What’s your condition called?

Bryonie: Condenidal scoliosis in hemi vertebrae?

Sheridan: Bryonie was diagnosed with congenital scoliosis in hemi vertebrae, basically that’s a severe curvature of the spine and the vertebraes aren’t made up of rectangle blocks like ours are, they’re all shattered and fused together. She was born like that; it was just one of those unfortunate things that happened when she was growing in my womb.

How many operations have you had?

Bryonie (to Sheridan): When was my first operation?

Sheridan (to Bryonie): When you were two.

Bryonie: Two, three, four, five, six, seven ... Seven?

Sheridan: They’re hoping that this lot of surgery that she’s been going through in the last six months will resolve a lot of the issues that she’s been having. How do you cope?

You just do, you learn to get up in the morning, and you know that you’ve got to cope another day, and you’ve just got to find the strength from somewhere, and then that day’s over and then you just look to the next day. It’s just a day at a time, it’s baby steps really. We’ve got a lot of moral support from the staff here at Mater, but also from the doctors themselves and the nurses, and I think they really felt for us as a family, so we have that extra support there, and I found that got us through a lot day by day.

What’s Dr Askin like?

Bryonie: He’s really nice, he wears glasses, and he has a moustache. And he wears suits all the time.