FAMILY NEAR DEATH, THAI ISLANDS AND A GLOBAL PANDEMIC AN EVENTFUL 10 YEARS FOR GREY-BRUCE KIDS BY AMY IRWIN 4 GREY-BRUCE KIDS • WINTER <strong>2021</strong>/<strong>22</strong>
When people do something difficult, they’ll quip that it almost killed them. Well, the first issue of <strong>Grey</strong>-<strong>Bruce</strong> <strong>Kids</strong> in late-2011 literally almost killed me. It was my 31st birthday, Oct. 25, and just three weeks before our first press deadline. I’d been feeling under the weather for a few days, but, as all Moms do, I powered through the discomfort to chase my young daughters and work on my new business venture – <strong>Grey</strong>-<strong>Bruce</strong> <strong>Kids</strong> magazine. Yet I knew something wasn’t right and Googled my symptoms – I was pretty sure my appendix had burst, and most likely a few days prior, which is very dangerous as you surely know. None of my husband, my sister or the ER doctor believed me because most people rush to the hospital when their appendix is first inflamed, thankfully not being able to stand the pain long enough to allow the useless organ to burst. Unfortunately, my high pain tolerance allowed me to live my regular life for days after, even as my bloodstream was poisoned from within. By the time the doctor believed me and cut me open, I was septic. What had been my appendix was gangrenous. They had to do two surgeries just to wash the infection off my other organs. I was in bad shape, delirious on medication, in incredible pain, unconscious for hours and the better part of days at a time, and there was a window where we didn’t know if I’d ever again hold my daughters, tell my husband a joke only I find funny, or put the first issue of <strong>Grey</strong>-<strong>Bruce</strong> <strong>Kids</strong> into your hands. Thankfully, I turned the corner, making incremental improvements and leaving the hospital 17 days later, weak and so tired. Still – somehow – we hit our first deadline that very week and here we are, 10 years later, celebrating the 41st issue of our little local magazine that almost never was. A SERVICE DIRECTORY? My husband Dwight and I were both born and raised in Ripley, and we graduated from Conestoga College in Kitchener in 2002; me with a diploma in social services, he in journalism. We immediately moved to Alberta to start our careers, and, after getting married in 2004, we quit our jobs and sold our house in Big Sky Country to go backpacking across New Zealand and Australia for 10 months. Eventually we landed in Port Hope, Ont., where we welcomed our daughter Layne in 2007. I was newly pregnant with our second daughter when we moved back to Ripley in 2010, so I had no job from which to take maternity leave after her birth just a few days before Christmas. As I said in my first Publisher’s Note, “I immediately realized, despite the fact there are thousands of families in <strong>Grey</strong> and <strong>Bruce</strong> which face the same challenges mine does, there was no publication dedicated solely to parents and caregivers.” Families need easy access to services, baby groups, breastfeeding information, health care, and much more, so I decided I’d be the one to bring that information to local parents and caregivers. After brainstorming different options, we landed on a free-forpick-up, widely distributed magazine that we called <strong>Grey</strong>-<strong>Bruce</strong> Left: The Irwin family (clockwise, Dwight, Amy, Layne and Jace) in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, in December 2019. Above: The family photo that marked the 1st anniversary of <strong>Grey</strong>- <strong>Bruce</strong> <strong>Kids</strong>, in 2012. <strong>Kids</strong>. With my background in social services and a natural business acumen, and my husband’s newspaper writing and editing experience, we convinced ourselves we could do this. Somehow, through my hospitalization, a few weeks of very little sleep for Dwight, and a lot of help from our parents, our first issue made it to press on time, and on Dec. 1, 2011, we distributed 10,000 copies across <strong>Grey</strong>/<strong>Bruce</strong>. We were astonished by the feedback, with many commenting on the professional look of the product and the interesting articles, made better by being written by local people for local people. NO TOPIC TOO BIG With our backgrounds in social services and journalism, our intention was never to have <strong>Grey</strong>-<strong>Bruce</strong> <strong>Kids</strong> be a “fluffy” magazine. There would be no topic too big for our little publication and, right from Issue 1, we met the challenge head greybrucekids.com • 5
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