 The 26th of September 1962 is as important a day to me as my Birthday…It was the day I had open heart surgery…In my first year of school, age 5, the school doctors picked up that I had a hole in my heart (a valve between the right and left side of the heart that should have withered after birth but hadn’t), without surgery the doctors gave me a life expectancy of about 20 years, surgery has now more than doubled that making it a day for me to celebrate.
I cut the hole in my sampler so that I could make a scare to match the one that runs down beside my shoulder blade and under my left arm with a smaller scare (for drainage tubes) below which for many years I believed was where the doctors made a mistake and had to start again.
The elephant is because I thought that the name of the Hospital was ‘The Prince Elephant Hospital’, it was actually The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney Australia, a 500 mile train journey from home town Ballina and my mother had to leave me their and return home as she was 8 months pregnant with her 5th child, my sister.
This detail will be finished with a shark or shark tooth charm at the edge for the time when I was 19 and a friend asked what my scare was from and I told her it was a shark bite, why I said it was a shark bite I do not know and at the time we were interrupted and I thought no more about it until a few days later when in a room full of people my friend asked me to tell them about my shark bite, I asked them what they wanted to know and proceeded to give answers to their questions of when, where etc, it wasn’t till the next day that I realized that they had all believed me and I had to fess up to having told a Tall tale, a tall tale that has become and family joke that has given us many a good laugh.
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October 11th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
What a story! you must have been scared to go to this big hospital, far from your family. It must have been hard for your mother too to leave you there. Amazing how you saw things then, the name of the hospital, and the surgery mistake. And certainly a lot of other things you don’t remember.
I found the story about the shark very funny 🙂
Have a nice weekend!