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DianaDiana

Diana

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Treatment: I was absolutely petrified initially. I was nervous, there was no doubt about it, I was really nervous. I absolutely dreaded putting the needle in. And for the first few times I can remember, if it was during the day, I had a nurse friend over the road, and she would just come and be with me, so that I'd got somebody with me while I did it. It was something that if I could have downed a bottle of sherry halfway through preparing it, I would have done. And then eventually, you just get on with it.

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Finding out: We actually told Stuart straight away. If we hadn't have done it then, we may have hidden it for a while. There's probably two thoughts with children. You either tell them the truth, and help them make their decisions and learn to live with things. Or you hide it from them and then have to tell them later on. We have always believed that our kids have every right to know what's going on, especially when it comes to them. How can you take that away from them? I don't believe you can. We don't believe you can. So he knew, he always knew that he could get really poorly and could die.

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Caring: I used to be much more easygoing, much more relaxed. I just became a carer as well as a mother, a nurse as well as a mother. I never had my life, my life has been put on hold. And I don't mean that in a horrible way. I have never had the freedom that other mothers have had. I didn't have the same life as other people. It might sound as if I begrudged it, but I didn't. It was how my life was.

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Living with HIV: You'd got this beautiful little boy who we'd had a shock when we found out he'd got haemophilia, and he was lovely and he was a gorgeous little boy. And then all of a sudden, there was a possibility that we weren't going to have him for much longer. For us every birthday from that day on was possibly the last. Every Christmas was possibly the last. We never thought he would be ten, we never thought he'd see his tenth birthday. For us, it was like the end of the world in a way. So yes, it was the end of the world.

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Compensated?: I certainly have felt, personally, that I have battled for everything for Stuart all the way through his life, financially I'm talking about now. Never mind the compensation side of it. But we've had to beg for every penny for him, through the DSS, you're talking about income support and all the rest of it. And filling in forms and filling in forms and filling in forms, and then saying the same thing over and over again. And I believe that we shouldn't have had to have been put in that position. It was like they were trying to catch you out, that's how it felt.

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Fear: At that stage, things were happening quite constantly, you know, he was having shingles and he was having this and he was having that, so he was always frightened. He lived in fear over the last nearly ten years of his life, he was frightened of dying. If he went to bed with a pain in his chest, he would have me up in the night, 'Mummy, what's going on? Am I going to die?' And I'd have to sit with him night after night sometimes, until he calmed down and went to sleep.

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Death and loss: Mother's Day last year, Stuart was alive. Mother's Day this year, he's not. It's been a pretty horrible time. Coming to terms with the fact that you initially had two children and now you've only got one. Thankfully I've only been asked that question once since Stuart's died. I have to say, 'I had two, but I have one now'.