A quote: “No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them.” ~~ William Godwin
I’ll start with a story …
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So much pain I almost missed Suzie hissing at me “Tell your mom this is all Buddy’s fault”. She raced down the street, cutting through yards, shouting “Mrs. Taylor! Kitty fell outta the tree!”
Mom was suddenly there as Suzie babbled about Buddy. She carried me to the car, shooing Suzie away. She glanced over at me while driving, “Kathryn?” I shook my head. Climbing that tree was my idea, not Buddy’s. Buddy was cool.
“Suzie is mad because Buddy ignores her.”
I was glad when we moved. I had seen the real Suzie. Now I can spot her anywhere.
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Now it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Dupin says: It will take time, they said. It did. The casts are off. I can wear shorts again.
No more bedpans.
No more gowns that open in the back.
No more someone else wiping my butt.
It was an accident, they said. It was nobody’s fault.
They say forgiveness is part of healing.
Of course they believed him. He’s a good kid. He’s trustworthy.
But he knows, and he knows that I know. He pushed me. On purpose.
Johnny Butler, when I’m more better, I will hurt you. You know what it is like to hurt and not be believed.
Cameron says: My heart stopped for a moment when I saw my daughter in crutches. You never want to see your kid hurt no matter what. She saw me and beamed happily at me.
“It’s not so bad,” she said. “You should see the other guy.”
I shook my head. “Climbing trees, hiking up dangerous trails. His parents’ number is on speed dial. What is it with you two always getting into trouble like this?”
She smirked. “Come on, daddy. Won’t this be a good story later?”
It did indeed make for a good story when I told it at their wedding.
Kids your age can’t even imagine what it was like before the polio vaccine. All summer long our folks would live in fear of an epidemic sweeping through your town. We all saw the pictures of whole wards full of kids in the old-fashioned ventilators they called the iron lung. Some of them were so totally paralyzed they couldn’t even move, and others had just lost the nerves that told their lungs to breathe, but all of them were totally dependent on those machines to survive.
We thought the kids on crutches were the lucky ones. At least they didn’t have to worry about suffocating if the power went out. That picture over there is your Great-Aunt Sally. She probably caught it at a graduation party for one of the neighbors. She never got married, just stayed at home all her life and took care of her folks even when she was barely getting around herself.
If she was bitter about the Salk vaccine coming out the next year, she never breathed a word about it. But she was the one who inspired me to study medicine, to go into research instead of practice. I wanted to find out why nerves can’t heal like skin and muscles can, and whether that’s a hard limit of the universe or just a limit of our technology.
And then the medical profession went and sold our birthright for a mess of pottage, and now we’re close to even the old tried and true vaccines being abandoned because of that betrayal. Now it’s only a matter of time before all those old pestilences come back to cut great swaths through a new generation. All I can do now is physick my own as best I can with what’s left and watch my own kin die of things that used to be trivial to treat or even prevent.
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