2024 turned out to probably be the worst year of my life.

The year started out nice, as far as I can remember. Nothing big comes to mind now, so I assume it was fairly routine. Me, Linn and the kids actually booked a trip to Greece for the month of May and we had some fun summer plans. The problems started for real in April.

I’m not going to go into too much detail, which might sound strange as I’m writing this. If I don’t want to write about it too much, why write at all? The way I see it, I write most of my life-related posts here for my own sake. It’s really like sort of a journal for me, but it is a potentially a very public forum and particularly when the things I write about involves other people – in this case my family – I want to be careful about the amount of details I share. That being said, the problems have been rooted in health issues for my son, Ebbe. In the early spring he started showing worsening symptoms of something that he’s had more or less of for his entire life. This time it would escalate and escalate and it took until the early fall before we finally got help. I’m not going to divulge the details about it, but it is not a fatal condition, and hopefully it won’t be chronic but we don’t really know that yet.

His health problem meant that the trip to Greece was a lot less idyllic than we planned, though in the end the positive moments outweighed the negative ones. As spring turned into summer things got worse and worse and for more or less the entire summer he was ”grounded” to the couch, just sitting still to not provoke the pain. It took a lot of effort for both us and for him to get him out of the house even for small things. We tried and succeeded a couple of times but there was a lot of frustration for all of us. The paradox of it all is that while much of the summer was truly terrible, some of our best moments as a family also happened this summer, mostly in the small, simple moments.

As the summer break ended and school resumed, Ebbe refused to go to school. The pain and the constant problems had taken a heavy toll on his psyche, so he was afraid of seeing his classmates again. We tried and fought, and begged and pleaded, and did everything we could but in the end we just couldn’t get him to go.

Late in September there was finally a plan in place to help him medically with the health issue and on October the 2nd we got checked into Uppsala Children’s hospital. What was meant to be a simple surgical procedure eventually turned out to having been done wrong and he needed a second operation to fix what was done wrong. The second operation succeeded but by then he had a really bad infection as a result of the first failed attempt and we ended up spending the entire month of October in the hospital and has had some medical care in the home ever since. In fact, as I’m writing this the night nurse just came by to take him off his drip.

It’s been a long, long few months. A lot was worsened by the failed surgery and I’ve been so angry at times. Angry at doctors, angry at life, angry at the world.

As the year came to a close he was getting better. We had a good time at Christmas and we all really wanted the year to end and move on to a new, better year. As 2025 started I think something inside me broke, probably all the tension, and I was tired beyond my ability to explain. It took a few days but then things turned for the better. Ebbe’s health has continually improved and tomorrow will be the last day of daily medical care in the home. And, best of all, this past week he started to work on going back to school and on Friday he managed to be there the whole day and he seems to actually long for Monday, and to be back and see his friends again.

2025 is off to a great start, and I hope I never have to experience another 2024 again.