Guilt. Knowing you have lost full control of a situation and that you could have done something to prevent that one bad thing from happening, makes one think differently about themselves. Instantly in that moment I felt like my life was over, the ground under me was crumbling into pieces and I was falling into a black hole…

I have a younger sister whose 9 and an older one who is 21, making me the middle child. When I mention my older sister, Zena, I also have to mention her situation. That is she’s special needs. But it's different, it's not a sad thing, or a depressing one either. But since she’s special needs she needs helps with all everyday activities, for instance like going to the bathroom, eating, changing, etc...

This is not the first time this has happened, the first was in the summer of 2016. My family and I were at the park with my aunt and three little cousins. We had decided to have a picnic, where the kids would play in the sprinklers provided by the park and the rest of us would just talk. It was a pretty normal night until it took a whole turn. We were eating pizza that we had just picked up from Dominos (I know, very picnic-y), while we were all eating my mom was feeding Zena, giving her little bite-sized pieces (this was before she got her feeding tube). Well since we were at a park and were eating bread there were birds everywhere, and of course Zena is afraid of all animals, especially ones that fly right at her. My mom had turned her wheelchair away from the birds so she wouldn’t be scared while eating. When doing so my mom turned around for less than a second to pick up her plate and that’s when it all happened. As she turned a bird immidiatley landed on her lap, she had a piece of pizza in her mouth and being very scared out of her mind she inhaled the piece, and choked. We didn’t know what to do, it felt like it all happened in the course of 5 seconds. I had picked her up and put her in my mom’s lap and she sat on the bench. Her face turned blue, not baby blue but that really deep, blueberry blue, and her mouth drooped so fast she looked crooked. And the most scary part was as i was trying to see what was going on, I saw her eyes physically roll behind her head, then the screams started. I called 911 and lucky my aunt and mom were screaming loud enough so other people could hear. They ran over and tried to help, nothing was working.

She was gone, we thought, this was her day.

We tried and tried to revive her but it wasn’t working. Finally the ambulance had arrived and that’s when the piece of pizza magically flew out of her mouth. Literal magic. Since she has rods in her back we couldn’t just lay her on the hard wooden table for cpr, so we did the heimlich and eventually it worked. Once she was put on the gurney and was getting checked out, she had a big smile on her face.
That classic Zena smile.
And the peramedics decided to take her so she could stay overnight for some tests and to be monitored, but thank God, she was alright in the end (we always joke that she just wanted to spice things up a bit).
Little did we know that next spring of 2017, same s*** happened again.
This time I was at a track meet in Fredonia and that had been the week that my mother got her major surgery. She was in recovery time and couldn’t do much on her own (feed my sister, carry her, etc) so I had to step up. Over the course of that week I took care of the family, I always did before but this time it was all up to me. This was the one night I wasn’t home.
15 missed calls, 20 text messages from both my little sister and dad.

I remember reading the one from my sister first, it was the most calm and nonchalant message i’ve ever read, and I remember it clear as day “Hey Nadine just wanted to let you know mom and Zena are going to the hospital. I’m with Shannon right now so everything is okay.”. My sister saying that everything was okay, made my feel less okay. I then went to go listen to the voicemails of my dad screaming saying “Zena is gone, Zena is gone!”. All I could think about was I couldn’t believe this was happening again, but this time I wasn’t there. I called my dad and he had explained to me that while my mom was feeding her dinner, a routine thing, my sister started to choke and she stopped breathing and that's all he knew. Immediately I fell into internal shock, all of the screaming in the background from the meet was closed out along with my own thoughts, I fell to the ground and began to ball my eyes out. I began screaming myself, punching the ground knowing it was my fault I wasn’t there, it was my fault. My friends calmed me down so that I would stop screaming but I couldn’t stop crying. I cried the whole rest of the way home, in denial, stressed, pissed at myself. When I got back to school my dads girlfriend and my little sister were they waiting for me. They had ice capps from Tim Hortons because they thought it would lighten the mood, and my little sister was simply just asking questions, like it was a normal day. That was all I remember of that night.

My sister and mom would have to stay overnight at the hospital, so we stayed at my dads house. Going to my mom’s house to grab clothes and seeing the crime scene was horrific, I could feel the air being sucked out of my body. Medicals supplies everywhere, couches flipped over to block my screaming, panic’d mom from my sister. The aftermath scene is always worse than the actual situation. I could feel the tension in the air, the despair that left my mother and the screeches she made that filled the room.

For the next couple weeks Zena was intubated in the hospital, meaning there was a tube in her mouth that ran through her throat and it was breathing for her. Her life was now a waiting game. Not knowing what the outcome would be, I always kept high hopes, knowing she was the strongest one in the room I prayed that my little fighter would be okay.