or an orderly would come to take me down for another test when I was having fun, listening to records or trying to understand a story someone was telling. When I got back on the floor, I was so happy to be with my friends again that whatever discomfort I had endured seemed well worth it.
One afternoon, I was taken to a floor I’d never been on. A nurse told me to take my clothes off and put on a hospital gown. Then she left me sitting in my wheelchair outside a closed door. I waited until a young doctor came out, grabbed my wheelchair, and pushed me into a big room full of doctors. Some I’d never seen before; others I’d seen on our floor when they made rounds. I recognized the important-looking doctor who was shocked when I’d said “Fuck you!” He asked a lot of questions of the younger ones, some so young-looking, I didn’t believe they were real doctors.
I was lifted by one of them onto an examining table. It was so high, I couldn’t have gotten on it by myself. Still, the young doctor should have asked if I needed help before lifting me. They all looked at me. Some came over to the table to touch me. They made me lie on my back and bent and stretched my legs, while I kept pulling down the hospital gown, trying to keep covered. Then they made me sit up again. One of the older doctors pushed on my back as he talked. I understood the word scoliosis. Some of the kids had surgery for that. They were in huge body casts, so they couldn’t sit in wheelchairs, but had to move around on stretchers.
Suddenly, I felt the hands behind me loosen the ties on my gown and push it off my shoulders.
“No!”
I thought I’d yelled loudly, but I didn’t hear my voice come out. I crossed my arms to hold the open gown over my swelling breasts, which still felt unfamiliar. The doctors kept talking and touching my back and pushing on my shoulders. Then one of the older ones grabbed me from behind under the arms, lifting me up. Another doctor held my hips down. The gown fell to the floor. I was naked. I shut my eyes as tight as I could to make all the American doctors disappear.
Then I was back in my wheelchair. My eyes were still closed, so I didn’t see who had gotten me off the table. When I opened my eyes, a woman doctor had picked up my gown and was helping me put it on. I had not noticed her before amid all the men. For a second, her eyes met mine. I thought she looked embarrassed. Maybe even guilty. Why did you let them do that? I wanted to yell at her. But she looked away so quickly, I couldn’t be sure what I saw in her eyes.
I raced to Audrey’s room the moment I got back on the floor. She wasn’t there. I went looking everywhere, wheeling so fast in and out of rooms, bumping into medicine carts, almost colliding with another kid, almost running over a nurse.
“Watch where you’re going! What’s the matter with you?”
“Audrey! Where’s Audrey?”
Finally, Chantelle stopped my wild run. A fifteen-year-old with skin like smooth, creamy chocolate and hair tightly pulled into a multitude of skinny braids, she had osteogenesis imperfecta and was small for her age, but she made up for her size with her sassy demeanor and her street-smart ways. She swiftly got in front of my chair with hers.
“Stop, girl, before you kill somebody!” she yelled in her high-pitched voice. “Do you wanna tell me what happened?”
“Where’s Audrey?”
“You can’t tell me? You can only tell Audrey? Okay. She should be coming up from PT soon.”
PT. That’s where Audrey was, of course. I went to Audrey’s room and waited, rocking back and forth in my chair, arms crossed over my chest. When Audrey came back, I tried to tell her what had happened, but I couldn’t think of the right words, and the words I thought of, I didn’t pronounce right. I kept starting over with the big room and so many doctors. Audrey knew right away what I was talking about. She hugged me, and I buried my face in her long blond hair and cried.
“I know” was all Audrey said.
“But I’m angry!”
“I know.”
“What they did was wrong!”
“I know.”
“I know,” Jane also said when Audrey told her what had happened.
“They’ve done it to Jane many times,” Audrey told me.
Rosa nodded. “You’ll get used to it.”
Standing near us was Matthew, an older boy, who in place of arms had little wings—that’s what they looked like. The doctors wanted to operate on him so he could wear artificial arms, which he didn’t want or need, since he could do everything with his feet. He had been listening to us girls.
“I wouldn’t mind being exhibited if they paid me,” he said. “At least in the circus, freaks get paid.”
“Don’t listen to him, he’s a smart-ass,” Rosa said.
It was sassy Chantelle who managed to lighten things up. “Girl,” she shrilled, grinning, “why didn’t you say ‘Fuck you’?”
My parents came that evening, as they did every evening. They came by subway from Brooklyn, and never got to the hospital before seven. My father looked tired, because he had worked hard all day. My mother looked lost. She missed her town, her family and friends, and couldn’t get used to this new country. I couldn’t tell my parents what had happened. I didn’t want to make them unhappy. Besides, I was too ashamed.
At last, the doctors decided to start by releasing a tendon in my right leg and scheduled me for surgery.
“Great! After the surgery, they’ll give you braces,” Rosa said.
I was wheeled down on a stretcher at 9:00 A.M. , smiling and waving good-bye to everyone. Audrey was still in bed. “Good luck!” she yelled from her room. I couldn’t see her, but I waved to her just the same. “Bye, Audrey!” I was not afraid. All the other kids had already had surgery; now I would be like everyone else.
I was taken to a floor that had a strange medicinal smell and left in front of a big closed door. When doctors and nurses wearing green gowns and masks went in and out, I tried to look through that door. All I could see was bright light.
Then a doctor and a nurse came over to me. The nurse held my arm and the doctor stuck a needle in my vein.
“Can you count backward from one hundred?” he asked.
I hadn’t learned to count that high in English, let alone count backward. I wanted to explain, but I fell asleep before I could say a word.
I woke up in a strange place, with glaring lights above me and weird beeps and humming noises all around me. It felt as if my leg were in a meat grinder, flesh and bones being crushed and chopped and mashed into a pulp. I could never have imagined such pain.
I cried “Aiuto!” meaning “help,” and called for my mother, “Mamma!”
The only words I could utter were in my native language. I couldn’t remember a single one of the hundreds of English words I’d learned. A nurse’s face appeared above me. She was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand her. She gave me a shot and I went back to sleep.
The next time I awoke, I was throwing up, my whole body seized with violent waves, heaving and retching the
