Dr. Bear

We moved to the house on Old State Road 145 the year I turned seven. I have no idea why; it was horrible timing. I was slated for a set of surgeries following the move that would leave me in Spica casts: plaster from the hips to the toes with a bar between the feet. Who wants to carry a seven-year old made of plaster up all the stairs in the side of that hill? My parents must have had their reasons, though. Maybe it was cheaper to live outside of town. Goodness knows we had no money: at that point, my father was drinking it away practically as fast as he earned it.

I had been through surgeries before that final heinous batch, but I didn’t remember them. I was two when I had the surgery to correct my crossed eyes, four when I had my heel cords released to fix contractures. The only memory I had of casts was what I saw in pictures: me sitting at the table feeding myself ravioli, with tomato sauce smeared all over my face; me on a hotel bed somewhere in Florida during a family vacation, dressed in a little red swim suit and cheesing it up for the camera. And those casts were a piece of cake compared to the evil that is Spica: they were like two little plaster ankle boots, and they weren’t connected.

To say that I was not at all looking forward to being “under the knife” was a vast understatement. Of course, I hadn’t really formed a concept of surgery yet: anesthesia and morphine and I.V. pumps were lost to memory. The fact that people were actually going to cut me open did not occur to me until the morning I got to the hospital. No, at seven, what I was most concerned about was having to wear diapers.

The thought of diapers really ticked me off. Only babies wore diapers. I, Tiffany, was not a baby; ergo, I did not want to wear diapers. Period. Every time diapers were mentioned in preparatory conversation, I’d pitch a fit. Eventually I got so distraught, I actually started to pace the kitchen and cry and pull at my hair. (Hey, I never said I wasn’t dramatic.) To keep me from going bald – and most likely to get me to shut the hell up, already – my mother came up with a compromise. Velcro panties were born.

Seven pairs of little girl’s panties with pretty little flowers on them were purchased and the side seams picked apart and replaced with – you guessed it – Velcro. The ease of diapers without the diapers. It was genius. I was delighted.

Back in those earlier days, my mother was sometimes capable of strokes of absolutely brilliant parenting. She was creative, even fun. One year for my birthday, she filled my bedroom with balloons that each had a piece of candy tied to the string. If I wanted the candy, I had to stomp on the balloons and pop them. It was necessary physical strengthening disguised as awesomeness. I had no idea I was doing physical therapy: I was just making a lot of noise stomping on balloons, and my mother was letting me. Then, of course, the Velcro panties, and after the Velcro panties, Doctor Bear.

In a moment of rare concern for my emotional well-being, my mother tried to prepare me for surgery with a comfort object customized to teach me about doctors. She bought a teddy bear at a thrift store and sewed it a little white lab coat, complete with a pocket and Dr. Bear, M.D. written on with gold glitter. She got her mother, who worked as a CNA at the nursing home in town, to give up one of her extra stethoscopes, which she hung around the bear’s neck. She gave it to me as a present a few days before the surgeries. I had it on the gurney with me when I was wheeled into the operating room.

I’d undoubtedly had some scary moments in my life up to that point, but slamming through those double doors into the O.R. surrounded by doctors in masks and caps and gloves was absolutely horrifying. I felt like I was being led to my own execution. I’d been given a mild sedative to help calm my nerves, but it barely did anything: I was a knot of fear through the entire morning, even after they upped whatever it was to the highest dose they were allowed to give a kid my age.

When I get scared, really scared, I lose the ability to speak. My tongue and jaws just stop working. Everything else, however, goes into hyper-drive: in the fight-or-flight paradigm, I somehow manage to encompass both the fight and flight reactions. In other words, if I’m going to run, no one is going to stop me. I will mow people down like a bull on a rampage if I must. That morning in the hospital, though, I was so scared I was literally frozen. Not only could I not talk, I could barely move. It took a lot of effort for me just to shake my head yes or no. Every once in a while I’d whimper and claw at the bed sheets, but that was pretty much it. Everyone thought I was behaving so well, but inside my head, I was screaming and kicking and punching and biting. If I had been capable of making my body do what I wanted it to do, they’d have had to put me in restraints – because the realization that somebody was going to cut open my body and rearrange the parts had dawned on me with brutal clarity, and I was very much against it.

When the pediatric nurse pushed the last syringe of the sedative into the line in my arm, I did manage to at least stop whimpering and clawing. I pulled the pillow over my head and squeezed my eyes closed and tried to pretend I didn’t exist. There was no one in the bed waiting for surgery. What girl? What surgery? For that matter, what bed? None of it was real. Nope. Uh-uh. Never existed.

So much for that.