At Least

At least it is not her head. 

At least it is not her heart!

At least it is not her brain.

You, reader, might agree with these sentiments but I do not.  People whose children are whole and without problems say these things.  Parents of children who are injured don’t talk like this.  They don’t examine your pain, your loss, your feelings about your child’s injury, and weigh that against some greater imagined injury.  It means nothing to look on the Brightside when directed by others.  Surely, we all know that in some ways we are lucky not to have a child with a greater injury but given the mechanism of injury, we were truly only lucky that she did not also have brain damage. 

So it ended up that her brain was not damaged but I would ask you, reader, to do a few things for me.  Reach your hand out in front of you—shoulder level.  Now out to the side.  Put your hand behind your back or over your head.  Brush your hair.  Put your glasses on or your make up.  These things she cannot do.  

Hera's Birth

When I look back at the birth of my first child, I am still angry at myself.  Why wasn’t I bigger? Badder?  Why didn’t I bust out with the F-bomb?  Something like “what the fuck is going on?”

But instead I was something different. I had been in labor for 2 days—bedridden for most of that and I wanted to see my baby.  The birth, delivery, and now the “presenting of the baby to the mother” had not gone anything like my previous experience.  Admittedly, I had never had another child but I had seen television depiction-- happy sitcoms or overwrought emotional dramas. More disturbingly the whole birth had been nothing like what I had seen in my birthing class videos.  To get to the heart of it—babies are born yelling, crying, screaming, or making some kind of noise.  Doctors and nurses comment on the strength of the lungs or the beauty of the baby.  But there was no noise from our daughter when she was born and the doctor handed her off to another doctor without holding her up for a second for me to see.   “Well she is out,” was all the doctor said.  She didn’t seem happy --she seemed annoyed.

“Please go check on the baby.” I said to my husband again.  Though I wasn’t insisting just kind of weakly requesting that he do it. 

“It will be ok,” he says.

“Just make sure she is alright.  She isn’t crying”.  But I did not act like myself-- demanding and yelling, possibly swearing.  I suppose it was because that some part of me didn’t want to know what was wrong.

The sneak football pass from the obstetrician to the pediatrician was done so I won’t see that my daughter needs to be revived when she is born.  At first, before my daughter became stuck, there had been just one nurse, loitering near the plastic bassinet.  She had dyed blond hair and a face like a bulldog.  Then the birth became a cock up.  The baby was in distress.   She was stuck.  Then the bodies in the room multiplied.  I couldn’t keep track anymore.  It was immense pain despite the epidural and at one point the doctor stood up and placed her fist high up on my stomach close to breasts and began to twist her arm like a corkscrew.  I felt like the world’s largest tube of toothpaste.

I continued a few feeble pleas with Shannon, my husband, to check on our daughter when someone shouted in the demanding nurse voice “Dad. Dad come over and hold your daughter.  Let’s bring her over to mom.”  The words were an attempt at normality but they felt staged. 

Shannon, walked over to the plastic bassinet and returned shadowed by a short brunette in scrubs.  The baby is cleaned and wrapped in a white blanket.  But there is something so strange about the way she looks.  He holds our daughter up so I can see her.  She still hasn’t made a noise.  Instead she just blinks with enormous almost black eyes.   Her skin is pale and wrinkled. The first thought I had was that she looked like a grub. 

I am not allowed to hold her.  Shannon showed her to me and his nurse/ warden was already steering him away down the hall to the Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).  Strange, I didn’t realize even as they were leaving to go to the NICU how serious everything is.  

In reality, I don’t really understand that she died.  The idea that at one point before she was born she was alive, then she stopped being alive and had to be revived.  Someone had to physically do something to her body to bring her back to life.  I don’t get this until I see the hospital bill:  recitation-- $672.00.

Introduction

On December 23, 2007, my daughter was born.  During her birth, she became stuck andultimately was injured.  Shesuffered from a right- sided obstetrical brachial plexus injury (ROBPI) alsoknown as Erby’s palsy.  It is alsocalled a shoulder dystocia during delivery.  

The injury stretched the nerves from her spine at c5 andc6.  Many people who suffer fromthis type of injury recover normal movement.  Indeed many children who at birth show signs of a brachialplexus injury ultimately recover within a month. Hera did not recover.  A recovery is judged (at least in myunderstanding) as spontaneous movement of the affected arm and the extent of the movement.  During the time while the individual isunable to move their arm, the nerves are healing.  It is extremely slow process. 

When my daughter did regain movement she was around 4 months old.  She had range of motion but also had the distinct waiters tip. Before her surgery when she was 2 1/2 years old, Hera was unable to reach her arm at 90 degrees out in front. She could not supinate her hand or reach her arm out to the side in any significant way.  During that time she participated in physical therapy and occupational therapy.  

One of the most difficult things for Hera was balance.  Without the aid of her right arm, she learned to walk at around 16 months.  Once she could walk, she often fell to her right side.  I recall her walking down the sidewalk near our home and as she began to fall she moved her head out as if she were trying somehow to catch herself with the right side of her body but the only effective movement she could make was with her head.