Every three or four
months either my ex-husband or I, or sometimes both of us, take our daughter out of state to get a new EDF cast applied. “EDF” stands for
“elongation, derotation, flexion,” the three functions this mighty piece of
plaster and fiberglass performs upon our six-year-old’s spine. We’ve been doing this for four years now, changing the cast to accommodate our daughter’s
growth and to stay on top of the spinal curve. Some kids with progressive
infantile scoliosis experience a complete or near-complete correction.
Other kids, like ours, are simply buying time, keeping at bay the inevitable
surgeries, invasive and painful and infection-breeding.
Last
year, at the tail end of the January trip, my daughter and I found ourselves in
a general casting room with her physician’s assistant, who had to adjust the
fit of the cast before we left town. We wrap up every trip with this
simple and quick procedure. My daughter likes it because the P.A. directs
his questions to her, and she gets to report on the fit of her cast and dictate
the changes that will ensure her comfort, and I like it because it marks the
end of the hard part of our journey. Ordinarily, it’s just us and the
P.A. on these mornings, but on this occasion in January we shared the space
with a girl—I’d put her in 7th or 8th grade—and
her dad. The girl was having a cast sawed off her leg, and from the bits
of conversation I overheard I gathered that she had broken her leg skiing--for
the second time.
Back
in the early ‘90s I went through a months-long workshop series called
Lifespring. Lifespring used to be Est, and legend has it that Est
participants were prevented from using the bathroom until they had had an
emotional “breakthrough”: in the 1970s, self-actualization very often involved
the genitals. Twenty years later, the organization had made progress.
Lifespring trainers allowed us to go to the bathroom whenever we needed
to; but they also served up a healthy amount of Kool-Aid, and for those few
months in 1993 I drank it. One day I was assigned, along with two other
young women, to perform Madonna’s “Vogue” to our group of roughly 40
Lifespringers. Costuming and amateur choreography were involved. I
may have kissed a young gay man during the song’s crescendo. After our
performance we had a breakthrough, the three of us: our trainer had
assigned us this “stretch” to help us to realize our power as young,
attractive, sexual women. In the three of us he had seen a resistance to
“owning” this part of ourselves, and in our performance we had embraced
it. We had not simply lip-synched early-‘90s Madonna, together we had
become early-‘90s Madonna.
One
of these girls—and, really, she was just a girl, not much beyond 18—was
beautiful and athletic, an athlete. She was also sardonic, so I liked her
very much. In a way, I wanted to be her. And then she had a very
challenging day. Our trainer was walking us through some concept or
another, and in the course of sharing, this girl revealed that in her 18 years
on earth she had broken nearly every bone in her body. I remember that
she said it lightheartedly, as if this were an interesting and amusing fact
about her. I remember that most of us reacted in kind. But the
trainer did not. He stopped the conversation to zero in on this
girl. He said, “Why do you want to kill yourself?”
As
it turns out, he was right. It didn’t matter that I thought he was
overreacting or that the girl met his question with laughter and minor
annoyance and the explanation, “They were accidents.” His
interrogation continued, and a few minutes later she was crying, and she was
telling 40 people in the basement conference room of a Holiday Inn why she
wanted to die.
On that January day last year, my daughter and I left the hospital
and headed to a bagel shop to get some breakfast before heading to the
airport. Who got behind us in line but the girl with the leg cast and her
father? We didn’t really know each other but had been forced into
familiarity by the shared hospital room, so in the bagel line we greeted each
other with an awkward “Great minds think alike!” While the four of us
stood at the counter, waiting for our food, I engaged the girl in small
talk. I told her I had overheard that she had broken her leg skiing, and
I asked her how it had happened. She told me the story in brief, and her
dad jumped in with some of the details. She looked miserable. I
said, “And this was the second time you broke your leg skiing?” “Yeah,”
she said. Miserable still. I asked, “Are you ever going to ski
again?” She and her dad answered simultaneously. She: “No.”
Dad: “Yes.” So her dad repeated, this time with great force and
irritation, “Yes.” “The whole family skis,” he told me. Then he
said to her, “There is no way you are not going with us.” I asked the dad
if they ski a lot. They do—every weekend in the winter. I said to
her, “You must be scared.” She looked at me with, I swear, gratitude and
said, “Yes.” Her dad said, “You are not scared.” I said
to her, “I would be, too.”
What is happening to
that girl today? I have to believe her dad has forced her to go skiing
again. Maybe she’s broken another bone. Maybe this girl wears casts
all year like my daughter does. Maybe these casts will bolster her, and to
others she will seem beautiful and athletic and sardonic. Maybe she will
have a breakthrough. Or maybe she will just continue to
break.
