Miracles Happen

It was August 19th, 2004. I was at a rarely-in-town Floortime workshop with a renown and lively speech therapist from Toronto. Lunch break arrives, and my new cell phone proves to be the most wise parental purchase I ever made. Just on the dot at 12 noon I get a strange message from the summer camp – “Tamya fell of the carousel and bent her knee (what the F??? one may ask, and the answer will come only a few hours later), but she is ok now, in Burnaby General Hospital. I call my partner right away, and ask him if I he can go to the hospital to see what’s going on. If I was at a business meeting I would think twice, and go to the hospital right away. But I was there for her, so I felt comfortable enough to share the parental responsibilities with him and not panic. Three hours later, the call comes: Tamya got X Rayed, and the light-board was in front of her bed. David didn’t need to hear what the doctor had to say, he passed her straight to me, and we both heard for the firs time that Tamya’s femur is broken, just above the knee. But the knee wasn’t broken, so I sighed with relief, and hailed a taxi right away to the other town. When I arrived, I saw a girl that I never seen before. Completely drugged out with morphine, yet still in tremendous pain. I was never close to anyone who broke a limb, so there was nothing in the world that could have prepared me to what was about to happen in the next 11 hours, and the six months that followed.

We had to transfer her in an ambulance to Children’s Hospital. They had to tie her up to stretcher, and her eyes popped out of her head (literally) from the pain. The ride was a nightmare, but it ended eventually. The ordeals of the emergency room are something I will spare you, but I have never seen so much pain in my life. Despite the morphine shots, the girl was in more pain than I ever knew a human can experience. I had to see her eyeballs pop even more when the leg was stretched. Than it was pee time…with the help of a painful catheter. This went on and on, until, after 11 hours, her muscels finally relaxed enough to go to the surgery room and spend three hours there to get fixed. What can I tell you, giving birth is painful. But hurts much more to see your child suffering pain that is far more intense than labour. In that tremendous pain though, for the first time, Tamya reached out for us to help her and support her in coping with the pain. It’s not like the bonding between us wasn’t strong enough before. But now was the first time she needed us to support her when suffering, instead of withdrawing. This was a pain that sneaking to the bathroom cupboard and covering up with a bandaid was not only useless but also impossible: she was not able to leave the bed for the next six weeks.

The next three weeks were immersed not only with pain, but also with anxiety and helplessness that Tamya has never experienced before. I won’t bore you any further with all the turmoil of recovering from a broken femur – the daily painkiller doses, the challenges of bathing, the resistance to physiotherapy, the intense fear of walking again… After six weeks in a brace and after about three month learning to walk again (for a long time with a distinct limp of course), Tamya has emerged a changed person: she was now focused, was able to sit down for prolonged time (I guess after six weeks in a wheelchair an hour of a boring school assembly is like a slice of pie!), and couldn’t shut up for a moment. Her speech therapy sessions were incredibly effective. I now heard with my own ears what Vinni (her Speech Therapy in the past 4 years) was confident is going to happen. The most improbable thing of all, which most parents and children take for granted – the beginning of speech. New words have been coming out of her mouth every day. Sentences, even. I finally reached the point that most parents reach when their child turns three: I wanted her to sometimes just be quiet like she used to be; you see, I really got used to the silence and to the non-verbal communication with her…

In a sense, this was Tamya's re-birth. It was even nore painful than birth and she emerged out of this extreme experience a completely different person. At the age of 8, the unbelieveable happened: Tamya started talking.

In the photo you see Tamya two years ago in early Fall 2004. She is sitting on a wheelchair posing for a newsletter of The Corporation, and she has a brace on her entire left leg.