Now tell me there's a God ....

IT'S 1am on the Children’s Assessment Unit at Portsmouth’s Queen Alexandra Hospital. There’s an aroma of hot food wafting down from the nurses’ work station along the corridor.
Alison, our duty nurse, has just popped her head into our room to take Ross’s temperature and other vital signs.

He’s still restless, trying to pull off the bloodied bandaging which leads to a canula stuck in his arm. Ross hates anything attached to him like that; hat, gloves, even the red wrist band he’s wearing which denotes his details – let alone a tube stuck into a vein in his wrist. 

Ross is confused, he’s in pain, yet no-one can explain to my young autistic son who is wrapped in his cotton wool world why he is lying on a creaking plastic mattress in a sweaty hospital room, surrounded by a load of electronic gadgetry.

It was 16 hours ago when I received the awful call from Ross’s mum that Ross had suffered a fit and had been rushed to hospital by ambulance. She was in Wales, I was in Wiltshire 90 minutes’ away – the race was on to get to the south coast.

It’s at times like these which really test your faith, and mine is now sorely tested. 

Moments before the phone call, I had been in church. At the time when Ross was lying postrate on the floor, clutching a cushion and raging into a convulsive fit, I was accepting Holy Communion. 

While Ross was lying in an ambulance, blue lights flashing to take him from the respite home in Fareham on a 15 minute journey along the M27 to the Queen Alexandra, I was repenting my sins and offering up prayers to my family.

But why? How can God inflict such torment on someone so young and so innocent? Is Ross, or are we as his family, paying for sins past? 

I just don’t get it and right now, sitting in this darkened room watching a poor frightened boy lying in bed, I don’t give a flying fig for God, Jesus Christ or any Holy Spirit.
Where’s the pay back, where’s the fairness, where’s the common sense? I am so angry.

The juxtaposition between my praying in church while my son was enduring a 30 minute convulsive fit with his tiny brain doing electronic gymnastics, is almost perverse. 

You try to live a Christian way, according to Christian teaching and you get a God Almighty kick in the teeth – not just now, but for the 13 years we have endured Ross’s autism which has left him without speech, still in nappies and requiring 24 hour care and attention.

I turned my back on God yesterday and I doubt I will ever return. 

Instead, without any of that Bible-bashing, Christian flag waving, "look at me" attitude, I have seen true care, love and devotion over the past 16 hours. 

The ambulance crew who treated Ross came to visit him in the afternoon. “It’s so great to see our little buddy,” said one of the crew. He was a hard-looking guy, with tattoos lining his arms and the build of a bouncer. But he and his other two colleagues possessed hearts of gold. “We’ve had a tough day, but seeing little 'un looking a little better has made the day a good one for us.”

I witnessed as first hand the unceasing care and devotion of the nurses in the ward. Anyone can knock the NHS, but when you see how the staff there take their time, explain and treat the patients with such care and attention, it is humbling.

Ross’s brothers were there, along with his mother, to comfort and sooth our little boy. Their love was unconditional, the pain and concern readily apparent.
Do we now face the added burden of a boy with epilepsy who could fit at any time, even while we are sleeping? He can't cry out, he can't warn us, he can't tell us where it hurts.

And then from Ross, a glimmer of hope, a straw to clutch onto in these dark hours of despair.
We were working on my laptop a few hours ago. There’s no wireless signal in the hospital, so he couldn’t log onto YouTube to watch his Thomas The Tank Engine videos. Instead, he has been watching Postman Pat DVDs.
However, at one stage Ross tried unsuccessfully to connect to the internet and remarkably started to type in words into a search engine.

I had never seen this before. He has never uttered these sounds before, yet slowly he typed in perfectly the words “Cat”, “Bag”, “Van”, “Sheep”, “Dog” and “Cup”, clearly hoping that one of these words might bring up a video he wanted to watch. It was remarkable, and a small victory. A further foundation block to build on.

Now there will be some who will claim how this was God’s doing, some sort of sign not to give up on my faith. Rubbish. If there was a God, he would not allow the suffering of others. 

Instead, this was one small step, one amazing achievement, from one remarkable young boy.