Baby Lost by Hannah Robert

Author:Hannah Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522869446
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

16

Scar tissue

In late February 2010 I had my review appointment with the trauma unit at Royal Melbourne. The doctor who saw me introduced himself as Ganesh, and I immediately thought of images of the elephant-headed god. He talked me gently through the CT scans that had been taken on the night of the accident. There was Z, curled in my womb, her hand up near her face. Oh, my little one. There was no need for any further scans. The liver and spleen damage seemed to be healing up well, and I wouldn’t need to come back.

At home, I made a sketch of my trauma doctor. Like his namesake deity, he had the head and sad, serious eyes of an elephant, but a human body with two arms: one gesturing towards a CT scan, another holding aloft tweezers gripping a bloodied shard of windscreen glass.

I had dreams of walking with my one crutch and a heavy backpack, up hills, through endless train stations, around in circles. Somewhere along the way, I realised I’d left the crutch behind and I’d been walking without it—but, instead of being pleased, I was devastated. I woke and walked stiffly to the bathroom, realising how fond I was of this limp and my crutch as visible signals that I was still wounded. I understood now why people wore black for mourning. It is simpler and less confronting than having to continually convey the message, ‘Someone I love has died. I feel irretrievably broken—please go gently with me.’

Since the accident, I hadn’t been able to lift my left leg from the knee. I would sit there, cajoling my foot to rise, but the best it could do was slide forward. The message to lift seemed to fizzle out somewhere between brain and leg. My physio had brusquely assured me this movement would come back, and had focused on breaking down the scar tissue so that I could bend my knee. One day my stepmum, Debbie, a retired physiotherapist, sat down with me.

‘You still can’t lift this leg?’

‘Nope; I can’t even remember what it feels like to lift it.’

She patted the couch, saying, ‘Both legs up here,’ and rolled a towel to prop under my left knee. With a tea towel, she made a little sling for my ankle, so that she could lift my foot.

‘Okay. I’m going to help you lift it—but you lift too.’

She lifted it slowly, giving me time to respond. Move, I told my leg. And, suddenly, my breath caught with a small sob of pain. When I slowed things down, I realised that my brain wasn’t just issuing an unheard ‘Move’ command—it was also receiving a pain message. I had to receive and listen to the pain message before my leg could override it and lift through the pain. Once I did that, and allowed myself to feel the pain, my foot started lifting out of Debbie’s hand.

‘Yes; see, you’re doing it now!’

It was tiny, but it was movement.

I tried again the next morning, on my own, getting bolder and lifting my whole leg forwards from the knee.

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