A Story About My Little Brother
Even though he could swim, my little brother preferred to sit in the shade.
1965.
My youngest brother was born with a heart defect. For years he was shuffled from doctor to doctor because back then they didn’t know how to fix the problem.
They called it blue baby syndrome.
Blue baby syndrome, also known as cyanosis, is a condition where a baby's skin turns blue due to a lack of oxygen in the blood.
He had a heart defect that was never really explained to me in a way I could understand it. I’m not sure my parents understood it either.
Today they would have repaired the heart the day he was born and it never would have been a problem.
He took lots of medicines.
He couldn’t do the things other boys his age could do because he was physically challenged by his weak heart.
Sometimes the other boys would make fun of him because he couldn’t do the things they could.
1975.
My family had a lake house on a small man made lake in Indiana. My dad built it himself with help from his buddies. The lake house became the weekend spot for our family and the families of my dad’s friends.
My dad taught at least one hundred kids to waterski on that lake.
He had a water sled the would be dragged behind the boat for the kids who couldn’t waterski.
We also had a sunfish sailboat that kids used to sail around the lake or from the lake house to the beach.
Even though my little brother knew how to swim (because of swim lessons) he avoided all of these activities.
The beach is where all the families would gather for afternoons of sun, swimming, hotdogs and hamburgers, “beach snacks”, soda and beer.
The beach swim area was cordoned off with floating red, white and blue metal barrels attached together with nautical rope.
There was a floating wooden pier with a diving board out in the deeper water.
There was a metal slide, like the one pictured above, that had a hose rigged to the side of the ladder to run water down the metal on the slide to keep it cool. The steps on the ladder got very hot so the line of kids formed in the water at the base of the slide so the first in line could scamper up the ladder quickly.
There was always a line to the ladder and many, many kids slid down the slide in a summer, splashing into the water at the bottom.
My dad always tried to get my brother to go down the slide. He would tell him he’d be at the bottom waiting for him to hopefully lessen his fears.
My dad’s buddies would tell him it would be OK.
My other brother tried to get him to go down the slide.
Sometimes the other kids would tease him about not going down the slide.
Even though he could swim, my little brother preferred to sit in the shade, wearing his sunglasses and fool with his baseball card collection. He knew everything there was to know about the Cincinnati Reds, no statistic was overlooked. 1975 was a great year for the Cincinnati Reds. He also knew stats about other MBA teams.
Looking back the kid probably was genius.
One year, on the last day of summer beach days, just before we were getting ready to leave and the beach was deserted, my little brother got up, put on the orange life jacket my dad required all skiers and water sledders to wear, walked out to the base of the slide, climbed up the ladder to the top, slid down, splashed into the water, swam into shore, took the life jacket off and plopped down on his towel in the shade, put his sunglasses back on without saying a word.
There was a round of applause from everyone on the beach.
He never went down the slide again.
He died from heart failure at age 17.
I was away at school.
I had no idea he was having any issues until that phone call from my dad.
The end.
Your story made me tear up. It's precious that you have that memory of his triumphant slide.
He lived 17 years, that is pretty good, incredible really.
Back then, and even now, it was difficult to find and diagnose heart or blood vessel problems
Some people go through their entire lives with some kind of condition
or deviation from the normal. Some survive some don't .
I am glad you had your brother for 17 years, and I know personally that loss was crushing. s
My sister, Dorothy, went on with her life just normally, when she was younger I do recall she had headaches, but later on she was a smoker. Her husband also smoked. They were always smoking. They had two kids, those kids do smoke now and then, or I smell it on them.
Dorothy, my sister, died at age 48 in 2001. She had a stroke a few months after going on a school overseas trip to Spain with her daughter, Sally.
At some point through brain scans they could see she had arteriovenous malformation (AVM)
I wonder how many people have other sorts of blood vessel or heart abnormalities and live long? She never had any test to find out in her earlier years
I know you think of him. yes, he was a genius. My sister had so many gifts. One was patience.
She was always kind and used to laugh at difficult struggles. She was kind of mean to me when i was little, but I grew 6 inches taller than her and got her back by making many things of hers out of reach, like her car keys.
Good memory, and thoughts of what could have been