Sarah Katherine's Personal Narrative

Sarah Katherine Doyle
Mrs. Donahoe
Advanced English I
21 February 2011

One in One Hundred


The night of my sister’s medical scare was the night that I realized how much I take what I have for granted. She and my brother Christopher had had their tonsils removed the previous week. Caroline had a particularly difficult recovery. She was constantly vomiting and always in a lot of pain. My usually loud, talkative, funny little sister had become someone I didn’t recognize. She slept, ate, and watched TV all day every day, hardly saying a word.
The surgery had occurred on a Monday, and the following Monday my parents went out to dinner with some friends, leaving me in charge. I was doing my homework at the kitchen table, sleeping on the living room couch was my brother Christopher, and Caroline and my other brother William were in the basement watching TV. Everything seemed to be running smoothly enough until I heard William’s panicked call.
“SK! Come help, there’s a lot of blood!” I ran down the stairs to see my ten year old sister in a state of complete and utter distress. She was coughing up spurts of blood. Compared to the amount of vomiting that had occurred during the week, the amount seemed trivial. We later found out, however, that anything more than a tablespoon is considered dangerous.
I somehow managed to get her upstairs to the bathroom, put her hair up in a ponytail out of her face until the coughing and bleeding stopped, wash her face, get her into a new set of pajamas, and go back to the basement to spray some Resolve on the blood stained carpet and sofa. By the time I finally got all of this accomplished, we were all exhausted and it was time to calm my terrified sister down and get us all into bed.
I tossed and turned until I finally managed to fall into a light sleep. The lights went on. I heard my sister crying. I heard my mother saying everything she could to try to mollify my hysterical sister. I got up slowly, sleep still in my eyes, trying to focus on what was going on. I walked down the hallway to the bathroom, and I’ll never forget what I saw.
Caroline was bent over the toilet, endless streams of bright red blood projecting from her mouth, while endless streams of tears streaked her pallid face. It looked like she had been shot. My mom held her hair with a look of pure worry and concern on her face. I was in shock. For a second I couldn’t move. There was so much blood. For a moment, all I could think about was the blood until I realized that my sister needed me. My mother handed me her hair, usually golden but now red and matted, and went downstairs to call the doctor.
The vomiting didn’t stop. Between each time I tried to calm her down. “There’s so much blood!” she cried over and over. It hurt just to watch.
The blood finally stopping, I guided her back to her room to change her clothes for the second time that night. I could hear snippets of my mom talking on the phone. “She’s ten… We live in Saint Matthews… We could probably be there in around twenty minutes.” I could tell she was trying to be calm for Caroline’s sake, but I could hear bits of panic rising in her voice.
She came upstairs just as I had gotten Caroline into new pajamas. She went to wake my dad and tell him what was going on. “She needs to go back into surgery,” I heard her whisper. Apparently Caroline heard it too. It sent her into another panic. It took everything I had to get her calmed down and into the car. They were gone. The minute I saw the lights of my mom’s car out of the driveway, horrible, heart wrenching images flashed through my mind. I was nearly as scared as she was.
Exhausted, I went back to sleep, and the next morning called my mom. It turns out Caroline had thrown up even more blood once they got to the hospital which led to her passing out from loss of blood. “It was like an episode of Grey’s Anatomy,” my mom told me, clearly relieved that it was over. She had been very close to needing a blood transfusion, and within thirty minutes she was back in surgery. The doctors told my mom that an artery was bleeding inside her throat. The chances of this happening were about one in one hundred. If she hadn’t have gotten to the hospital, my sister would have been dead.
After that night, I consider myself even more protective than your average big sister. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if my mom hadn’t called the doctor. Now I try to be even more involved in my sister’s life. I ask her questions about her life, her friends, her school. I’m more shielding and supportive. That night was a reality check for me. I’m more aware than ever that I’m so lucky to have people like Caroline in my life, people that love me unconditionally and rely on me. I’m making an effort to not take them for granted anymore.