Dwarf: A Memoir by Tiffanie Didonato & Rennie Dyball

Author:Tiffanie Didonato & Rennie Dyball
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Nonfiction
ISBN: 0452298113
Publisher: Plume
Published: 2012-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

You’re Gonna Be the One That Saves Me

Mike in the limo at my sweet sixteen birthday celebration.

THE DAILY ROUTINE I dreaded most during the bone-lengthening process was pin care. Not even the constant physical therapy was worse, because once I was pumped up to stretch or do range-of-motion routines, my blood scorched through my veins and empowered me to work.

Nothing pumped me up for pin care. With more than a dozen pins protruding from my legs, I had to clean them— every single one of them— twice a day.

It not only hurt, it was messy and irritating and tediously repetitive. The process took about forty-five minutes each time. First there was the task of gathering supplies from the linen closet: a blue absorbent pad, sterile saline, a plastic presealed cup, quarter-sized octagon-shaped sponges, sterile cotton swabs that looked like giant Q-tips, and hydrogen peroxide. Then there was the prep work.

First I filled a cup with saline. Next my mom lifted my legs and placed the pad underneath them to catch the liquid that would inevitably roll off, and the big Q-tips went into the cup. Then we had to remove all of the little octagon-shaped sponges that were anchored around each pin from the night before. It was painstaking. Worse yet, some of the sponges dried to the pin sites, like clingy stubborn little squeegees, wrapped around the pins. There was no choice but to rip them away. Pin care was a necessary evil. There was just no way around it. Eventually, I found a way around some of the sticky scenarios. Ever a control freak and insistent on doing things myself, I poured hydrogen peroxide over each pin and let the mini sponges absorb it until they were too soaked to stick. The cold peroxide made my thigh muscles rise up and flex around the pins— which was almost as painful as a muscle spasm. This was only the beginning. Each pin took four Q-tips. I dipped each swab into the saline and wiped away any scabs, making sure also to push my skin gently down and away from the pin. Twice a day I was a living, breathing, barely walking maintenance machine. And I bitched and moaned, winced and clenched my teeth the whole time.

Coping with pain in my house meant one of two things. If you could fix it, you did so and moved on. If you refused to fix it, you were on your own. “Suffer, then!” Mom would say— the choices were to suffer or fix it. Given those two options, I did my best to “get a straw,” as Mom was so fond of saying, and suck it up.

While going through the tedious motions one day, a TV ad for a car— a BMW Z3— caught my gaze and wouldn’t let go. The car was beautiful, sexy, and intriguing. The driver looked carefree and limitless. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen on television. Everything about that vehicle exemplified independence and I desperately wanted it.

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