The good, the bad, and the ugly.

That's what we're here for, a community of loving friends, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Last week, the only thing I had to concern myself with was the lack of camera at A Crafty Coffee, things have changed a lot since then.

It has been a rollercoaster ride of emotion this week for everyone who knows Crafty, Coffee, A Crafty Coffee and Emma's family.
William went to hospital on Sunday, he'd been under the weather and his Mum and Dad became increasingly concerned that his leukaemia may have returned so they took him to the ward for an early blood test. NOBODY could have predicted the outcome. When he was diagnosed the first time round, William had a white blood cell count of 250 which was excessive and dangerous. This time the count was 470. For the leukaemia to have returned to soon and so aggressively after remission was a really bad sign, and with his counts so high, a night in PICU was in order.
Now, you will all know that Emma (Coffee) has herself been wrestling with ill health, she was in fact still in hospital when all this happened but, needless to day, the staff have been supportive in allowing her to be there for her little lad.

On Monday evening, Emma called me to tell me that they had spoken with the consultant and that the outlook was bleak, she was clearly devastated, as was I.
Attempting to support someone through this is painful and difficult, you are helpless and powerless, yet you know you could say or do something that could upset or offfend.
It is good that I've had to wait until today (Friday) to be writing this blog post because, since Monday evening, things have changed slightly for the better.
William's leukaemia has responded (somewhat unexpectedly) to the chemotherapy, his white cell count was down to 1.7 last time I heard, he has been well and stable enough to have a central line put in (which was necessary, but that looked like it may be difficult) and there is some hope that they may be able to do a bone marrow transplant.
The future is by no means certain, and the family are aware of this, but a glimmer of hope is something to hold on to.

A Crafty Coffee plays host to some wonderful, supportive and loving people. The group have rallied round setting up prayer sessions (those who pray), communicating news as it arrives, supporting the Grandmothers (both attend ACC when they can), supporting the family as best they can etc
So today, I should have known to expect the quizzing and questioning from those who want to help and support, and from those who haven't had the information filtered down to them in detail. I didn't expect it though, I wasn't prepared. As I said earlier, it is really painful to attempt to walk through this with someone so close, so I guess I was hoping for a teeny tiny escape this morning.
Nonetheless, I think I did a decent job of keeping people filled in without breaking down on them, and I even knitted a little more of Baby Chapman's blanket so that was good.

I was even treated to being party to more frivolous conversation about hand spun yarns, crafts and costings, Folksy, Etsy etc. These matters are actually important, how we price work if we want to sell it, how we can be undermined by people underpricing their work or overpricing their work when they use lower price materials and the like. But the perspective was definitely there this morning, these things do matter, but in the grand scheme of things, they're not really worth being stressed over.

If you pray, please pray for Emma, Steve, William and Edward, and all of those in their extended families, and the friends attempting to support them.

Thanks
Love C&C xx