It started out hard, right from the beginning, cause she was born sick.
Not the kind of sick that comes with a cold or the flu. And definitely not the kind of sick that one could recognize from the outside.
Never the less, she was born sick.
Her mother tells the story, at times with dismay and often with affection.
“You see, there was something wrong with her right from the time I brought her home from the hospital…no, no, …it was before that….”
Apparently, from the moment of her birth, from the very first second that her mother laid eyes on her, her mother knew that there was something wrong with this child. But in “those days” all the doctors kept telling her that she was but a nervous, new mother, and if she would just calm down the baby wouldn’t sense her unease and would be “just fine”.
“Fine” the mother would wail…”this child can vomit at fifty paces!”
At the time of her birth, they were New Brunswick, in the Navy, “met and married” (they would later grow fond of saying). A refuge for the mother…a place to be an independent woman in an era of Victorian views, and an attempt at “being his own man” for the father…an escape from a tyrannical father.
Yes, they met and married in the Navy. Married in their blue serge uniforms…a wren and a sailor. When she found out that she was pregnant the mother left the Navy, but the father stayed on…to support his family.
After she was born, they had to leave the Navy base. Children weren’t allowed in the married couple’s barracks. So the mother packed while the father worked. And when she wasn’t packing, the mother held her daughter and she sat on a crate rocking her, adding her own wails to that of the screaming child.
The story goes that when the movers arrived, with the big truck, one of the moving men came and stood in the door and watched the mother holding the baby, and listened to them cry. Cry and rock, rock and cry.
The moving man tried to talk to the mother, to calm her down. But the mother was inconsolable. She knew her daughter was dying.
Now comes the first of the “little oddities” that would come to define her life. The small coincidences that held her apart from the rest of the world in her mind’s eye.
The moving man had a sister. The sister was a nurse. A nurse that worked for a pediatrician. A pediatrician with a horrendous waiting list and a passion for protocol. The moving man sees the terror in the mother’s eyes and calls his sister at her job. The sister tells him that he is nuts, and that she is not bothering the “great doctor” with her brother’s fancy.
But the moving man pleads with her and eventually she relents. She speaks to the doctor, and he in turn eventually speaks to the mother…
“When you touch the baby’s stomach, does it ripple?” Asks the doctor.
“Yes”, snuffles the mother.
“Does she have projectile regurgitation?”
“Wh…What?”
“Can she puke and hit the far wall?”
“She hasn’t kept a bottle down since she was born.”
“How old is she?”
“She’s only twenty one days old and she’s gonna die!” Wails the mother.
“Madam”…says the doctor…”get that baby to the hospital immediately…right now, do not stop to get her a bottle, do not stop to change her diaper, do not stop to put on your lipstick, do not even stop to find your purse. Get that child here immediately…a matter of life and death!” (And the mother thought that she was frightened before.)
The moving men rush out and uncoupled the transport truck from the trailer and the mother climbs up into the cab with the wailing child. The moving man rushes them to the hospital…careening around corners and running lights. The doctor rushes the baby into surgery and in a matter of hours, saves the girl child’s life from an ailment that usually only happens to boys.
So at the age of twenty-one days, she has her first scar…almost a second belly button. And has lived through the first of the many coincidences that will make her who she is.
She has survived the beginning of the good fight.