ANDREA CORR
Parent, musician
Chosen childhood item:
“I am holding my beloved Fisher-Price record player. Twinkle Twinkle is ready to play. My children play with it now” “Childhood illness can keep children away from their home and life too much. As many as 185 children and babies are not at home in their beds tonight. Their illness is keeping them in Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Dublin.
“Some spend weeks and months away from siblings and their own home; away from their toys, from their music. We want to change the record on this. Get them well, get them home, get them out to play, as quickly as possible.
“I don’t remember personally the time, as a baby, I spent in hospital. I was admitted for a kidney infection, but I also picked up gastroenteritis, which I became seriously ill with. It was one of those stories I liked to hear a lot as a child. Brown eyes looking out of the cot at [my parents], and the rest of me as white as the sheets.
“My parents were very scared and visited daily, hoping there’d be a change and that they could bring me home — the ‘well’ baby I had been before I got sick. They visited my uncle and aunt one day, having been in to see me, and couldn’t resist popping in again on their way home. They found me [with my] colour [back], smiling out of the cot, and were told they could bring me home, which they did — in my older cousin Shane’s boy’s brown dungarees and his T-shirt.
“As a mother, I can only imagine the helpless fear parents must feel when their child is ill in hospital. How they must yearn for their home, playing as they should be, with their happy chatter alive in the house. I’d say it’s one of the hardest experiences a family can suffer.
“But for it to go on to become a favourite funny story, and the hospital episode within to be one of love and colour, in as much as it can be... That would be what I’d hope for, and what I believe children’s hospitals need our support with.
“I think the greatest gift we can give our children is as long of a happy childhood as is possible. To feel loved and safe, even when it is an episode away from home and in hospital.”