TRAUMA DRAMA, Chapter One

By Bonnie Hayden

I was told I walked early. I don't remember.

I once saw a picture of "baby Bonnie" -- ME -- standing in front of our house.

I don't remember. I don't remember when I stopped walking.

I have little flashes of memories, from maybe when I was four years old. Doctors in white coats pulling on my legs, trying so damn hard to straighten out the muscles. Open the joints. Vaguely I recall thick white casts being smeared on my legs.

To this day, I don't know why the doctors were doing this.

Ma never said. She just stood by and watched.

I don't even remember how many times they tried to straighten my legs out and put them in casts. I remember they drilled holes in my knees, and in my ankles. Twice they did that.

I do remember the fear and the excruciating pain I felt every time I had to go to the doctor's office so they could cut the casts off.

I remember Ma covering my ears

and telling me to stop crying like a goddamn baby.

I was no more than four or five years old.

After the doctors were finished cutting off my casts, my dad would pick me up very gently and he would carry me to physical therapy.

I lived there, in what was then Pittsfield General Hospital, for months at a time. I never went to school. What I learned, I learned from tutors.

There at the hospital, therapists would try to force my legs to bend. They wanted to open my broken joints.

Pushing and pulling. Punishing. Always always punishing me with the pain. They were always measuring "degrees of movement" with

I was alone with these people, total strangers, for what felt like hours. Days. I was so very young.

No one talked to me. No one laughed or tried to cheer me up. THEY ALWAYS TALKED ABOUT ME, AS IF I WASN'T THERE. They talked about what to try next. They talked about what decisions they had to make:

which set of casts they would make into splints, splints that I had to wear every single night.

Torture. It was...torture.

Because my joints were collapsing from the juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, I had to sit all day long, and my knees would bend and every night Ma would force my legs back into the casts and tape them tight.

Dad would not do it.

Dad said that Ma was just torturing me, for nothing. He said the doctors and therapists were wasting their time.

Eventually I realized. Dad was right.