Showing posts with label awkward moments. Show all posts

My head is at the top of the table marked by the strip of yellow tape. Above me a space-age looking machine whirs above, there's a flash of clear light and the cross-hairs that were projected onto a point on my femur are suddenly gone.
The silence is palpable. It tastes something between desert dehydration and post-vomit bile. These are the seconds when I am trying to remain still, my leg quivers nervously from pain and from not wanting to know: is it broken? Is it badly broken? Will it need surgery? How long in the cast this time? How did all of this happen so quickly? Could I have done something to prevent it?
"Okay you can relax now" the radiologist tells me. Are you kidding?! I want to scream at her. This is not the moment where I can just "relax now.." this is when I wait for the picture to load up onto the screen. Lying on the table I awkwardly crane my neck to see if I can see the computer screen, I catch a glimpse of the x-ray slowly loading onto the monitor, but I'm too far away for even my own x-ray vision to see anything accurately. There is more silence and more nervous sweaty quivering until she tells me "you can have a seat in the waiting room, we'll call your name when it's ready." There is more time for silence out there.

--
The high school gymnasium was stuffed with row after row of dying-to-be-done-with-high-school teens. All four entrances into the gym could not be propped up any wider, no amount of silly teen flirting could tempt even the tiniest wind to relieve us from the insufferable heat. We are seniors and it is late spring of 2005, it is our awards ceremony for the graduating class.
"This next award goes to...." In fact I don't even remember what I was awarded for. There were things from the debate team, from the school newspaper, from the literary magazine, from the English department, and some other thing. "...For the student who has overcome challenges, persevered.." And suddenly the entire front row in which I was sitting turned to look at me. I pushed my manual wheelchair to the podium where the principal handed me a plaque. I shook his hand, took the plaque, and then the applause died down as the crowd awaited the next announcement, the next student. But the wooden frame was too heavy and bulky to hold in one hand and push with the other. The crowd of curious eyes watched as I probably fumbled a bit, trying to switch the plaque to my other hand. Then I realized that wouldn't work either, in came the seconds of silence waiting and watching for me to figure it out.
At the time and at that moment what I didn't realize was everyone in that room knew I'd be able to figure it out.

--
I could recount many other moments of silence. Most of which I am anything but comfortable in, and maybe that's just because I'm a person who likes lots of activity and fast-thinking. Silence usually brings a lot of waiting, watching, staring, observing, worrying, and lots of time that seems completely unguided. Shouldn't I be doing something right now? Is something I am constantly thinking, it can get to be too much. To say that I am terrible at silence would be an understatement. I've been trying to make some effort at being more comfortable in silence - and for someone who has an opinion about everything - that is quite a tall order. Without getting too zen or meditative (because I know nothing about either of those subjects), this is what I know so far about silence: it has a mind of its own and it doesn't include yours, it marches to the beat of its own drum unheard by anyone, and like a kite it'll pick up and leave on the next wind that blows past - not by any breath you blow on it.

Everything got weird for me around seventh and eighth grade. My breaks began picking up in pace again, I was confused about my friends - the girls whom I wanted to be friends with vs. the girls whom I felt I should be friends with; also there were boys (and since when are they never weird?), I wasn't sure if I had all the coolest Trapper-Keepers and neon colored pencils, and my collection of Pogs was still something I went home to play with. Oh yeah and umm... my body was being more awkward than it already was. Every day it seemed like I woke up to a body that became a little bit more of a stranger to me. And there I had been thinking but no one knows my body better than me!

Ugh puberty. Even as I write this my face is cringing. Why do our bodies pick the most uncertain time of our life to morph into more certain beings?! There are some things that were just meant to be purposely confusing and never make any sense, like ever.  

Before puberty my body was already strange, but it was a strangeness that I had known since birth. It was a strangeness that I understood and I could point to certain bowed areas or limbs and tell you a story behind each; and every story had a happily ever after ending. During this phase it seemed like every part of my body was beginning in the middle of some random Choose Your Own Adventure book except I never got to choose where it would wind up. Someone else was choosing for me. And every morning I woke up pleading can I just have ONE say in just ONE thing PUHHHLEASE?! Always to no avail.

As strange as this time was for me physically, I did find some odd comfort in the fact that all my friends were going through a similar weirdness. Finally, our bodies had something in common even if it was the most disgusting awkward commonality ever. I could deal. I went to a school system where the unit of 'Our Growing & Changing Bodies' was addressed in science class in the 6th grade. Vocab lists for each unit consisted of words like: fallopian tubes, uterus, urethra...and we were quizzed on the menstrual cycle like kindergartners learning how a chick grows in an egg. My friends and I would giggle in the back of the room; if ever you wanted to see a classroom chock full with invisible Berlin Walls between every boy and girl, just go to any middle school class that has a similar curriculum.

My parents signed the permission slip that allowed me to participate in the class. I come from a culture that just doesn't talk about human sexuality, so you can just forget about that conversation with my parents because it never happened. They sent me off to school probably hoping that all my brimming curiosities would be fulfilled. So I sat there trying to keep up with the worksheets and fill in the blank quizzes, and yet I still felt like I was learning about some species Earthlings had just discovered on Mars. The 'growing & changing' bodies of girls on the worksheets never looked like mine, the books we were given had arrows and labels stemming from the pictures that meant nothing to me. When I tried to over lay those pictures on to my own body it was like trying to navigate through the Bermuda Triangle with a map created in Australia - everything seemed misaligned, backwards, and destined to point me towards some lost vacuum in the sea.

I'm not sure when it was that I finally decided to hell with this, I'm just going to let it happen whatever it is. But at some point I did. It was probably because after awhile I decided I can't keep up with trying to figure out everything that my body is doing. I've never been able to explain every aspect of what's going on, it was like trying to ask my parents why do I have O.I. and no one else in our family? The answer is: because that's the way it is, and that's just how it happened.
After the initial two or three years of awkwardness things settled back again. Sure I had to get to know myself in my own skin again - but when I looked around I realized it's what everyone else was doing too and it seems that's ultimately what puberty is all about.  

Since you spend your days a convenient just-out-of-reach-feet from the toilet, and your view of the outside world is only gleaned from the millimeters of space between the door and stall walls.. let me take a moment to tell you exactly how it is out there:

By nature I'm not a very confrontational person so I'll try to be as civil as possible. I should warn you that what follows may make you quite a bit uncomfortable -- I am not sorry for that.

Having a rare condition means that being noticed is just a part of the package. If I were a product on a store shelf I would have a WARNING label and it would probably read something like this:

My friends enjoy teasing me for these and I have come to accept that I cannot go anywhere without at least one awkward moment.


1. Don't text and drive. Even if it's your power wheelchair. One time I was busy texting and soon found my head met the rear-end that belonged to a short old lady.

2. That time I only had 3 wheels on my chair. One of my rear wheels had fallen off - allegedly because one of my closest friends had been sitting on the back of it too much and it took the wheelchair company WAY too long to get a replacement part. The day that wheel fell off I had a mid-term in one of my classes and when my professor saw me she thought I was insane for rolling the 7 blocks to make it anyway. And trust me, if THAT professor was calling me insane.. then I guess sometimes my judgment can be really questionable.

3. Classy goes messy. It was a school tradition that the President served students breakfast. There were lots of administrators, deans, professors and tables stocked with food that had been nicely decorated. A corner of the tablecloth to one of the buffet tables got caught in my tire and BAM... onto the floor go an entire plate of cannoli's, pancakes, fruit.. I looked around and all I could say was "I guess the 5 second rule doesn't count?"

4. Painfully speechless. The editors of the high school newspaper were called in for a meeting that morning and there were bagels for us. It was an important meeting because we were having personnel issues and as I went to bite into my bagel - for whatever reason - the back of my jaw snaps. I sat for the duration of that incredibly tense meeting with my mouth shut, an un-chewed bite of bagel in my mouth, and just nodded and said "mmhmm" the whole time. Later on after school I went to the ortho and found out my jaw was broken - no fun at all!

5. The Claustrophobic Aide. In 9th grade my aide was claustrophobic. The reason why the school had hired her to begin with? So that she would go in the elevators with me as a preventative measure in case I got stuck or the elevator broke. Did I mention? She was claustrophobic... which means she never went in the elevators with me. Instead she would meet me at the next floor in front of the elevator doors and listen to make sure it was still running. Now that I think about it.. this incident deserves its own blog entry. It's an epic tale of youthful rebellion: The Time Sandy Staged a Coup & Got Rid of the Aide ;-)