Special Delivery

Take one month's plastics (daily disposable bottle and tube) for two girls' tube feed. Not including the feed itself, extension tubes, syringes, spare buttons, feed pumps and chargers).

Add one month's medical supplies (sterile water for humidifier, dressings, tape) for one childAnd a selected portion of both girls' monthly drugs
(other half of the cupboard far too messy for display. And no, I don't feed the girls fish food!).

Throw a month's supply of breathing circuits into the mixAnd a month's worth of catheter supplies
Add suction catheters - this is a box of one hundredwhich could last us months, or could be used in a couple of very bad days. So multiply that box by three, to give us a very bad week's worth kept in stock.

Next bring more miscellaneous medical suppliesMouth swabs, spare tubing for the nebuliser, syringes and fingertip probes.

multiply white box by ten under one bed and six under the other, to include wipes - wet and dry - disposable gloves and aprons, creams and lotions and sprays, instruction manuals, chargers and batteries, oxygen and spare tubing, more dressings.
And then go and fetch a month's worth of incontinence pads.
Navigate your way around one indoor wheelchair, two posturally supportive armchairs, one back up manual wheelchair, one off-road three-wheeler, one wheelchair charger, one ventilator, one CPAP machine, one humidifier, random assorted splints and braces, spare bonnets and chin straps, feed - thankfully supplied in powdered form - and endless buckets of fruit juice.

Tiptoe past the sheer volume of laundry produced when an overnight drainage bag disconnects from a catheter two nights in a row, flooding bed, floor, and everything stored under the bed with a litre of urine. Slide sideways past the tent, previously stored under the bed, and wonder whether this really does mean you now need to replace it.

Step back. Into the cat food bowl. Shuffle sideways into the neat pile of regurgitated cat food and fur ball. Mutter lots.

And wonder how you managed to forget to buy chocolate where you are possibly going to squeeze storage space for three months' worth of pads, when the deliveries change.

Tia