Your children are never supposed to die before you, it’s just not the way things are supposed to happen in life. Your supposed to watch your children grow up, help them with there problems, watch them get married and have kids, and watch there kids grow up and so on. For my family and I all that changed when my brother Tristan was diagnosed with a rare bone marrow disease called “APlastic Anemia.” My mother said “We had no clue what it was. It started out with him coming home from school with bruises and so we told him to stop rough housing around at school but when he did and the bruises weren’t going away we figured something was wrong so we took him to the doctors.”

When she took him to the doctors she told me that the doctor was afraid to tell her that her son might have Lukemia and that to make sure he wanted my parents to take my brother to Children’s Hospital as soon as he called them, so that he could do a series of blood test and bone marrow test. My mom then called to forewarn me. I was sitting in my sign language class and my phone rang. I wasn’t going to pick up because i thought my mom was calling to yell at me about how my room wasnt clean or something along those lines but i stepped out of class and answered anyway. My mom had told me everything and she also told me not to cry because she didnt want me to scare my brother, but it was too late for that. I satyed for the rest of class and then went straight home. I walked in and everything was normal and i went upstair and my brother was watching tv i looked at him and couldn’t imagine that anything could ever be wrong with him and it hit me then that he might be sick. I tried my hardest to not cry and went to my room. An hour or so later the doctor had called and my brother had to go. He came to say goodbye and i remember the look on his face; a sad yet scared look. i had asked him what was wrong and he said “Courtney I’m scared.” I told him to not be afraid and that everything would be fine. He gave me the biggest hug and kiss. The next daywas a friday and my brother was scheduled for surgery that morning but i had to go to school. After school i went strat to the hospital and when i got there the doctors informed me on everything and they said my brother had a 90 oercent chance of living, and that we would need to fined him blood and platletes for him, so we did, hey also said that in a week he would be able to come home and start at home treatment which would have been Nov. 5th 2007. The Friday before Nov. 2nd he started complaining of headaches all day and by the second day they figured something was wrong and admitted him into PICU (Pediatrics Intensive Care Unit).

The day before that on Saturday I decided I would let my parents take a break from the hospital and I would stay with my brother all day. We did the little that there is for someone in hospital to do. We watched tv and he had some friends come to visit, he slept and then we went for a walk on the floor and he held my hand because he was afraid to fall because the medicine he was on made him weak. I was leaving soon to go babysit his friends and when my dad came back to the hospital i walked him to his room, I gave him a hug goodbye and he was sad the i was leaving i told him i didnt want to and that i would be back first thing in the morning. He looked at me and said “Courtney i love you” and i said “I love you too booger.” i gave him another hug and left.

Sunday morning my mom called and told my sister and I that my brother was in PICU. She said she would call us when we could go to the hospital and when she did we went straight there. She told us that the doctors had given him a cat scan and found a brain hemorage the had burst and they were going to need to do surgery. They had to remove some of his brain because the bleeding had put to much pressure on it that it killed his brain. While they did that we waited him the waiting room for the most horrible news that I have ever recieved in my entire life. The doctors came to tell us that my borther wasn’t going to make it but we wanted to try everything we could anyway in the hope of saving him, so they continued to give him medicine. He was in a drug enduced coma and we hoped and prayed everyday and we would talk to him thinking he could hear but the doctors said he couldn’t. They told us he wasn’t getting anybetter so they gave us three options: a) we could leave him in a coma for the rest of his life, b)we could take him off all the medicine and see how far he would go, or c) we could pull him off life support. We gave it one more day and nothing seemed to change. So we figured we shoundn’t allow him to suffer that way so on Thursday Nov. 8th 2007 we pulled him off life support and my brother passed away. I go visit him every saturday and I cherish the last words that he said to me and miss him dearly!