Reminiscing

So this is a memory I have of being 4 years old...of course its going to sound disjointed and possibly completely trifling, but this memory, of course, is from a 4 year olds point of view.

When I was little, my two older brothers had a tree house of some sort. It was their fort, their home away from home, the place for Ben to go sneak cigarettes. When I was four, Ben "allowed" me to come up and clean up the inside for him. Not that the place was really messy in general--it was just a little room of course and I'm sure Ben wanted some company or entertainment (even if it came in the form of his spoiled, 4 year old sister). I was always terrified when it came to climbing down..ladders in general just never seemed rational to me. I remember that Ben would always go first and wait at the bottom to watch my ridiculously slow descent out of the treehouse. This day was no different of course. He climbed down and waited for me. I remember getting out on the ladder, but when it came to climbing down you needed to hold onto to the ladder near the top...which meant that there was about an inch of space to slide your fingers in between the tree house and the ladder. Small dark crevices have never set well with me--spiders tend to lurk in these fissures and I have a strong strong disliking when it comes to spiders. So on this particular day, I was at a loss as to where I should hold on as I climbed down and finally decided to brave my fingers to the crevices in the floor boards at the very top of the ladder...It didn't work and of course I fell. Hit the ground with a sicking thud. I remember Ben panicking but still managing to pick me up and carry me inside and laying me on the couch so my mom could look at me. Once she decided that my wrist had to be broken (whether she was tipped off by in my insufferable wailing or the odd angle my wrist had decided to form...I don't know), she called the hospital, picked me up and carried me to the car. I sat on Ben's lap and he held me on the way to the emergency room. That is actually the most memorable recollection I have from that day--Sitting on his lap on the way to the emergency room. And later waking up (a very long while after I was supposed to wake up..apparently I don't react well to being put to sleep) and having both Ben and Nathan present me with a bouncy ball they'd found somewhere.

Ben's oxygen saturation levels kept decreasing yesterday and because they were at a loss of words as to why, they did the CT scan on his chest that they were supposed to do the other day on him. Results? Hes got a lot of blood clots on both of his lungs. A lot. They're giving him blood thinners at the moment. And today they are putting him back on the ventilator and under sedation. They say they don't know why hes got the blood clots--usually only perfectly still patients suffer from them, and of course hes not perfectly still.

I'm majoring in psychology simply because I've alway wanted to better understand people. To better understand my family. To be able to understand the mental aspects of Bipolar, Tourettes, ADHD, Borderline, and all the others Ben has suffered with his entire life. And now Nathan has been diagnosed with Borderline within the last year and a half or so. I'd shifted my goal in life to be able to help my family in the only ways I knew how. And now I'm not going to be able to help Ben. And he was the reason it all started.