Snake leaves skin in house

A TERRIFIED couple are combing their house for a snake after discovering its shed skin under their twoyear-old son’s bed.

Bethan Baldwin-Pierce, 25, and partner Kayleigh, 23, also found a half eaten mouse at the bottom of the stairs at their home.

Bethan, of Larkfield, Kent said: “We’ve got a snake specialist coming over so hopefully they will find it. Otherwise I won’t be able to sleep.”

A local enthusiast has identified the reptile as a harmless corn snake.

SHE’D already been through so much when I met her for the first time: a young girl of 10, who regularly came to hospital with attacks of pain so severe they could only be lived through with opiates.

Even before she started school, Laurel had been diagnosed with a hereditary blood disorder called sickle-cell disease, a condition that would overshadow the rest of her life.

I watched her grow up. She developed from a teenager into a young woman, and my admiration for her only increased as the years went by.

She finished school, graduated, started going out, fell in love, all the while checking in and out of hospital. How did she do it?

Her girlfriends all went to discos, wore skimpy clothes and drank alcohol, while she was bound by strict rules: stay out of the cold, drink lots of water – anything to avoid one of her dreaded pain crises.

I remember once she left the house without a scarf, and then spent a long time waiting at a bus stop out in the cold. After that, she was hospitalised with searing pain in her jaws.

As she gained experience, she gradually learned to cope with her disease. I was there in the background as a kind of tutor/partner.

I was tough on her, because I cared. There was something about Laurel that spoke to me.

Although her entire life was dominated by her condition (one that she shared with her mother and brother), she always remained so admirably calm. She needed frequent injections – to administer fluids and painkillers or take blood samples – so her veins were all messed up. But she never lost her composure, never complained when we missed the vein for the umpteenth time.

I often sat chatting with her on the edge of her bed. We talked about life, but also about death. I was widowed very young; she had already lost her brother and a nephew.

Every year in the hospital, she saw people dying of the very disease she was attempting to defy – people she knew and who were often good friends.

In Britain we tend to avoid talking about death, it’s kind of hidden. Between the two of us, though, there were no barriers to the subject.

For a long time, I never really understood the severity and extent of the pain she had to endure.

After having my first child, I talked to her about the pain of the labour I’d experienced. It was dreadful, I said, and I asked her whether it was comparable to the sickle pain she suffered on a regular basis.

She had become a mother herself in the meantime and answered quite casually: oh no, sickle-cell pain is far worse.

I became an expert in sickle-cell disease, with one of the biggest clinics in Europe. But my most important lessons came from Laurel: she showed me what it’s like to live with a disease that will be with you for ever, one that dictates your entire existence.

But even when her pain must have been truly unbearable, still she soldiered on. She taught me what bravery truly is.

Even when her pain must have been unbearable, still she soldiered on. She taught me what bravery is...