Was This in the Plan? , livre ebook

Hashtag Press - Stephanie Nimmo

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104 pages

English

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Far from being a misery memoir, Was this in the Plan? Is a frank, open and no-holds-barred account of how a family was determined not just to survive but to thrive when the odds were against them. It will make you question your own attitude to life and how you choose to respond when unexpected events throw you off course.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

Informations

Publié par	Hashtag Press
Date de parution	12 septembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780995780637
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

This edition published in Great Britain by Hashtag Press 2017
Text copyright Stephanie Nimmo 2017
Copyright Cover illustration Helen Braid 2017
Cover Design Jem Butcher 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-9957806-2-0 eBook ISBN 978-0-9957806-3-7
Typeset in Garamond Classic 11.25/14 by Blaze Typesetting
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

HASHTAG PRESS BOOKS
Hashtag Press Ltd
Kent, England, United Kingdom
Email: info@hashtagpress.co.uk
Website: www.hashtagpress.co.uk
Twitter: @hashtag_press
For Andy
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
EPILOGUE
POSTSCRIPT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Acknowledgements
My love and thanks
To our parents and our Scottish and Welsh families. To our friends, all over the world, who have walked our path with us for many years.
To my friends who I call on in a crisis, you know who you are. You are my avengers; you women sustain me and without you I don t know how I would cope.
To the class of 86-it took me a long time to realise that our time together gave me the resilience to be the person I am today.
To the Doctors, Nurses, Carers, Therapists, Administrators and Support Staff we have met on the way-thank you for making a difference.
To the Social Care teams-thank you for fighting my corner.
To the Educators, the SenCos, the counsellors and therapists-thank you for never giving up.
To everyone at Shooting Star Chase-thank you for walking our path with us.
To all the other warrior mothers and fathers and carers out there-I hope I have helped shine a light on our world.
To the people who have been part of our story: Janet Swain, Simon Bell, Marion Germain, Alison Bourne, John Nimmo, Sam Carlisle, Sarah Collins, Niki Steve Brown, Lynne Phil Wilkins, Thijs AnneMarie, Astrid Edwin, Gary Elden and everyone at Sthree past and present, Keith Southern, Lee Grantham, Alex MacLeod, Scott Ransome, Jon Suzanne, Jon Fiona, Chris Sue, Peter Serafinowitz, Benedict Wong, Helen Linehan, Gaby Skolnek and Jo Whiley.
For helping me shape this story into something people might actually want to read; Helen Abiola at Hashtag, Jemima Hunt and Sam Carlisle.
Most of all I want to thank my incredible family: Andy, Theo, Xanthe, Jules and Daisy. I am me because of you. Thank you.
It s times like these you learn to live again
It s times like these you give and give again
It s times like these you learn to love again
It s times like these time and time again
- Foo Fighters -
FOREWORD
By Jo Whiley, Radio DJ and Television Presenter
No one has taught me more to relish life than Steph. I first heard from her via a tweet she d sent me. I get many tweets so I ve no idea why I replied to her. She d written to me asking if I could help her fulfil her husband Andy s bucket list. He wanted to see the Foo Fighters at potentially his final Glastonbury and if possible meet the band who he d long-time worshipped from afar.
I began to check that Steph s message was bona fide and my research lead me to her blog and the title of this book- Was This in the Plan? . I remember feeling a connection instantly. Steph and Andy had four children whom they plainly adored. They were formidable characters with a robust sense of humour, they were HUGE music fans and they lived life to the full. But their life was complicated. And then some.
Daisy had extremely complex needs and a life limiting condition. Andy had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and Steph had no choice but to juggle caring for both of them with being Mum to Xanthe, Theo and Jules. The least I could do was engineer a meeting with a rock band. Thankfully Andy got to meet Dave Grohl who was as epic as Andy wanted him to be and didn t let him down. Phew! From that point on our lives became entwined.
First of all we tweeted, then we texted, and finally we met up and ate cake in a fancy London department store where we got on brilliantly, as I knew we would. I have a sister with learning difficulties so I knew something of Daisy s world. Both Daisy and my sister Frances would occasionally surprise strangers with a hefty thump for no apparent reason #awkward.
My mum has always been a warrior and I recognised this in Steph. A wife, mother and campaigner who will stop at nothing to care for the people she loves and to make every day count. By sharing her family s story, Steph speaks to others who are dealing with their own challenges and personal tragedies. Showing us that no matter what life throws at you, there is an inner strength within us all and that as painful as it can be at times, life is there to be lived to the full.
What has happened to Steph is mind-bogglingly heart-breaking or as Steph puts it succinctly, it s just monumentally shit. It s been a privilege to get to know the Nimmo family. They ve changed my perspective of life and death. I now have a much greater appreciation and understanding of both. Steph has spoken of the ripples that Daisy left behind, how she touched so many people s lives and this is undeniably true. But it s also true of Steph and she should know that.
She s a crazy, crusading, running, swimming, music-loving, gin-swigging lady. What s not to love and admire?
PROLOGUE
There s a problem with this machine. I m just going to get someone.
We were at the hospital for our early dating scan for Nimmo Baby Number Four. I d not been able to shake off the feeling of wanting one more, to round off the family, to even out the numbers. Four children would complete us; we had always said we wanted a big family, after all, my husband, Andy, didn t need much persuading. If we had really thought things through, we would have stopped at two-but despite the chaos and the ever-increasing laundry mountain, we loved having children and didn t want it to stop, at least not yet.
When Andy and I first discussed starting a family we thought it would take twelve months or more to conceive and so we decided to have a year of fun, travelling and going to exotic places while we tried. But then I fell pregnant within the month, which put our plans to travel to India and Sri Lanka on hold. Instead, we had an extended trip along the north and west French coasts, taking in the D-Day landing beaches in Normandy, eating cr pes in Brittany, photographing the sunflower fields in the Vend e and visiting the cognac factories in Charente-Maritime.
It was on a return holiday with the children in Normandy a few years later that I found out I was pregnant again. Our family of five was to become six. By now we thought we had the whole pregnancy and birth thing down to a fine art.
I was planning another home water birth and wanted to have as little to do with this hospital and medical stuff as possible. We only needed to go there for the scans and antenatal clinics and that suited me.
The doctor returned, accompanied by a nurse. What we didn t know then was that this was a very special nurse. This was the nurse only a few people met, the nurse who came to speak to you when an anomaly was detected on the ultrasound scan.
We think there is a problem with the baby, the doctor said cautiously, clearly knowing he was about to deliver a huge bombshell. Our calculations show that statistically it is at high risk of having Down s syndrome.
How high? I responded. What are the stats?
We were used to our risk factors being in the thousands, but maybe because we were older this time we were looking at one in several hundred? That s okay, that s still good odds
One in four.
Our baby had a one-in-four risk of having Down s syndrome. So there was still a seventy-five percent chance it didn t have Down s, wasn t there?
We were numb. All I could think was, what had we done? Why had we been so greedy as to want another baby when we already had three perfect children at home, waiting for us?
We hugged and cried and then we went home with an appointment to return in the next few days for chorionic villus sampling (CVS), an invasive antenatal test where a sample of amniotic fluid would be taken for analysis to establish whether or not our baby had Down s.
I could not get the thought out of my head: what if our baby was disabled? Had we ruined our children s lives forever? I looked around at my perfect life, my perfect marriage, my perfect children. What if our much-wanted son or daughter did test positive for Down s? How the hell would we cope with a disabled child? Would we keep it?
No way, I thought. This wasn t in the plan!
CHAPTER ONE
I don t like Jon s friend much, he s really full of himself and tells crap jokes.
Ali and I were in the ladies toilet of the Three Compasses Pub in Canterbury, Kent. It was Jon s birthday, 5th October 1988. He was an army officer stationed in the nearby barracks and had been dating our friend, Bee, for the past few months. His friends had come along for the evening to help him celebrate. Little did I know that I had just met the love of my life.
Andy was holding court at the table, doing his best to impress the assembled group