One In A Billion: Speech

In year eight, I entered an interhouse public speaking competition. There were no topic restrictions (besides a time restriction) so I found it quite hard to choose a topic. However, I realised the best topic came from inside my own house. This was my speech.

My mum. Just the sound of my topic might bore you to death but honestly, her life isn’t simple nor easy.

When I was only five, mum began to feel weak and unwell and it wasn’t just every once and a while. Everyday, as she describes it, mum felt as if she had run a marathon but she kept performing her home duties as well as working full time, hoping the pain would disappear. As you might have guessed it didn’t and after a doctor’s appointment, the doctor suggested she had chronic fatigue, a disease which makes you weak and tired. He perked her up with iron and vitamin B injections but after a only three weeks, the vitamins wore off and she was back to feeling bad.

In March 2001, mum was forced to quit work as the doctors diagnosed her with a rare disease called myositis. The disease, as it usually does, ate away at the muscles in mum’s limbs, making it hard to pick up things and walk. In the colder months of winter, mum found it hard to get out of bed and a lot of the time, she didn’t have the strength or energy to.

When 2002 came mum began to have difficulty breathing. Even walking made mum short of breath and soon she felt very limited in what she could do. The doctors knew something wasn’t right when mum’s face broke out in a butterfly rash. They ran some tests which proved she had DermatoMyositis, a disease which not only affects the limbs but her skin as well. She was put on heavy doses of steroids to help the disease but that also ended up affecting her. Mum’s right eye began to turn in each time she woke up or became tired and she gained around 20kg. Then the worst part came.

On the 21^st of September 2003, mum was rushed to hospital not being able to breathe. In the early hours of the next morning, mum was pronounced clinically dead when her organs shut down. She said she saw herself inside a coffin with her children and husband standing over her. She saw the coffin closing but begged God not to let her go, that she was too young and that she would give up smoking if he let her live. Many doctors gave up but two young doctors wouldn’t let her go and thank god to them because mum pulled through. For three days, mum was unconscious but when she finally awoke, she stayed true to her promise and to this day hasn’t had another cigarette.

Later that year, mum’s GP was concerned at the fact that she was continually short of breath and having heart burn as well as high blood pressure. He referred her to a heart specialist at Sir Charles Gardner Hospital and in 2004 she was told she had heart failure. They kept monitoring her but finally decided to put a device in her which would monitor her heart. Bad results were found from this and at end of April 2005, mum was notified that her heart had deteriorated and she had Cardiomyopothy would require a heart transplant. Cardiomyopothy is when the heart enlarges itself to try and cope with the body’s workload. They implanted a deliberator which is a device that jump starts your heart. Over the course of six months, mum’s deliberator went off thirteen times, all for false reasons such as electric blankets or hot showers.

Around 11:30pm on Tuesday the 6^th of December 2005, mum’s pager started to beep. The message lit up, “please ring the hospital” we knew this was the call we’d all been waiting for. Mum immediately got dressed and packed her bags before rushing to my grandma’s to tell me the good news. Half asleep I smiled “That’s great news” and soon mum was at the hospital. There was still four hours of tests to insure the donor’s heart was completely compatible. Fortunately it was and on Wednesday the 7^th, mum was having the biggest operation of her life. However, during surgery, a large amount of air accidently entered mum’s body, causing her to fall into a coma.

She was immediately put into the Intensive Care Unit under 24 hour watch and two days later I was able to see her. Seeing her in that bed was one of the hardest moments of my life but the doctors were worried she wouldn’t make it through and wanted her closest friend to be with her. She had a large tube down her throat breathing for her, a nasal tube taking bile out of her stomach and her face was puffy and a weird colour. They tried three times to remove the breathing tube but every time she had a seizure. They finally got it out and on Saturday I came again to visit her. The doctors tried to wake her from her coma but they were unsuccessful. I sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hand. I talked to her and asked her to wake up. I almost cried when I saw her eyes slowly open. It was a miracle.

Things weren’t all better though. Within the first three months, mum was in hospital on four different occasions, three times with an infection and once because there was water surrounding the heart. Over the next two years mum was in and out of hospital and in April 2007 mum’s new heart went into complete heart block and she was required to have a pace maker implanted. It helped immensely as it started getting her back on track but then something else went wrong. She was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and had stents implanted in her arteries. These began to improve the function of her kidneys and the blood flow to the heart. So things still aren’t exactly perfect now, they’re testing to see if something is wrong with her oesophagus, she’s still taking 20 tablets daily and her myositis will never be cured. So with the myositis and the way her condition has deteriorated, doctors have stated that she is really, one in a billion.