THE BLIND and THE LAME

2. Memories

I lay in bed fully awake, reminiscing about what had led to this moment. Robbie and I became friends when we started middle school. Before that he had been home-schooled because of his delicate health as an infant and small child, and his poor eyesight. As a rising sixth-grader, though, he begged to be sent to public school. He was the oldest kid in the class. I in my turn I had fallen from a tree in the first week of school the previous year and broken my thigh bone right at my already seriously compromised hip, and shattered my kneecap as well. I had surgery in the city and was sent home in a spica cast from my armpits to the toes of my right leg and to just above the knee of my left. I spent nearly two months imprisoned in that cast. After that it was a wheelchair through June. It cost me a year of school. I walked with crutches for the first time on the day before my twelfth birthday and I was still on them when school started and would be for two months after that. I caught hell from my parents for climbing a tree in the first place. Well, a kid had to be a kid, right?

So what ailed my hip? As I started kindergarten, a couple of months after my fifth birthday, I began to come home every day limping, with pain in my right leg. As time went on my limp became more pronounced and my thigh ached constantly. After a month of that my mother took me to our doctor who said it was just growing pains. Finally, on the Monday after Thanksgiving, she took me again and insisted that he set me up with an orthopedist in the city. Wow! I got to ride the commuter train! They took x-rays of my whole lower body, then more of my right hip. That puzzled me because it was in my thigh that I was feeling the pain. It seemed like forever before we were escorted to an office, and more forever before the doctor came in with a couple of x-ray films in his hand. He hung them up on a lighted panel on the wall facing us and said, "Son – your name is James, right?"

"Yes, sir," I replied, "but everybody calls me Jimmy."

"Jimmy, it looks like you've picked up a nasty business in your hip called Perthes disease. He pointed to the x-ray and said, "This is the ball of your hip, except it doesn't look much like a ball. Look here at your good hip and you'll see the difference. For some reason, one hip in a thousand gets all rotted out and gets flat from your weight. Nobody really understands why. Walking on that is what's causing your pain."

"But Doctor," my mom said, "he says it's his thigh that hurts."

"Mrs. Latham," the doctor said, "It's not unusual for hip pain to be referred there. I thought as a nurse you would know that."

"I'm a cardiac nurse," my mother said. "I don't often work the lower body, especially in children."

"I see," said the doctor. "Now – in my experience most of these cases heal on their own if the patient refrains from walking on the affected hip. We're going to put Jimmy a Snyder sling and give him a pair of crutches and we'll see how he's doing in three months."

"Three months!" my mother exclaimed. "That long?"

"Mrs. Latham," the doctor explained. "These cases typically take at least two years to resolve themselves, many as long as three."

"Oh Jimmy," she said.

"It's OK, mom. Crutches – that will be fun." The timeline meant nothing to me. All I could think of was that older kid with his whole left leg missing that I'd seen in our town center sometimes. I asked Mom what happened to him and she said he'd had cancer. I asked her what that was and she said, "Jimmy, you don't want to know." That boy, whoever he was, had visited my imagination and my dreams constantly for as long as I could remember.

The doctor said, "Jimmy buddy, after a while it won't be much fun, but you'll have to make the best of it, OK?"

"Yes, sir," I said. I still did not comprehend what I was facing.