Powerful Bricks.

Anxiety is something that comes and goes with me. It is a rare thing but annoying when it visits. I am lucky that I am able to acknowledge it at the time and attempt to reason with myself or at the very least remind myself that it wont last.

My anxiety usually comes when I am driving. There have been rare times I have had to pull over just to get myself back together again.

I don't expect anyone to understand this, I certainly didn't when it first started happening.

It started after Lochie died.

We lived on the North West corner of the city. The best, quickest way to get home was to drive past the Royal Children's Hospital. I realised that I just couldn't drive past anymore so I went a different way, every single day. Of course I never mentioned this to anyone else, thinking that would look at me oddly, seriously it is just a building.

A taxi drove me home one night, I was on my phone and before I knew it we were cruising past the hospital. I talked myself through the chest pain as we drove past.

Weeks later it happened again and then again. Anxiety visited but left quickly.

A year later I had to take Popps into the children's a number of times for check ups. I had no choice, I had to deal with the anxiety.

Here we are now, years down the track and I drive past the hospital so much that I never feel that anxious. I don't start to sweat and want to jump out of moving vehicles just to avoid driving past a building.

But I pulled over last week.

The Children's Hospital has been rebuilt and the old hospital is being pulled down. It will become a parkland beside the new hospital. A place for recreation, a green space in a big city.

I wasn't sure how I felt when I saw it. Was I glad to see the old bricks come down, was I sad? It certainly wasn't a building of beauty, it was an ugly 1960s yellow brick square and the inside was run down and like a rabbit warren of passageways and rooms.

A lot has occurred at the Royal Children's Hospital, lives lost and saved, families broken, lives changed.

It is now rubble and teams of people will work very hard to transform that area to be a place for others to enjoy.

It is only bricks.

It is only bricks, they are not doing anything. I used to repeat this over and over when anxiety started to visit when I drove past.

Are buildings more than just the materials that they were built with to you?






There is a wall on the new RCH page that people can add to, it isn't easy to use, so maybe contact them directly if you want to add your own message.