more basic than some hostels I've stayed in (and had to pay for) there were a few things that really grated on our already frayed nerves. The kitchen had a kettle, a microwave and a steriliser but nothing else - no crockery or cutlery or utensils of any kind. Which made even having the kitchen rather pointless, I thought. With hindsight we should have gone over to the hospital restaurant to eat, but we were so knackered and anxious about the next day that we just wanted to hibernate. But the bathroom sink was blocked, the lift was covered in grafitti, there was nowhere to plug in a phone charger or anything else and the whole flat smelt of dirty nappies, so all in all it was hardly conducive to a comforting night.

We woke Alice for the last milk feed she was allowed at 1am, after which she slept better than we did I think. She didn't even seem too bothered not to be fed when she woke up at 5.30, sucking happily on her dummy and staying fairly quiet even when we got back to the ward to be admitted at 7am. After a while the anaesthetist came to have a chat about what was going to happen next, and we took Alice downstairs to theatre at about 8.30. I thought it was going to be completely traumatic watching her be put under with the gas, but in fact the anticipation had been far worse. She went to sleep very peacefully and it was almost a relief to know that it was all happening at last, we'd handed responsibility for her over to the surgeons and there was nothing more we could do for the time being.

We'd been told it would be two or three hours before Alice would be awake and ready for us to see her in the recovery ward, so we walked along the South Bank and had a coffee in the National Theatre cafe before returning to the ward to sterilise some bottles (there was a steam steriliser in the 'parents kitchen' on the ward but it didn't seem to be working and the nursing student on duty didn't know what to do with it either, so in the end we used our own cold water sterilising unit which we'd brought with us - I'm very glad we had it because it made me feel more in control, using something I was familiar with and not having to bother the staff all the time). Then we went for breakfast in Starbucks across the road and were on our way back when the nurses phoned to say Alice was awake.

To be continued...