domino's

Hey
Its niah as usual
And I’m here to explain the reason to me being the freak I am
Btw I was asked to do this I don’t just go around sharing my sob story
Well it was in May 2007,
Just after mother’s day
and I went to Koonung to watch Tahni play basketball and afterwards when we got in the car mum started driving the opposite way to go home so us kids were like "whats happening?" and she said that nan had had 'a fall' and that we needed to go to the hospital to see her. So naturally we were crying and stuff because we were scared. When we got there Nan was in one of those white beds in the hall way and she looked really sick. Then the lady came and in the hall way started taking blood for a blood test. Nan hated needles so she wasn’t very happy about that and Tay went white and mum had to take her outside. and then they wheeled her into a little room and we had to sit there whilst she got asked questions like 'are you experiencing any dizziness now?' and she told her story a million times 'I was at the door talking to mrs. Davies and everything went black but she said that I clutched my heart and fell to the ground but she couldn’t help her because she has Parkinson’s disease so she called for help.' the doctors didn’t know what it was so they just sent her home and then it was Isabelle Andersons bowling party. I had the choice to go and so I did but on the day no one else was home to look after Nan but I went anyways. Michelle Yips mum was going to take me home. Catherine was told to let me call my mum, so I did and she said that I had to go home to my family friends because my Nan has had a stroke. I remember that feeling when she told me, trying not to cry but needing to and feeling like all these walls falling down inside of me but knowing that nothing could stop it and Michelle Yip was such a good friend at the time. So Nan was like getting worse and so we had one of my aunties/uncles come over and have a day every week to look after her. That was good for me because I saw them every week. But there were so many down sides that the happy didn’t balance out everything. Nan stayed in hospital to have tests run, they had her staying in the stroke ward because that’s what they thought she had. They did scans and test and realised it was a brain tumor. Nan couldn’t get the right words out of her mouth. I remember her saying ‘I had an MRI this morning’ and we were like “oh my goodness why didn’t you tell us?!” and she didn’t know what all the fuss was about because she thought she said “I had a shower this morning”. Small things like that that made everything more scary. She was a perfectly healthy, active grandma one day and a month later she basically lives on her chair that moves up and down it was the coolest chair in the world. Her medication was unbelievable, Pills, chemotherapy and radio therapy. The Pills were soooo confusing, she had a cool little day by day box, morning, lunch and night every day had something in it.

They decided to try and get some out, like a sample. First they shaved part of her head but the man shaved all these random clumps made her hair looked weird as, but they did well and they got like 8 cells out. Doesn’t seem like much but it made such a difference. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, the meds were doing their job but then nan went to my auntie Bern’s for a night or two whilst I was at a camp. She was gardening out the front. (They have a massive hill so the driveway is so steep and hard to get up.) She bent over to get a weed and toppled down the hill, she got stopped by a huge log but she had bashed her head and she had more purple than skin colour on her. The ambulance was called and she was taken in. When I was coming home from my camp, driven by Nathan Pincus’s mum, when I got out of the car mum warned me that Nan had had a fall whilst I was gone and seeing her that was such a shock. She looked in so much pain and that was more drugs to add to her list.

After that her hair was getting shorter and thinner and so she decided to buy a wig. The wig looked pretty real actually. If we ever had a cold we weren’t allowed to go near her because her immune system couldn’t deal with anything, not even a simple cold. Everyday we would coat her in sorbelene cream because her skin dried out so fast and we had to change her shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, hand soap and any other skin thing to all natural brands or else she would get rashes. Brodie and Owen’s wedding was coming up, so Nan was determined to get to that. I know it meant so much to Brodie as did Nan. The day was so nice because we were all a family, the men watching the car racing and the women outside eating cheese and crackers. The kids scattered everywhere. Nan even went to the reception and danced the night away. She could finally kick up her feet. Nan had made a date to have a party and invite all the family and all her friends to. It was to be in March after Travis’s 21st and after Jay and Lisa’s wedding. She didn’t want to steal the spot light from anyone. Nan had received a voice recorder from Teresa so she didn’t forget things. Smart idea. We had a fairly normal time in October and early November, I saw Nan get her radio therapy, holding back tears as she was laid on a bed with this scary mask on and lasers were put through her head, I need to be strong for her, to be strong with her. If she could do it so could I. but in late November she started to have a cough. She felt too lousy to get up and mum decided to get it checked out. Turned out a normal cold had turned into pneumonia and she was hospitalised and put on a drip and everything. I brought in Mr. Robert Brown to stay with her but she sent him home so he “didn’t get lost”. That was when I knew things were not ok, not fine and dandy like mum said, something was really wrong and nan didn’t think she was going to pull through and who would know better than nan herself? No one. Ellie my cousin was staying with us and she was sleeping in my room so we got to talk a lot. We got so much closer in those few weeks, she as the only other person I knew that was going through the same thing and actually WANTED to talk about it with me, iron out the parts I didn’t understand and let me rant about how I felt and swear and watch me scream into a pillow and do it with me sometimes too. We were like sisters. One Friday I went to the swimming pool for an excursion and as we were playing some games on a basketball court I felt really sick, like stomach and headache and mr. sandy called my house for someone to come and get me and Ellie and my uncle Tim came. I almost died of humiliation, Tim was wearing some old pants and no shoes and he looked like he just got out of bed and hadn’t had a shower for days, which was probably true but still. Even my teacher laughed. I felt sorry for him though because his mummy was in hospital and I made him worry. So we went home and I felt instantly better, it was really weird, everyone thought I was faking but I actually did feel like shit and miraculously I felt better at home straight away. And then I realised it was a sign from God; we got a call telling us to pick up the girls from school because Nan only had a top of 48 hours to live. So of course no one was happy, we picked up the girls and went into the hospital. For once in her life Nan looked like one of those frail old grandmas’s. Not the active young looking grandma she was only 8 months or so ago. She had a mask on and like a million tubes in her arm and she couldn’t even talk properly, when she did it was a soft, hoarse, whisper, one that every once of energy was going into hearing. And in her hand was this strength, all her life was holding onto in her hands, the hands that I had held my whole life. So here I am trying to stop the tears flowing for just 10 seconds so I can tell her how I feel and failing when I have to leave and I walk out of the room only to return 15 minutes later and this time I don’t cry, I hold her hand and I tell her that it will all be ok and that I love her and she’ll pull through and everything will be fine but knowing that everything will not be ok and the doctors don’t think she will pull through and that me loving her cant help anything in this situation and the one thing that haunts me to this very day is when I walked out and I turned my back on her, and I never saw her again, I turned my back on my last chance at seeing my Nan, and over the two days that she was alive I wasn’t allowed to see her again and every time my mum called home I made her tell nan that I loved her and it made mum cry every time I asked. And then I was in my room with Ellie when my aunt Kathleen came in saying “I just need to see my boys’ and my dad coming in and asking us to go outside and being hugged by my cousin Krystal and my daddy and crying harder because the arms I was in were not the arms that I longed for more than anything, the arms that no longer existed because nan wasn’t in them anymore.

So that is my story
That is why I am the way I am today