Tuesday 10th February, 2004
I’m not sure about today. It feels a little unsettled. Our girl is still breathing very fast, around 100, and I’m just not comfortable.
I'm up to "that section" of the book now. Going through and diarising my journal entries, interspersing them with the rest of the story as it unfolded - I couldn't record everything in writing, but interestingly, now that I am going through it step by step, it is eerily easy to recall smells, sights, sounds, feelings, emotions, words that occurred during those days with her.
This was the very last journal entry in the diary I was keeping as I sat at Ella's side.
I can't believe how unnerved I was, I couldn't shake it. There seemed no noticeable reason for me to be that way. Nobody appeared that fussed, but I had the monitor blinking behind me and reminding me she was still dependent on her artificial environment.
And then she died two days later. They hadn't been suspicious of anything being "up" until that morning. But two days before, I had known. Somehow, somewhere in me, I had known. I didn't speak up because I thought it was just me being overly cautious or stupid.
I reiterate now something I have since said sooooo many times: DON'T go against your initial gut instinct. It knows. Now I'm left with the "what if's" and "if only's" that plagued me in the days after Ella's death. People said then, and will continue to try and placate me now, that I couldn't have known. There was probably nothing anybody could have done. But they don't know that. I don't know that either.
I know for certain that Ella's ultimate death could probably not have been prevented. But I still carry immense guilt and a burden that I had been sitting on a dire alarm signal for two days before the infection, that was now raging in her body on the day she died, finally became apparent to doctors. I knew. And I sat on it.
Listen to yourself and be guided by that voice.
