Hi.
My daughter is 10 yrs old. She was a normal, happy, bright little girl who went into hospital for a standard operation to repair a broken elbow with pins. This was seven months ago. The pins got infected and she had to have another operation to flush it out. When she woke up from that operation she looked as if she had had a stroke or a bleed on the brain. At its worst she couldn’t eat, go to the toilet, speak, remember who her family was, write or read, walk (in wheelchair for weeks at a time), extreme fits: 20-30 a day. Her mouth opened sideways and she drooled and moaned, and went cross eyed. During investigations she has had a total of eight anaesthetics and results are that she is physically fine, it’s all psychological. She also talks about waking up in the operation and has nightmares about surgeons in scrubs pulling her limbs and not being able to wake up and that there is a bright light shining in her eyes. She started climbing the walls and screaming when someone with scrubs walked into her room and ended up hidden and shaking under her blanket. Her ears are incredibly sensitive and she faints at any loud noise or anything else that is too overwhelming. We live in Paignton and after six months at Bristol Children’s hospital have transferred to GOSH I’m London. Here she has to spend evenings away from me and I can’t put her to bed and we are both really struggling with this.
Many of her original Conversion Disorder/PTSD/neurological functioning symptoms have gone now but what is left in an incredibly anxious child with an eating disorder who finds it difficult to talk about what has happened and so has selective mutism. Anyway, I have been informed she may need sectioning under the mental health act. This terrifies me as all I see is a very scared baby who needs empathy and love and building up, and I think moving her to yet another scary environment will make things worse. Plus, I don’t want to lose my powers as a parent obviously. Any advice would be gratefully received.x