Poster Child (4 page)

Every once in a while, floating in a drugged and uncomfortable sleep, I saw the shadow of Dr. Elliot in the room. I felt his cool hand on my forehead and sometimes some light pressure on the cast. I caught a glimpse of the dark shelf of hair over his head.

For years after my amputation, I had a couple of horrible, recurring dreams. One was of a trash bin for amputated limbs—a huge, green-sided metal bin big enough to fit several people inside. Nurses and doctors I had never met had the job of dumping the newly severed parts; their green uniforms matched the bin. Inside were piles of bare, amputated feet, hands, entire legs and arms, all floating in blood. I never imagined that the limbs might be wrapped up or wiped clean. This implied effort, and I thought that amputations involved a simple hand saw that moved back and forth through the bone until something fell off, as if severing a part of the body were not so different from felling a tree. Later I would learn that there was a specific term for amputated specimens like mine—medical waste—and that it was disposed of in a specific way: It was burned. Trash from waiting room wastebaskets was combined with blood-soaked bandages, culture dishes, needles, swabs, used surgical gloves, scalpels, and limbs and organs from the operating room, and everything was incinerated in a special receptacle at the hospital designed specifically for this purpose.

In the dream, I am always four years old. I stand on a stool in front of the bin, sorting through the floating body parts with my bare hands, trying to find the one foot among the many that is mine.

Plagued by nightmares and sometimes by pain, I woke up in my hospital bed and tried to orient myself. I looked at the glass of water on the table next to me, at my body, prone and encased in plaster, and at Mom's face. She was always asleep, her blanketed back moving up and down with her breath. Eventually I went back to sleep, soothed by the familiarity of my mother's body and the objects in the room.

The body cast was hot and uncomfortable during the summer. The smells were horrible. Every day, Mom gave me a sponge bath and directed a small fan or cool air from a hair dryer down the cast's narrow top opening. It felt delicious to feel air move inside that closed space, but it did little to alleviate the mix of smells—dried sweat, crusted blood, shit—that wafted up from the stale, gluey air trapped against my skin.

In addition to the heat and smell, the logistics of the cast were a challenge. I had to go to the bathroom through a small square—like a trapdoor—between my stiff, separated legs. If I needed to use the toilet at night, I had to shout and wake up my parents. Sometimes I peed in the cast and endured the awful smell until it faded into the others.

Mom "petaled" my cast—an old technique she had learned in nursing school. She cut strips of adhesive tape, each about the size of a Band-Aid, and put half of the strip outside the cast and half inside. Petaling created a smooth surface at the rough edges of the cast. After the tape had been soiled by shit and urine, it was simply peeled off and discarded. "It was like laying the petals of a flower," Mom explained. "Although it was never going to smell like a flower down there, it did smell better and the cast didn't scrape against your skin."

I liked to go on long drives in our yellow station wagon. That way, I could still cover distances, even though I was immobile. That summer, when we drove to Illinois to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins, I sat propped up on pillows in the back of the station wagon and watched through the windows as the land rolled away in reverse, changing from rocky and hilly to flat fields decorated with silos. In the distance, the land met the sky in a smooth line. Andy handed me treats and books over the middle seats that he was happy to have to himself for a change.

When we arrived in Illinois, the body cast had been on for several weeks, and Mom insisted on combing out the tangles in my long hair, which she'd arranged in a high, messy bun. She propped me up against the couch in my aunt and uncle's living room and tried to distract me by playing cartoons on television and offering sweets.

"Maybe we should just cut her hair," Dad said, watching as I screamed and protested. "It sounds really painful." At this, I howled louder. I was definitely in favor of a haircut. Who cared what I looked like? This painful process didn't seem worth it.

"No way," Mom replied, spraying my hair with more detangler. "I won't cut her hair." When she was ten years old, her mother had open heart surgery, and Mom went to live temporarily with her aunt and uncle. The first thing her aunt did was take her to the town barber to have her waist-length hair cut short so that it would be easier to care for. She'd hated it, she said, because she'd felt like a boy when she wanted to be a little girl. "She's keeping all of this," Mom said, fingering a strand of my hair and preparing to rake out a tangle. Dad shrugged and left the room.

"Ready?" Mom said cheerily, picking up her comb. "Almost done!" I groaned as she handed me a butterscotch candy.

The June air was sweltering hot. I heard the shouts and giggles of Andy and my cousins Erica, Beth, and Sarah as they played in the backyard. Periodically, the screen door would screech open and then close again as one of them ran in to check on me. I heard the deep tones of Uncle Aaron's voice as he talked to Dad. I heard the clink of ice as it melted down in their Manhattans.

After all the knots were out, Mom washed my hair in the kitchen sink; gentle as she'd tried to be, my scalp stung. The comb moved smoothly through my wet hair. "See," she said, squeezing the ends of my hair with a towel. "All better." I glared at her.

Dad carried me out to the back porch so I could sit on the patio, propped up on pillows. I looked out over the yard and watched the fireflies bob and spin in the thick, early evening air. I put my hands in my sweet-smelling hair as it dried, wavy and heavy. I smelled of sweat on clean but sticky skin. These smells of summer temporarily masked the odors wafting up from the cast, which would be on for another four weeks. My cousins took turns drawing on it; they signed their names under their creations and then passed the pen to the next girl who wanted to leave her mark on the brick house.

Sarah caught a firefly and pulled off its blinking back. I loved those lightning bugs because even when they were dismembered, part of them lived on. There was no pain to imagine, no struggle to witness; there was only light that gradually and beautifully faded. Sarah bent her dark head over my hand and attached the firefly's lit back. Dulling quickly, it balanced on my sweaty finger, a ringless jewel.

The brick house came off on my fourth birthday. Afterward, I wore a walking cast, a cone of plaster that extended past the edge of my stump. I walked on this for a while as the healing was completed.

When this second cast was removed, physical therapy was required to restrengthen the atrophied muscles. Mom helped me do the exercises in the bathtub, because warm water helped the muscles relax, making them easier to flex and stretch. "Kick, one-two-three, kick," Mom said as my splashes dampened her blouse and a rubber duck floated to the far reaches of the tub. She drew a smiley face on the end of the stump with bath paints and put a doll's skirt on it, and I called it Super Stump. Super Stump loved to fly around, particularly in Andy's face. She got me in trouble a few times, but I was proud of her. Sometimes I would bend her up to my mouth (my knee was still functional) and sing into the heel as if it were a microphone. Andy and I both learned to balance a spoon lengthwise on the end of Super Stump. We loved showing our friends this cool trick. I felt that my leg made me different and special and interesting to other kids. Instead of being the dorky kid sister, I was a novelty. "Hey, watch this," Andy would say, and off came my leg and out came the spoon, followed by the oohs and aahs as it trembled on top of the line of stitches at the bottom of my stump.

But how to
explain
what had happened to me? Nobody understood about PFFD, least of all me. When kids asked, "What happened to your leg?" I replied, "A dragon bit it off." I thought this was genius—what a glamorous tale! What a story I had! I told everybody this, embellishing it more each time (the dragon challenged me to a duel, and I lost; the prince threw me out of the castle, and the dragon attacked me) until Mom told me to stop. She said that it wasn't appropriate, that I was
lying.

I didn't get the artificial leg as originally planned. In October, Dad noticed a bump on my left hip and made an appointment with Dr. Elliot. After several X-rays, Dr. Elliot, looking pale and visibly shaken, reported the news. "This has never happened to me before," he explained. The plate had failed to heal; the "screw" that had been inserted into the hip plate was floating around and had broken in the socket. He told us to come back the next day while he came up with an alternative plan. Mom always wondered if this problem had been caused by the walking cast, which had not been connected to my hip and slumped to the floor when I sat down.

Dr. Elliot recommended a hip surgery in October that would take out the screw (embedded in the bone) and the plate. This would be followed by three to six weeks of traction in the hospital to keep tension on the leg. The surgery took about six hours; after four hours, Dr. Elliot appeared in the waiting room and told my parents that there would be no need for traction, as he could do a bone graft on the crest of the hip and place pins in the bone that would then be removed in three to four weeks.

During this long surgery that my parents found difficult to sign off on, Dad had refused to go to the hospital chapel with Mom. Instead, he walked around on different floors of the hospital, poking his head into the rooms of other patients and asking, "How's it going in there? Everyone okay?" He told me that he'd had no mind for prayer that day. "I just kept moving around," he said. "It was the only thing that made any sense."

Mom tells me, "Dad and I were the only ones left in the waiting room when Dr. Elliot came to get us. We were so happy that you were going to be in a body cast, which sounds strange—to want your child in another body cast—but it was so much better than traction." The hip spica body cast would be on for seven more weeks, scheduled to come off just after Thanksgiving. My legs were separated again by the metal rod and also by metal pins through the femur bone; like anchors, they held everything in place.

That Halloween, I was Little Red Riding Hood and Mom was Groucho Marx. The rounded edge of the cast stuck out from beneath my red dress, and I wore a black felt boot on my right foot. Our eyes were hidden: mine in a red mask, Mom's in black plastic glasses attached to a false rubber nose. Mom carried me on her hip around the neighborhood, collecting candy. "We were a hit!" she said.

Before I left the hospital and returned to preschool, Ms. Sharon searched through her supply closet and found an old walker that looked like pipes that had been soldered together. "That thing was impenetrable," Mom tells me. "Like a metal tank. If some kid ran into you, they'd probably regret it." Dad used the bicycle seat from my first makeshift walker and covered it in a new layer of sheepskin so my butt wouldn't get sore from so much sitting.

The pipe walker, or "the tank," as we called it, was great for protection from other kids who might collide with me during the chaos of preschool, but it was so heavy that I could not move it alone. The teacher or several kids together had to push me around the schoolroom.

At home, Mom gave me a small, round platform with wheels attached. Lying on my plastered stomach, I pushed myself forward and backward with my hands. I looked like a white plaster beetle with my back legs immobilized and stiff and my hands scurrying like small feet along the ground. I felt mobile once again after the disappointment of not getting the leg and being forced to move around in the tank while wearing another body cast. A few hours of fast forward motion across the kitchen linoleum made the situation feel more bearable.

The best part of the scooter was being able to play with Andy again, not just indoors but outside, too. After a snowfall, he suggested projects that we could both do at ground level; we built miniature snowmen and shallow forts in the snow. Then one day he dared me to a race—he would crawl, and I would push. We weren't even supposed to be outside without supervision—but we didn't care. It was a beautiful November day. The sunshine was luminous against the white, melting snow, and the wet ground smelled fragrant, almost springlike.

When Mom thought we were napping, Andy quietly crept outside and I followed on the scooter. We started the race on the long concrete walk that ran the length of our downward-sloping backyard and had just been cleared that morning of fresh snow. In the middle of my descent, I hit a hidden patch of ice and the scooter slid out from underneath me. I skid face first on the concrete, knocking out a tooth. Catapulting into the alley, I bumped one of the pins and landed on my back. The force of the jostled pin hurt so terribly that I threw up on the front of the cast.

Stunned, I looked up into the branches of the snow-covered trees. Wet snow crystals dropped on my face when the wind shook the branches. Andy was screaming my name, but his voice disappeared into the cold ground. I could taste blood and feel it, fast and wet, filling my mouth. I heard Mom's shouts and hurried steps down the path. I wanted to move, but I could not. Sun moved over the snowy branches, and then the whole sky exploded into a glowing, sparkling white.

After everything was healed and my tooth was spirited away by the tooth fairy in exchange for a one-dollar bill, the cast was cut open and the pins were removed. I knew it was going to hurt, but when Dr. Elliot pulled each of them out—quickly, one after the other—I had never felt anything like it. It felt as if the tissue and bone were being yanked out at once or the body was being forcibly turned inside out. I gritted my teeth, determined not to cry out. "Brave girl," said the assisting nurse. "What a brave girl," she said again, wiping my sweaty forehead with a cool towel. Those words of praise made all the pain worthwhile. Bravery in these situations was a virtue; it set me apart and made me feel proud.