Words of a younger sister

I have always wondered when I’d be brave enough to write this without feeling the same kind of pain that I felt, so at last here it is. Think back to December 2003, I had just completed my first year at Monash University and was back home for the Christmas holidays. We were all eagerly waiting for my brother Kagiso who was driving down from Johannesburg with relatives. We hadn’t seen him for a year as he was studying in Australia and so we were waiting with so much excitement and waiting to hear about his adventures in the land down under. For some reason -  and I will never ever understand how my mother just had that intuition – my mother kept saying that she is quite worried about Kagiso driving in the evening and she just felt that she would be unsettled until he arrived home. My mother never lets such negative thoughts cloud her mind but that day was different for she kept on repeating her fears about the entire journey. And to make matters worse, she had a dinner that evening and so she didn’t really want to go but we all convinced her that all was well and she should go and enjoy herself. But she was right. While I thought she was being irrational, she was absolutely right. That evening my brother never arrived home.

The phone rings and it’s my mother. She tells the family that my brother was involved in a very unusual accident about an hour from the South Africa / Botswana border – a young female kudu had jumped through the windshield and the hit my brother directly in the head. I know that sounds bizarre but along that Zeerust road it is more common than we think and usually people who get into such accidents where a kudu is involved never survive. I didn’t want to think the worst about the situation and I didn’t want to think about the severity of it all so I simply blocked it out of my mind…..I blocked it out of my mind until I was told that my brother’s heart had stopped twice while he was being flown by paramedics from Zeerust to Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg….I blocked it out of my mind until I heard that he had suffered severe head injuries…I blocked it out of my mind until I saw him lying helplessly in the hospital, in a coma, plugged to a life support machine…I blocked it out of my mind until I heard that he may not wake up from that coma and if he does he may be brain dead. Doctors had nothing positive to say but told us they’ll do everything possible, medical insurance was told to cover my brother for just a week because nobody thought he would survive beyond that week. I saw him there, his body was perfect but his head was swollen and bloody.

We were told so many things that nobody ever wants to hear about a loved one:

"His skull is crushed"

"One of his eyes is missing"

"He has a blood clot in his brain which may or may not dissolve but we cannot operate on it because it’s in an area that is too sensitive, it’s too risky"

"He’s too weak to breathe on his own"

"He may not be able to walk again"

"He may not wake up"

"Let’s take it one day at a time"

About eight different doctors were working on my brother, working around the clock. I found myself negotiating with God. Negotiating in the form of a prayer and it went “Dear God, please spare my brother, please do not take him because we still need him. I still need him. I know us mortals shouldn’t question your plan but this very one is hard to even fathom”. Unlike the pain that I felt when my father passed away, this pain was inexplicable simply because you do envision your future without your parents as that is the natural order of life – we live and ultimately we die and leave our loved ones behind – but I always envisioned my brothers in my future so the fact that I suddenly had to shift my mind to the possibility that life may not happen the way I had always thought it would was something truly hard to come to terms with and quite honestly I refused to come to terms with it, it was too hard to even think about. My emotions were hanging on a threat that any sort of disruption set me off. Even though the nurses kept telling us to speak to him because chances are he could hear us, I couldn’t say sentences without my voice getting shaky, I could say much to him without tears rolling down my cheeks. I just couldn’t say much.

When I say miracles happen it is only because I have seen them happen. My brother underwent about three  or four operations and beat the odds – he woke up, he was not brain dead, even though he was weak at first he could walk nonetheless. Even the doctors were stunned – one doctor even said “I may be atheist but this is the working of a higher power because I can’t truly explain this.” In three months my brother was out of hospital and back home…three months….this is a man who nobody thought would survive…this was a man who even experienced doctors had told us that there’s little chance of survival…yet in a month he was out of ICU and in three months he was out of hospital.

Dear God, Thank you…..