You Can Choose Your Friends...

Synchronicity can be a beautiful thing. She’s the big, fun sister of Coincidence. Usually, she’s benevolent. She helps you find a great book on a bench just as you’re bemoaning the lack of something interesting to read. She facilitates an accidental meeting with the man you’re madlusting for just after you’ve had your hair done. She ensures your sister-in-law has finished having her children when you start having yours so you inherit an entire wardrobe of lovely baby clothes.

Usually, Synchronicity smiles on me but today, the day I’m due to take O to the Spina Bifida clinic, she’s pissed off. The morning starts at 4AM with O screaming her guts out. She’s in pain, uncomfortable and tired. We spend four hours consoling her then R has to leave for work and I’m left trying to contain her pain while my back aches from the pressure of the ever-growing twins. An hour later, I bundle her into the car and we’re off to the hospital for the dreaded Spina B appointment. The first face I see as I’m entering the waiting room is the angry boy (now man) I used to look after ten years ago. Sydney isn’t that small of a city. There are at least ten hospitals with spinal wards. Why would I be confronted with the one person I know who has a neural tube defect in this entire town? He’s still in a wheelchair, the hump on his back even more pronounced than I remember it, but his face has changed. He looks peaceful. I greet him. He recognises me, is polite, charming even. I note the easy way he jokes with the doctors and nurses who minister to him. I know I should feel happy, relieved that he’s less belligerent, at peace. But something about his ease is making me terribly uncomfortable. He’s accepted his fate, I realise. He’s not fighting anymore. He knows he’s lost.

I don’t have too much time to dwell on my placid friend before Doctor Loud Bowtie grabs my hand, squeezes O’s cheek and welcomes us to the clinic. He’s irritatingly friendly as he explains O will be seen by several doctors this morning. It’s the team approach that helps “these kids” get proper treatment, he claims. A good theory, but with O and I both utterly exhausted from the morning’s shenanigans, the prospect of seeing seven doctors in a row is as appealing as having my teeth removed by a Nazi with a bleeding gum fetish.

First up is a neurologist. He’s young. And cocky. He tests O’s reflexes and pokes her with a sharp implement in various body bits, all the while making me repeat her entire medical history to him. When he’s finished, he smiles paternally. Yes, he says, she has diminished sensation in certain parts of her legs and buttocks. You do realise there’s a chance she May Never Walk.

He said it.

The thing I’ve been fearing and hiding from and praying no-one ever says.

But she moves her legs, I tell him, quickly. Like I can eat up the words his said if I just talk fast enough.
Yes, he says, but does she take weight on them?
No, I stammer, but she’s recently had spinal surgery and she’s been in hospital six times in ten months and she-
He stops me. It’s a matter of wait and see, he tells me. The urologist will see you next.

I stumble through 5 more doctors, scarce hearing them as I repeat O’s medical history with less and less coherence. All I can think of is the neurologist’s flippant words.
She May Never Walk.

I manage to gather that the urologists will order a scan of her bladder and kidneys. I’m not sure I want to know why. The orthopaedic surgeon examines her and says he doesn’t think she’ll need orthopaedic surgery but will reassess her regularly. The neurosurgeon examines the scar on her back and mutters something about being lucky the cord was tethered low rather than high. And the rest, I’m afraid, is a blur. Until we get to the final medical professional – the physiotherapist. She takes one look at O and comments on how lovely her leg movements are. That’s all is takes, someone being nice. I start to cry the tears of a mentally unstable woman (they’re huge fuckers, these particular tears, and they come with an unnaturally guttural heaving noise which resembles a cow in labour). The physio quickly draws the curtains around us and tries to console me. I explain what the neurologist said. She shoots a dagger glare his way and reminds me that doctors are often trained to give you the worst-case scenario. Yes, O will need help learning to walk, but it can’t be said that it won’t happen. She tells me she won’t do an assessment on O now, I should come to the clinic in the New Year and we can do it then. When I feel better. It doesn’t even bother me that she’s using the tone I’m sure she reserves for schizophrenics and small animals.

I stagger away. Dr Loud Bowtie puts his arm around me and tells me he hopes my first visit to the clinic wasn’t too traumatic. He’ll get “the girls” to make me another appointment for January. You’ll get used to it, he assures me. It’s all a lot to take in the first time. The more he talks, the more panicked I become. I don’t want to get used to it, I don’t want to ever have to come back, why don’t these people and their tests and their invasive implements and predictions about my daughter just leave us alone? I feel myself slip so far off the precipe of rationality I almost reach New Zealand.

But it’s the final words that Dr Bowtie hurls at me that push me into a new dimension of madness.

Welcome to The Family, he says.

And no matter how far away I push O’s stroller, I can’t help but fear we’re going to be forever related to these people in ways I haven’t even begun to imagine.