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Again I was like that dog
circling around and around on a bed trying to find the most comfortable
place to rest. Rhonda had suddenly become dissatisfied with wearing her
braces.
Every morning it was a
battle to get her to put them on her legs. She would literally fight to
keep from being laced up into them. The velcro straps her one able hand
would grab and jerk, jerk and jerk again until they were undone. By the
time the struggle was over and she was off and gone on the bus I was
exhausted. This went on until I decided it was time to go to the school,
Carroll, to where she was attending so I could understand why she had
suddenly become so difficult.
“I heard you drive up, Mrs.
Flood.” Rhonda and one other child, who was blind, were in the therapy
room.
“Now just how did you
know?” I was puzzled.
“You drive a Ford,” the
little girl told me.
“Okay,” I laughed. This
child was undaunted in her quest to live.
The therapist wasn’t all
too friendly as I tried to engage her in conversation. Finally she was
honest with me, “She doesn’t want to wear her braces,” the woman spoke
outright.
An Oklahoma Crude expletive
could have been expressed but was not.Everyone who might have advised me
didn’t seem to know how to answer my questions.
“Can you see how these
braces are throwing her whole body out of a natural alignment. The heavy
belt around her lower back is causing her torso to bend back and that
causes her to have to pull her head and neck forward. As a result she is
getting this tongue thrusting. The hard won speech therapy is just being
thrown out the window. She can’t talk with her mouth all filled with her
tongue being pushed forward..” I kept trying to find someone who could
help me with this dilemma. In the meantime, Rhonda was still fighting me
daily not to put the braces on her legs and I would take them off the
minute she came in off the bus.
“Oh my! Just look these
cruel things have rubbed a blister on you hip.” I was so upset when I
called the doctor I was practically crying.“You are going to have blisters
or sores. It isn’t that much of a problem.” He told me.
I hung up the phone and was
determined to do some research on what? I didn’t know where to go. As I
spoke to the kind librarian she was all too ready to find me whatever I
wanted. She especially recommended the book called “Karen.” It was a story
about a mother who had fought with the braces for years only to trash the
whole effort. The kind lady said it was such a joy to see her daughter
pleasantly going about her life from the ease of her wheelchair and not to
have to be struggling along on tortuous heavy, steel braces.
Readers Digest came out
with an article on the work of Doman and Delacatto. It was a different
kind of therapy and they claimed it was working much better than anything
else for paralysis.
Probably, since the doctors
believed in those braces, I would have been still with them other than I
couldn’t stand the thought of torture in the way of the sores and then
there was the all the time put into speech therapy that was simply being
lost.
Again, I walked away from a
potentially productive lifestyle, or maybe not, to follow my heart and
desire to see we did all we could for our disabled daughter.
“You don’t miss having a
household helper in your home?” A friend asked me.
My mind went to the beloved
girl, Ruby, who had worked so hard for me and was so dedicated to our
family’s well being but, as in all things, unlike Lot’s wife, I never
looked back. |
