Narrative Essay - Reborn

Morgan Mader

Dr. Hafer

English 106H

12 February 2017

Reborn: December 19, 2007

        Growing up, I spent every waking minute with my cousins, Megan and Michelle DeHaven. We rode bikes together, played hide-n-seek together, and always laughed with each other. Of course, there were occasional arguments, but that becomes inevitable when you spend all your time with another person. Slowly but surely, those two became more like sisters to me, as we spent every day and every night together. We went to school together, played every sport together, and knew almost everything about one another – there was not one thing I wouldn’t do for them.

        My cousin, Megan DeHaven, was born on May 26th 1998 with her twin sister Michelle DeHaven. Megan happened to be the younger twin by twenty minutes, weighing 5 pounds 13 ounces. The first time I went to their household I was about seven years old. Upon arrival, Megan insisted I go see a squirrel that her brother, Mikey DeHaven, had shot during hunting season. Of course, I followed her to go see the squirrel. As I was bending over to get a closer look, their Saint Bernard, named Sampson, had unexpectedly attacked me. I ended up going to the hospital where I needed to get stitches in my right ear and the under-part of my nose. At such a young age, I considered this situation to be life-threatening. But nothing comes close to the life-threatening experience my cousin, Megan, endured two years later, when she was merely nine years of age.

When Megan was merely nine years’ young, despite having received the HIB (Haemophilus Influenza B) vaccine, she contracted a rare derivative of the disease, Haemophilus Parainfluenzae. The chances of contracting this disease are about one in a million - she stood a better chance of getting struck by lightning twice. She got extremely ill with a high fever, vomiting, dizziness, then eventually she became comatose, was posturing, and was seizing. My aunt Mimi, her mother, had walked into her room to check on her during their family’s dinner because she knew Megan had not been feeling well. When she walked into the bedroom, she discovered Megan seizing on her bed. Megan’s mother and father rushed her to the hospital where the doctors had intubated her and medevacked her to a hospital that had a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. (PICU) After being admitted, they started administering intravenous antibiotics. Soon thereafter, her body went into septic shock: all her organs had shut down and she went into cardiac arrest.

About a month before I left for college, I asked my aunt Mimi to tell me the full story about what happened to Megan. When I was younger, I was unaware of how severe her illness was because no one wanted to tell me. After all, no one had the heart to tell a nine-year-old that her cousin and best friend was fighting for her life and the odds were not in her favor. Even if they had, I probably wouldn’t have understood. When Mimi told me exactly what had happened, it brought tears to my eyes to finally understand the battle Megan had gone through and ultimately conquered. I then asked my aunt Mimi to explain her own thoughts and feelings when Megan was in cardiac arrest; I wanted to understand her pain and suffering as well as Megan’s. I wanted to understand the suffering I should have experienced with them years ago. Before she could begin, she had to take a minute to hold in her tears. Mimi had told me that at the exact moment Megan’s screen went flat line she was talking to one of the nurses at the front desk. The front desk had all the screens of the patients, and when she had heard the sirens for the code blue, she looked up to see that the reason for the code blue was Megan; she looked up to see Megan flat lining. She told me that at that moment she felt nothing but pain. She fell to her knees and began to pray.