Lee is my younger brother. When he was born in 1988 he was a really sick kid. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and every time my mom had a contraction, it caused him to aspirate meconium (which is the yuck that babies start to make while they're still in the womb). His lungs were completely covered and he was rushed to the NICU and then flown to Children's Hospital in DC where he was treated on a machine called ECMO. It left a nasty scar on his neck. Due to the cord tightening around his trachea he underwent some reconstructive surgery when he was two years old to widen and strengthen his airway. The first attempt at this failed, he went into acute respiratory failure when he was about two and half years old. He and I were playing in the family room, I had pushed a balloon into his face just as he inhaled. As if you held your index finger on the bottom of a straw and sucked from the top, so did his trachea collapse. He was rushed to Children's again where they took out a portion of his lowest rib and used it as a splint in his trachea.
All of this to explain why it is such a BFD that the t-shirts we're using in Lee's quilt are from all of the regattas he has won over the years. He joined rowing when he was a freshman at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. The crew team stuck together and won three years at Stotesbury, three years at Nationals, and competed in the Royal Henley Regatta in 2007. He went on to row for University of California Berkley and has been coaching for local schools for the past two years.
The pile of t-shirt scrap from the 40 t-shirts Lee gave me to sew together:
It's going to be more manageable to sew 20 together on the front and 20 together on the back. The front will be shirts from high school and the back will be shirts from college. We bought denim for the border and a light batting for the insides. We chose three colors of trim: red and blue for TJ and yellow and blue for Cal.
I'm also using some of the ties that he's collected over the past few years and his Boy Scout shirt for one of the corners. Kitten approved!
Luckily, I'm not sewing those sweaty gross unis.
So excited to see that he did TBC! I row on the potomac and do TBC now then row for my school. This was such an awesome story! When I was born my lung had collapsed and they stuck tubes in me to reinflate it. I have little marks on my sides still. That's awesome how well you were able to become at rowing. You're such an inspiration and good luck with whatever you choose to do during the upcoming years!
ReplyDeletein the timeless words of Evel Knievel, "[Lungs] Heal, Chicks Dig Scars, Pain is Temporary, Glory is Forever."
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