TAPVD sibling

Being the sibling

The earliest thing that I remember from my childhood is at the bottom of a tree. In my kindergarten, when I was 4 years old standing next to my best friend Brittany o' Callaghan looking up to the top of its branches, imagining that there was a huge nest filled with baby birds. As 4-year-old animal enthusiasts, we had to use all of our might to climb this tree and save those poor birds, I remember Brittany climbing a lot higher than I could and reaching the nest. I was trying so hard to catch her but I was a dainty little four years old who had never broken the rules in my life. The next thing I remember is my kindy teacher Libby having to climb a ladder to get two 4-year-olds who were stuck in a tree down from the tallest branch.

That was my first day of kindergarten.

The next thing that I remember from my childhood I was 6 and a half years old sleeping at my nanas house. my yonder brother Kynan had just been born 7 weeks earlier. my sister and cousin were jumping on beds in the spare room and my nana was sitting on her black leather couch, on the phone to my parents in the lounge room. She was crying and when I noticed her I cautiously went to ask her what was wrong. I remember her telling me through tears something about my new baby brother being in the hospital, needing surgery and having something wrong with his heart. I don't remember why but something inside me filled with rage at that moment. I stormed down my nanas hallway, feeling as if I was the only rational, oldest person in that house. I wasn't crying and I was thinking about my crying nana who wasn't handling the situation in the other room and I thought it was my duty as I stormed into the spare room where my sister who was 4 at the time and my cousin who was 2 and I remember screaming my lungs out saying " how can you just play and jump on the beds. Don't you know that Kynans going to die."

Being only 6 years old myself, I didn't really understand what that meant. And I don't know where I got that idea from. I know now that I couldn't have expected my younger family members to think any different. I remember them continuing to play and laugh, jumping on the beds in their dresses saying that they didn't care. And I think that was the first moment to the start of my life.

I remember later on my dad having to drive down from pt Augusta with our things to drop them off to us at our nanas. I remember knowing that he'd be gone for a long time and that he didn't know when he was coming back. Mum says that having to drive away from me and my younger sister was the hardest thing he ever had to do in his life. and was one of the only moments that she'd ever seen him cry.

In my R/1 class we hung a picture of my brother on the wall and being at a Catholic school we said a prayer for him every day. and after school every day we would walk just down the road to my nana and granddads house where nana would cook the worst food and wed sit on granddads knee as he told us stories about living in Britain after the war. We lived with them for roughly three months before our parents returned from Melbourne where my brother had open heart surgery. He didn't die, he returned very much alive but from that point on he was the very focus of our lives. we would have to travel to Adelaide every few weeks for appointments or we would live at my nana and grandad's house. I remember often being told by my teachers about how well I could adapt to my ever-changing livening environment and was still doing well at school. I was never one to miss behave.

in the following years, my mum started working for a charity called heart kids that worked with children with heart conditions like my brother and my family became close to many others in similar situations. I think with all that I know now, this was the best thing for my family as she worked as someone who supported others in our situations. but really they supported us.

from this point on, I had set out to learning everything about my brother's illness, at the time I could name medically every condition that he had. I was the only year two student that could remember that Total Anonymous Pulmonary Venus Drainage meant that a baby had been born with all of the pulmonary veins from the left side of his heart were connected to a vein in their neck, with the only thing keeping them alive for 7 weeks is the same hole that keeps a babies heart pumping in the womb staying open for blood to flow in.