Lets Start At the Very Beginning (Its a very good place to start)

This is the first of no doubt, many posts re Harrison.
Let's go back through his history.
Harrison was born on Tuesday 6th March 2007 at 10.10 am - (Ella his 2 year old sister was also born at 10.10am.. Possibly a coincidence? You will later come to find that she also perfectly matched Harrison as a Bone Marrow donor!)
Harrison seemed fine, at birth. He grew, fed and gained weight well until he was 5 weeks old with no complications.
At 5 weeks Harrison developed an abscess on his bottom cheek (known as a perianal abscess).
We had a couple of trips to the Children's Hospital at Westmead NSW to have this operated on. May 24th was meant to be the surgery day, however Harrison had developed a temperature and a cough, so the operation was delayed.

By the 27th May Harrison was admitted to hospital with suspected meningitis, fevers and vomiting. He was poorly feeding and very stiff. By 30th May Harrison had developed oedema and had a chest infection. Chest x-rays taken showed there to be fluid on the lungs consistent with PCP (Pneumocystis Carinii), and showed abnormalities on his rib cage. We were still at Gosford hospital at this time.

A lumbar punch was taken that while it looked ok, showed a high white blood cell count, indicating that there probably was some disease. But no bug grew from the culture, so we could never be sure if it was a viral or bacterial meningitis he suffered.

Next Harrison had his first general anaesthetic, for an MRI of his brain and to have to put in a femoral line (a type of canula that goies into the femoral vein instead of the canula in the hand). The MRI seemed clear.

We were transferred 2 days later, the 1st June, to the Children's Hospital. We were put into an isolation room, where we had to mask, gown and glove and where we had no visitors unless authorised by medical staff.

Harrison had a few complications at the time which made his diagnosis for a particular disorder hard, as he had swelling, protein loss from his blood, poor immunoglobluin cells and his lymphocyte count was down. I will explain these a little later.

Initially due to the complications and not having any test result back that showed a definitie immune deficiency, the doctors started to think Harrison had Lymphangiectasia (pronounced Lym-fan-jek-tasia), or a leaking Lymphatic system. This could have attributed his many symptoms.

So we began having tests, that would hopefully prove the diagnosis of Lymphangiectasia which included bowel biopsy, CT scan, nuclear medicine scan, cardio echo gram (heart ultrasound) and ECG.

The only problem that was discovered from all these tests was that the bowel villi (the little cells that absorb nutrients into the body via the bowel wall) were a bit blunted.

By now I had been told to stop breastfeeding as the milk could not be easily absobed by Harrison. He lost weight - quickly. He went from 5.1 kg to 4.78kg in a few days.

Then we got the news we most dreaded. A blood test result came back showing Harrison had no ADA enzyme in his blood. This confirmed our worst fears, he had SCID (Severe Combined Immune Deficiency) a potentially life threatening illness. This was Monday the 18th June 2007. Harrison was a day off 15 weeks ( or 3.5 months old).