Letters to Me: Dear Anna

My memories of what I went through 26 years ago giving birth to my lovely, adorable son Dylan.  He was born on due date, 15 hours of labour nature birth. The only medical issue at birth was he was jaundice and put under lights for the first few hours after birth. At a later stage we found he had a hole in his heart that closed over six months later, two lots of pneumonia and three lots of grommets.

As I couldn’t breast feed Dylan, he was bottled fed, so we were allowed to go home three days later and wait for a telephone call to confirm the diagnosis of Down Syndrome after blood test was taken on day one, plus other signs given by the doctor on call that my son was born with Down syndrome.

After being home for the  first four weeks in denial of what could I have changed, finish work earlier, not taking the mild sleeping tablets prescribed by the doctor, not in the age bracket could I have done anything different, the answer was no , there was nothing I could have done to change what had happened as it wasn’t our family history it happened at conception. 

So, from there the journey started with physio and speech therapist visiting at home, that then moved on to going to Epic early intervention program as well as attending 3-year-old kinder and two years of 4-year-old kinder as he wasn’t ready to go to school after the first year of 4-year-old kinder, then school.

The journey continues with Dylan attending both mainstream school as well as a Special school this continued up until, he finished school at 18.  He is now involved with lots of community activities e.g. Special Olympics (Basketball and swimming), Bam arts (Drama, Dance and Hip Hop), Happiness First Café (Customer Service and Barista working) as well he has a small business, he is the owner of his own homemade business called Dylan Delicious Delights.  You can find him on either Facebook or Instagram.   It just shows that nothing in possible when you set your mind to it even with having an intellectual disability.

Written by Anna, Ambassador Dylan's mum