Love you to death - channel 4

[autumnleavesonthefloor]

Is anyone else watching?

I can’t say a lot because it’s very outing but I grew up with this family. So surreal seeing it all like this. They’re some of my earliest memories.

His sister commented that he was faster than she was.

That makes sense. I guess I was lucky my ds had such thorough testing etc.... He is one of those people with multiple allergies across several food groups. He never had a tube but his diet was very restrictive. He grew out of some allergies but the more serious ones remain. I often got the feeling teachers and others didn't really believe it resulting in a trip to hospital after a food tech class.

We were lucky that he was under the care of an excellent consultant until he turned 18 who organised all the tests and food challenges. If we had been fabricating it would have been discovered very early on.

It was paper records back then as well. Most doctors were good at skim reading and flipping to relevant bits but if someone turns up with 8 overfilled folders of paper notes, nobody is going back to folder 1 to find the one nugget of useful information.

The consultant in the show who had gone through his records showed that he had bundles and bundles of notes.

My mother would have loved to have been the parent of a child with a disability

We knew a child who had one (a very mild disability) and she jumped on the bandwagon (raising funds for a piece of nice-to-have-but not-essential piece of equipment)

If you'd heard her,you'd have thought SHE was the mother of this child and she exaggerated this child's symptoms to an almost unrecognisable level

As it was,my brother had asthma and she milked it for all it was worth-she definitely made out it was worse than it was

He only had to miss a breath and she'd rush him to hospital

She raised a lot of money (and told a load of tall tales) to get him a nebuliser ('or he could die!') even though he did have asthma but it wasn't that bad

She loved it if they kept him in-it was sickening to see her fawning all over the doctors

My (then baby) dd had to go in just before her first Christmas and the jealousy/snide comments where unreal

She would have adored the money/admiring comments ('I don't know how you do it')/controlling a child's life/the goodies that come with an ill child

Thank god she had others that put the brakes on her behaviour or bro would definitely have been another Matthew

The thing is, having a genuinely ill child is the least fun thing you can think of. Certainly no positives or perks in our case but maybe it’s because we didn’t put DS all over the internet when he was critically ill.