It started out like any other Sunday. We'd all gotten up, dressed and had breakfast before heading to dance lessons. I'd just started learning modern dance (or jazz dancing as they called it back then). Before then I'd done ballet and tap. I was seven-and-a-half, my little sister almost five.
It was six o'clock in the evening. My family had just finished dinner and my sister and I went out to play on the swings. We had had the swings for six years. Steph went into the house to ask my mom something. I wasn't going very high on the swing. I was pushing myself with my legs. I leaned back while holding onto the chains that hold the swing up so that I could pick up speed, the same thing millions of other people on swings have done millions of times before. The same thing I had done numerous times.
Suddenly while I was swinging, I fell. First my back, then my head, then my butt, then my legs hit the ground. I was in a lot of pain. I got up and sat in front of the swing and cried. I got up and walked into the house. went into the living room. I sat down on the chesterfield. Standing up didn't help, neither did sitting. Everything I did hurt like hell. When I told my mom that I'd fallen and that I was really sore, she suggested a warm bath because I'd probably just bruised some muscles.
I sat in the water for a while after I'd gotten washed. I was one of those kids who loved to play in the bath.
"Time to get out," my mother told me when the water had started to get too cold. I started to stand but I couldn't. My legs wouldn't cooperate with me. "No time for games."
I told my parents that I wasn't playing this time, I honestly couldn't stand. My father picked me up out of the tub and put me on my feet. My legs were like jelly and wouldn't hold me. Like a ragdoll I fell to the floor. Dad picked me up and carried me to my room where he tried to get me to stand again. Once more I fell to the floor. My father went to start the car while Mom helped me into my pajamas. Dad came back in and carried me out to the car and took me to the hospital.
Once in the ER, he asked if I wanted to sit in a wheelchair or a regular chair. Something told me that I wasn't in good shape so I told him I'd like to sit in the wheelchair. He put me in one and then went to the nurses' station to register. He came to sit beside me and I told him that my legs felt funny. He asked how they felt funny and I told him that they were pins-and-needles and numb. He put his hand on my leg and I told him that I couldn't really feel his hand. I knew that something was seriously wrong with me then. Every few minutes he would put his hand on my leg and each time I felt it less and less.
An hour after we got to the hospital I was taken into the exam room and lifted onto the stretcher. They did a pinprick test where they run the point of a safety pin over areas of skin to check whether you can feel it. The results were not good. Four hours from the fall to the exam. That's all it took for all movement and feeling from my waist to my toes to be gone. After many tests and x-rays they couldn't tell us why I could no longer feel or move my legs.
My grandfather arrived and brought my mom to the hospital, my grandmother was with my sister. He and my dad went home and I was transferred by ambulance to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto for further testing. Mom and I played the Alphabet Game all the way from Richmond Hill to Toronto. I was so tired. It was after 10 p.m. Way past this little girl's bedtime.
The rest of what happened over the next four months (actually most of the next year) is fuzzy, not because of any head injury or temporary amnesia. It's more likely because of the fact that seven-and-a-half-year-olds can only handle so much before their minds begin to protect them from trauma.
I do remember the giant Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animal on the wall outside the door of the exam room at Sick Kids. I remember being so tired and cranky and they wouldn't let me sleep because they were afraid of brain injury. I remember my legs being black-and-blue with bruises from the pinprick tests because I'm so fair-skinned and bruise easily.
I remember the ambulance ride from Sick Kids to the rehab centre at the end of March. That I remember because my uncle was the paramedic who drove me and my mom to the rehab hospital and we stopped at McDonald's for Chicken McNuggets on the way.
Twenty-one years ago today it happened. Twenty-one years, countless x-rays and blood tests. Twenty-three operations. The bicycle that I had just started to learn to ride without training wheels has been replaced by first a manual wheelchair and now a motorised one. My vacations have been spent in hospitals, including my 16th birthday.
It's funny how something so innocent as a fall from a swing can change one's life so drastically forever.
