I was going to write about our trip to Southern California except that my wiggly energetic daughter Ramona fell out of her chair at dinner and broke her elbow. We had to go to Emergency, then we were transferred to Oakland Children’s Hospital. Ramona ended up needing surgery. Not open surgery. They pushed the bone back together through her flesh and then with a tiny surgical drill they made three little holes to insert wires to hold her bone together. She doesn’t know the wires are in there. They will be pulling them out when the cast comes off. That was a week ago.
At times like these that I feel overwhelming gratitude towards modern medicine. I almost considered being making a career change. The suffering and permanent damage that it can relieve are irreplaceable. I don’t like suffering. I just wish we could get all the benefits of western medicine while skipping the Invasive/Medical Industrial Complex/We Control Your Body part. Of course, it isn’t the medicine itself. It is the way that power and society use it. As a weapon of power, like everything else. That could be a dissertation. It probably already is. Well Ivan Illich has written a lot about it…
She will be in the cast for a month. It’s hard to see a four-year-old body and spirit go through it. Besides the pain, I feel like I have gotten the smallest glimpse of what it might be like to have a special needs kid; a physical disadvantage. We do everything with two hands! To open things we use two hands. To balance we need two hands. We hold items with one hand and manipulate them with another. It is only in having one hand that we can truly appreciate two! No more dressing up dolls, dressing herself. Even going to the bathroom takes a lot more work and thought when a giant cast is dangling from one’s arm. She has, however, become very ingenious in adapting and finding other ways to do things. R’s best friend came over the third day, while she was still on pain meds and hadn’t ventured out of bed much. After about 45 minutes, everything fell apart. They didn’t know how to play together with her disability.
But the next day she stopped taking her pain meds mostly and ventured about. Four days later she went to a birthday party (yesterday), one of the only two girls there. She was the fragile one. She had to stay out of the jumpy house, only six days after her surgery. She couldn’t go into the rolly-ball, or even play in the sand box. She ate snacks and collected candy from the broken piñata she didn’t hit, but her spirit was visibly dampened.
At the end of the party, when she saw that there was only one girl in the jumpy house, her face lit up. She excitedly and nervously asked me if she could go in, that she promised not to jump high or run into anyone. Of course I had to against the doctor’s advice. It paid off. For the first time in a week she was herself - free from all the things she couldn’t do. The girl left and a couple boys came and she got to play pirates for over an hour in the jumpy house, sword-fighting with her plastic skeleton. That girl is always the last to leave a party…
I guess broken bones are a “cool” handicap, at least from what I remember in school. Alas, we just get to experience it for a several weeks and then we are free of it. Like the college student who goes to visit a third-world country for the summer to experience poverty.
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