Rainbow tale helps ease hospital pain
FOR Mundingburra mum and entrepreneur Aimee Hair, 32, her three sons are her whole world.
When her second son Lukas, 5, was born with severe Hirschsprung’s disease, a rare condition that affects one in 1,000,000 births, she knew the road ahead would be difficult.
But what she wasn’t prepared for was the amount of operations her little one would have to endure, having already had 17 operations so far in his young life.
In 2016, Lukas spent three weeks in hospital, fighting for his life with the severe infection Hirschsprung’s enterocolitis.
He was in intensive care for a week-and-a-half on a respirator and required three major emergency operations within five days.
“I kept thinking about how traumatic it was for him, he was kicking and screaming and not wanting to go in,” Ms Hair said.
In August last year, Lukas required an operation for a hernia that had developed due to all his other surgeries.
He became traumatised by operating rooms.
While Ms Hair was driving back to hospital one day, she looked out her car window and spotted a rainbow in the sky.
“An idea came to me, a strange thing came over me and I thought ‘I’ll tell him the masks they put on him are rainbow medicine and it smells like a rainbow’,” she said.
“In 20 minutes of driving I came up with the concept … it’s not scary, it’s exciting, not everyone knows what a rainbow smells like.”
That night, Ms Hair sat down on her couch at home and finished a first draft of her children’s book Can You Smell The Rainbow?
Ms Hair read it to Lukas to prepare him for an operation he was having six weeks later.
“He loves his character in the book and his crocodile teddy who has been in all the operations with him,” she said.
Ms Hair said Lukas showed an immediate change in the way he approached operations after reading him the book.
“It was the first time he’d gone into an operation where he didn’t have such a huge ordeal like he did previously,” she said.
“I thought I needed to make this into a book as it’s helped Lukas and it’s going to help every child relieve anxiety and trauma.”
Ms Hair collaborated with first-time Melbourne illustrator Tim Bond and received her first self-published copy last month.
“It arrived while Lukas was at school so I organised with his teacher for me to take it into him while he was at school,” Ms Hair said.
“He ran up to me and gave me a huge hug and said thank you mummy, he’s rapt with himself.”