eli

                    
October 10, 2002, 11:30 am. 7 month old premature infant born with mild spastic dysplasia to Rodney Raphael and Melissa Thomas: Daneyah Thomas. Ever since I was a baby, I beat the odds. I held on. The doctors thought they knew that I wouldn't walk or talk. Well, shit, for the sake of humanity, I hope Irvington Memorial Hospital gets better doctors. They predicted wrong. The name Daneyah means God's joyous child. Expectations have always been high for me, with a name like that;expectations that I've been trying to live up to, I'd been living like I've always had something to prove. My parents are very religious, and this was just another thing that God gave to them.
"God loves you." Mom  would say, "he's made you like this for a reason, he chose you."
I held onto that for a while. It kept me going through all of the grueling knee pain, and on difficult nights, that was the reason to keep going.  I made it through elementary, even though they saw my disability as a liability, and never listened to me. So, I started speaking up. Very fucking loudly. And it worked, sort of..I made a lot of new friends, and people seemed to like my personality, (that's a shocker considering that I have a special personality.)And then, came 6th grade where all of that didn't mean shit anymore. All of a sudden, teenage hormones were a thing, and girls were not so nice anymore. So for most of that year, I kept to myself in the library, just reading and writing when I had no work to do. I was born with a knee condition that made them bend so quickly that I was almost standing in a fetal position, and the pain got worse. It got so agonizing that if I had no surgery, I would never be able to walk again. My mom and I went to a lifelong pediatrician of ours, someone I viewed as an ol' friend. Guess what? Ol' friend didn't know jackshit either, he sent us to a new orthopedic surgeon every six months.
"Her hips are fine. I'm surprised she even still walking like this." A doctor said. I'd made myself come up with ways to tell whether or not people were lying to me. I was sick of trusting them with my body at this point, but, they were the doctors and unless I could get a doctorate at 12, they'd have to do. I began to judge my doctors on their appearance, and the way their facial expressions looked.
He has wide set blue eyes, and dark brown hair, they say that people with eyes farther away from their noses are more trustworthy. I thought. He also has blue eyes, so he's an explorer. He'll try something, he'll figure something out. News flash: he didn't. Neither did the rest of them, about 10 in all of Irvington and Morristown to be exact. The pain had gotten so bad that even walking to the bus in the morning was tiring. My parents began to think that I'd just given up, and that I didn't want to walk anymore. I was 11 by that time. I was using my wheelchair a lot more too. I loved pink. Everything was pink, my crutches, my wheelchair.
I refuse to look out of style. Everything must be color-coordinated. Just because it was pink didn't make it look less medical. I was so done for. I'd convinced myself that God was getting to fixing me. But that led to other questions that I'd never asked myself before. If he made me this way for a reason, why can't he be the one to fix it? I wanted to believe that it maybe He was helping a homeless family get food for the night, or maybe He was guiding the doctors through a surgery that was supposed to be impossible. So I kept holding on, I'd made it through this much, what was a couple more months?
Then, what came an event that can only be explained as a divine intervention. God had a good day on July 28, 2016. My aunt and grandma were on their flight home from Cancun. My great aunt, Lystra, is what my family likes to describe as extra. She has absolutely no filter. If you lookin' dusty one day at the dinner table, oh honey, she'll be the one to tell ya. You'll never look dry at the Thanksgiving table again, that's for sure. So naturally, Aunty Lystra had no problem stepping in when she saw an issue that hit too close to home.
"Daphne, that child doesn't remind you of Mama?" Aunty Lystra squinted her eyes in disbelief I imagine.
"Yeah, now that you say it." Granny said, "she does look a little like Mama," they continued to speak broken English dialect, at the fault of their Caribbean descent. Also, "Mama" was the nickname they used when they couldn't remember what my name was. Yeah, they did that a lot.
Aunty Lystra went to go do what she did best, instigating. In no time, she'd questioned the family about their child, and it turns out, she had my exact condition. The family handed my aunt a note that read: Nemours Hospital in Delaware. Little did I know, what I was looking for wasn't destined to be found by me.