“Mom discovers what her daughter was doing with her brother in the bathroom, and she can’t stop screaming. Suzy and Timmy were siblings, and they were bonded like few others. At an age when many would be bickering and in constant confrontations, they were unconditional friends. Suzy was seven years old, and Timmy was five, and there was no one in the world they loved more than each other.
Suzy, being the oldest, was also a guide for her little brother. The fact is that the parents of both had been so carefree all their lives that the girl learned many things about life, alone or at school where she had a teacher who was always ready to answer all her questions. Everything she was learning, she also transferred to her little brother.
Together they got through life with no more support than the one they gave each other. But they were still children who needed their parents; they needed them to see them beyond the two mouths they had to feed. They wanted to be taken seriously, and every day they tried hard to make them realize that they also thought and felt and were able to understand life so they could take the time to explain and guide them. But that just never seemed to happen.
Everything got worse when Timmy got sick. Every day he complained that his stomach hurt, but since it coincided with the beginning of school for the boy, his parents were convinced that he was simply trying to get out of going to school. That’s why they were even furious when the boy told them that his stomach did not stop hurting and that when he ate, he sometimes felt like vomiting. Six months had passed, and Timmy was still sick and not getting the attention he needed. It got worse when he started vomiting at night.
Suzy had told her parents that her little brother was throwing up his food, but they thought he had just gotten indigestion and would be fine the next day. And since there was simply no way they would believe Timmy that he was sick and wounded in their dignity, the two brothers decided that they would not bother them anymore.
Suzy then assumed that she was the only one who could take care of him because only she cared about him and did not leave Timmy alone at any time. Gradually accompanying him to vomit and holding him while he vomited became a habit that happened more and more often until it was a daily routine. The boy was getting thinner and was pale and weak all the time; and at his school, they noticed it, but when they asked Timmy’s parents if the boy was suffering from any illness, they flatly denied it and excused themselves by simply saying that he was going through a stage of poor appetite, which according to them was very normal at his age because they had gone through it too. They believed that soon he would start eating normally and his appearance would improve but that it was not an illness.
In the meantime, Timmy was finding it harder and harder to keep his food down, and also his concentration and strength were disappearing little by little. In class, he was not able to pay attention, and he did not go out to play full of energy like all the other children. He preferred to sit in the sun, and many times he fell asleep. Even though so many people saw them, only Suzy was able to understand that he was sick, and she could only hope that soon someone would pay attention to him.
One night, the mother went into the bathroom and found a scene she never thought she would see. There was Suzy helping her little brother hold himself up while he was vomiting; a bloody vomit that seemed to be tearing the little boy from the inside. And when the boy finished and looked at her, she realized she had been blind for a long time and started screaming in complete shock. Her son was sick, she didn’t know from what, but he had been sick for a while now, and it was obvious. The children had told them, and they hadn’t paid attention, and so they had decided to fend for themselves by making as little noise as possible, trying to hide it, as if they were doing something wrong.
Suzy and Timmy were so young that they didn’t know how serious it could be for the poor child to vomit like that and endure his terrible stomach pains without any treatment, nor did they know that none of it was really their fault but the fault of irresponsible parents who had failed to pay attention. All Suzy wanted was to help her brother feel better, and for that reason, the boy adored her because she was his biggest support and the only one who was looking out for him all the time.
On the other hand, his parents did not know what care and love were. The boy told them hundreds of times that his stomach hurt, and they had never paid attention to him, assuming that it was some childish strategy to avoid eating his food and that nothing was really wrong with him. At no time did it occur to them to think that maybe their son was sick and that complaining so many times about a pain was not normal.
And the fact is that there are parents to whom the title is too big for them, parents who neglect their children believing that their job is limited to giving them a roof and food when it is much more than that. If a parent is not willing to be present in every step their child takes, if they are not willing to guide them, to teach them to face life, and to be a good person, something would have to be done to put them in their place. And that was precisely what Timmy’s parents needed, they needed the wake-up call that the doctors gave them that difficult night because Timmy was so weak that his little body seemed to be unable to resist any longer and now he was in the emergency room.
And although they were slow to realize what was happening to him and needed to do several tests that took many days, when the diagnosis finally came everyone in the unit, doctors, and nurses were devastated. The child had cancer in a terminal state.
A cancer that he could have overcome a long time ago if Timmy’s parents had paid attention to what they were being told. Timmy’s mother still hadn’t come out of shock, and the father was feeling like the most miserable man in the world. How was it possible that his son was on the edge of death when from the beginning he had begged for their attention? How had they been able to ignore their son’s pain without paying attention to anything else, not even to Suzy who every day asked them to take her brother to a doctor?
Both of them could not believe their own indolence, nor the dastardly way they behaved, and the speeches they were given at the hospital made them feel even worse, but it was well deserved. The whole time Timmy was in the hospital, they were constantly reproached by all the medical authorities. Some nurses were not even able to speak to them again.
All the attention was focused on Timmy and saving him at any cost, but after a couple of weeks, they realized that they had arrived too late. There was no way to save the little boy, and in the midst of tears and despair, the only consolation his sister had was that Timmy’s last words were for her, to thank her and to ask her to be happy because he would be watching over her from heaven, to understand that now he was going to rest and that was why he was at peace.
That tranquility was reflected during his last breath, and the image of the child was practically of an angel. Timmy’s parents could never get over knowing that their son had died because of them and tried to repay at all costs everything they had been wronged with inordinate attention for Suzy, but Suzy had already learned to stand up for herself and although she grew up and learned to forgive her parents. The relationship between them could never fully heal.
The memory of Timmy was still painful, but she was also inspired by it every day and as she grew up, she found a way to accomplish the goal that she had set for herself since she had said goodbye to her little brother; to found a hospital to treat children with cancer, and she didn’t stop for a second until she did it.
Suzy became the standard bearer of the fight against childhood cancer in her country, and until the last of her days, she helped without looking at whom and with all her love because her brother, even so many years later, never stopped inspiring her.
