Tommy hurt!

Dear friends

Whilst many of you know about our tragedy this weekend I thought we should record it here for those who may be a little out of the loop.

On Friday night at around 8pm, Tommy was in his room preparing to go out and celebrate Crispin’s 15^th birthday. He was pottering around and began trying to light the gas heater in his bedroom. It was a bitterly cold night and it was the first time this season we had tried to put the gas on, it is not uncommon for the heaters to need several minutes of “bleeding” to allow the air in the pipes to work its way out and be replaced by gas which can then be ignited. Something must have been wrong with Tommy’s heater because when he clicked the flint to create the pilot flame, the entire room exploded like a bomb. The neighbours even heard the explosion and chaos ensued.

Tommy was badly burned and rushed to hospital where he remains in ICU, sedated and on a ventilator. He is unable to breathe on his own and will have a tracheotomy operation tomorrow to allow the ventilator that he is on to not have to go down his throat the way it does now. He will have hole for a feeding tube made in his stomach at the same time as the nasal gastric tube is causing damage to his nose and it keeps bleeding.

His hands are badly burned too although we are not sure exactly what damage these have as they are bandaged up like to boxers mitts.

Needless to say all of this is just far too close to our traumatic memories of our Ben. The kids are in varying stages of shock and emotional meltdown and Mom and I are barely able to keep it together. The temptation to be physically sick is never far from us. How this can have happened to our Tommy on top of everything else just destroys my ability to reason completely.

The wing of the house where Tommy’s room was has 3 small rooms and 1 big room. The drywalling partitions in all of these are going to need tearing down and rebuilding. The force of the explosion bent the walls out, blew out the windows and cracked the ceilings.

We are having the builders come in and give us a cost estimate but as you all know TLC can barely afford to keep the normal costs covered let alone add this kind of thing to our budget. If any of you have a creative way to help with this feel free to email us your ideas, our brains are not working completely rationally yet.

Thank you to all who have offered up prayers for our Tom and those who have sent words of support and encouragement we appreciate you all and ask for your patience with us if we are slow to respond to things for a while.

We Love you all

Pippa