15,000 Thousand Failures and a Meltdown Later...

 Welcome to my blog, otherwise known as the place I dump my emotional baggage😖

So last week, for approximately the 15,000th time, Kaedyn’s wheelchair decided it was going to throw a tantrum. This inevitably led to me having a full-blown crashout that nobody quite knew how to respond to. I don’t lose my shit like that often, especially not in front of my kids, but I was ropeable. Seeing red. Feeling every single emotion that comes with being a mum whose child relies on AT to get through his day.

And when he misses out... I get feral. It’s just the way I’m built.

So we had a complete battery failure. The spare battery wasn’t coming to the party either, and I was raging hard!!

The reason being... Kaedyn had his first school excursion that same day. They were taking public transport to Bunnings, which was meant to be this fantastic, fun-filled day. I was ready to pack the spare battery, have the other battery fully charged, and send him on his way. It was meant to be one of those moments where he got to taste a bit of independence.

So honestly? Crashout warranted!

Anyway!! We’ve had multiple problems with this wheelchair 😭 absolutely not a reflection on the supplier because they’ve been wonderful! But this thing is just not our lucky wheelchair. And with that sitting constantly in the back of our minds, worrying that we can’t rely on it and that Kaedyn will start feeling the pressure of essentially being legless without it… We bought our own powered pack-down wheelchair.

Which did save the day...up until about 11am.

Then it died too because it hadn’t been charged in a few weeks. A mistake I will absolutely never make again.

The staff got a good workout that day.....

But equipment failure has honestly become the bane of my existence. It has plagued us nonstop, and I just wish it would stop. At what point does Kaedyn catch a break? At what point do suppliers stop hearing from me with a fresh list of issues and another “hey, it’s broken again” email?

Sam basically pulled me aside today and made me cry it out.

Sam is Kaedyn’s OT and also, somehow, my emotional support system. She is an absolute unicorn, and I genuinely don’t know how we ever lived without her. Clone her, bottle her blood, make her reproduce 1000 more!

The conversation got heavier when I told her that our long-term plan is probably New Zealand, because eventually, something has to give. I want Kaedyn to live a full life that he chooses, instead of me dragging him from therapy appointment to therapy appointment, trying to optimise every second of his childhood.

There’ll still be appointments. We’ll still fight for his independence. We’ll still travel the globe for Taylor Swift concerts...but we need a slower life.

Right now, the pace of everything feels too fast. My kids are turning into young men before my eyes, and somehow I still feel mentally stuck ten years back, grieving the childhood we never really got to just… enjoy.

Anyway!!

I have 36 chapters to edit in the next week, or I'll miss publication, and I'll royally fuck myself for my event.

Cheerio!