Friday Fact

Once upon a time there was a goddess called Ren. She included delightful little random factoids about herself on her blog. Ren went away.

There is a prolific blogger we here at Curves like to call Deej, (we should probably ask permission before bestowing monikers on our friends, shouldn't we?) who has many blogs. One of which is lots of funny and mysterious facts.

And tasty Texan temptress Kendall used to answer the Friday Five, a short list of facts that allowed us to get closer to our favourite American.

I'm sure I don't need to connect the dots for you... it's obvious that I, Janet, love facty bits. So I might just divulge some facts of my own, every Friday, 'cause it's my blog and I wanna. There might be multiple facts, there might be just one. I might back them up with a story. They might be deep, they might be trivial, but they will definitely be honest... so please be kind!

Factoid the first -
I should be brain dead. (No laughing!)

When I was a tender three years of age, my grandparents took me to Sydney for a holiday. After drinking from a public drinking fountain, I contracted bacterial meningitis.
All of my blonde curls fell out (and were later replaced with straight brown hair - I sometimes wonder, "Would life be different if I were blonde?'), I couldn't walk, I couldn't talk, I was like a newborn baby all over again.

My doctors were convinced that I was not long for this world. They called my parents in Melbourne, telling them to rush themselves up to Sydney, so that they may say goodbye to me. At best, they advised, I would be afflicted with such severe brain damage that I would be like a vegetable.
Through some twist of fate, after my parents arrived (by breaking land speed records on the highways), I began to recover. Slowly, but surely, and after a few months, I was able to return home.

I have vague memories of my time at the hospital. I remember screaming through the ordeal of routine injections, and the little round bandaids that they would put over the pinpricks, which had a blue smiley face on them. I remember that there was a golf course outside my window, and I would watch the doctors playing between their rounds. I remember that my bed was like one of those big, white, wrought iron cribs, and that the ward was like a long, sterile corridor. My warmest memory is the visitor's room at the far end of this corridor, with soft lighting, toys, and my mum and dad.

Though my detractors would love to tease me and say that I'm still brain damaged, all evidence points to the fact that I made a full recovery. I was enrolled in four year old kindergarten when I was still three, to accelerate my learning, and I did ballet classes to develop my motor skills. And I became a robust young thing, without too major a health concern after that...
Oh, except for the fact that my pap test a few years back was sent to that dodgy facility, where they messed everything up, so I had to have ANOTHER PAP TEST. No woman should ever have to do that more often than bi-annually. I really think that doctors are far too willing to go up there...

Enough of that. My brain works. The end.