First published in the Tri-Town Transcript Jun 19, 2019
By Esther C. Baird
I’m typing this in the last gasp of May and you’re reading it in early June, which frankly is not much better. Volumes have been written about the horrors of May for parents of school-aged kids. Other columnists, bloggers and YouTube singing families are wittier, more agitated, funnier and, though it’s hard to imagine, even snarkier than I am about this time of year.
Personally, I’m just exhausted and barely speaking to anyone I know. So I don’t want to talk about this seasonal blight on our sanity, except to say here at Casa Baird we marched through these final weeks with a twist. And the twist was that our ninth grade daughter couldn’t actually march.
Two days after we returned from April break (when, frankly schools should just close shop and call it summer even if the weather is still miserable) she tore a ligament in her ankle during a team practice.
Basically a torn ligament means no one has any clue when, or how, or if, you will heal. If there is an injury more vague and difficult to pinpoint than a sports induced torn ligament, I have not seen it.
Here in late May, she is on week five of no weight-bearing, plus an air boot, plus a scooter, plus crutches. This is all happening to a teenager during end-of-year finals, an academic travel week to a science station in the middle of a marsh, and, of course, all the assorted performances, concerts and award ceremonies that involve risers and so very many stairs.
It’s a tricky mix. But our daughter is doing a great job keeping her spirits up. She’s following her doctor’s orders so that she can heal, and she’s keeping a sense of humor.
I, on the other hand, didn’t have a sense of humor about this time of year before the injury happened, so it was easy for me to maintain that unamused status. This was especially true when doing things far from my happy place. For example, Six Flags New England.
We went because the high school chorale participated in a singing event that included passes to the park. After the kids performed (and my daughter navigated getting up onto the stage with a scooter, only to wisely stand to the side of the risers) we went to Six Flags for five freezing hours. There was just enough rain that the park stayed open while everyone got wet and hypothermic. Do you know how much indoor space there is at Six Flags? That’s right, zero.
And fine, there are ramps that run alongside the stairs to the park entrance for those with limited mobility. But is that really the best we can come up with? Instead of going up and down a flight of stairs, the only other option was to navigate 500 miles of switchback ramps. They were, by definition of being a ramp, either at a steep incline or decline, which, on wheels is tricky, and on crutches, is pure hazardous territory.
So much is made in physics about shortening space and time, wormholes and all that, but what if access-ramps prove the existence of a lengthening of space and time? Forget the twins in space, you can send a twin over the ramp at Six Flags and his stair-based counterpart will grow up, have a family and be waiting to introduce the ramp-twin to his great grandchildren when he finally arrives.
When we first realized we were in for a long haul recovery, I asked the orthopedic office how I could get a temporary handicap placard for my car. They laughed like it was a pretty good joke.
I didn’t get it. “I mean I drive her everywhere and every time we go some place I have to drop her off at the front door, hop out, get her crutches or scooter, leave her, go park the car wherever I normally park, walk back and then join her in the building. Isn’t there a handicap tag I can hang that’s temporary, like a two or three month tag?”
They gave me a government form full of sections that cross referenced to other sections and said, “It’ll take at least a month to get this through, so you can probably get a placard in about six to eight weeks, if you’re approved.”
Ah, ok, so the government’s ability to define “temporary” was the joke. Got it. Except, of course, I didn’t get the placard because there was no point — much like the end of the school year. But soon it will be over. However we get there, hopping, crutching, wheeling or time traveling, we’ll navigate those ramps and make it to the happy place called summer!