Chapter Sixteen #2
“I was sent to Boston Children’s Hospital and lived there for the first six months of my life.
I required open heart surgery and pulmonary procedures.
” She held up her left hand. “See this scar?” she asked, pointing to her palm below her pinkie finger, and he nodded.
“That was from the removal of an extra finger. I had them on both hands and extra toes on both feet. To say I was a medically fragile and complex child was an understatement.”
“I had no idea,” he whispered, taking her hand again.
“Most don’t. They see the overall picture and think, Oh, she’s a little person. It’s more complex than that. Do you know what I mean?” she asked, and he nodded. “I was also born without baby teeth or nails.”
He lowered his brow and leaned in to inspect her hands, his eyes widening when he realized the truth. “Those are painted onto your skin. I never noticed.”
“Most don’t,” she said with a shrug. “My nail technician uses a special paint. I can’t do artificial nails because there isn’t anything to stick them to.”
“If you were born without baby teeth, what did you do until your adult ones came in?”
“I had temporary dentures as a child that worked okay, but weren’t ideal. After consulting with a dentist, it was determined that I had sparse adult teeth as well, so those were pulled and I got a full set of implant dentures in high school.”
“I’m sure all of that is just the tip of the iceberg of what you’ve been through,” he whispered. “Did you live in medical foster care?”
“That’s what one would expect, right? But no, I was extremely fortunate to have the best adoptive parents in the world.
My mother was a nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital.
It didn’t take her long to realize I had no visitors or family.
I’d had no skin-to-skin contact with another human that wasn’t painful, so she stepped in.
She was a NICU nurse, but after her shift, she stayed the way a mom would.
She came in on her days off and was there for the surgeries, setbacks and little victories.
“Soon, her husband, who was a surgeon there, started coming with her on the weekends to see me, and they applied for an emergency foster care license. There was no way she was letting me leave the hospital with anyone but her. In the end, they adopted me while I was still in the hospital, so when I came home, it was to stay. We moved to Pennsylvania when she took a different job, and we lived there until I was ten. Then, we moved to California when she was recruited for a management position in one of the children’s hospitals.
I attended college and worked in Silicon Valley for years.
When they decided to move to Florida to retire, I also wanted a change, so I applied to Secure Watch.
For the first time in my life, I moved thousands of miles away from the two people who had always taken care of me.
It was a difficult adjustment at first, but now I love the independence.
More than that, I love that they can enjoy their life without worrying about me. ”
“They love you, so they still worry about you,” he said, and she nodded.
“True, but it’s a healthier kind of worry now.
They’re both retired, so they do a lot of free care around the country in low-income clinics and such.
I see them every few months, and I miss them between visits.
They’re thinking about moving to the Midwest. It turns out Florida isn’t for them, but they also don’t want to move back to a big city.
They find their time in the Midwest working in rural communities invigorating, so they’re exploring that now. ”
“We need more people like them in this world,” he said, and she nodded vigorously.
“You’re not kidding. I’ll always be grateful for the sequence of events that brought them into my life. I can never have kids, but if I could, I would want to be just like her.”
“You can’t have kids?”
She inhaled deeply for a moment before responding. It was always hard for her to admit, even though she had known from a young age that she could never be a mother.
“Imagine this body growing a child and giving birth to it,” she said, motioning at herself.
“I didn’t think dwarfism precluded pregnancy, but maybe that just shows my ignorance.”
“It depends on the dwarfism,” she said with a shrug. “My kind of dwarfism is a hard and firm no. My truncal size alone excludes it, but my heart wouldn’t handle the added fluid and requirements to sustain a pregnancy. I had a hysterectomy during one of my rib surgeries when I was sixteen.”
“That had to have been a tough decision,” he said, and she could tell he was trying to assimilate what she was telling him, but she was sure he hadn’t yet considered what it meant for his life if they became involved. He would. They always did.
“It was an easy decision for me, but much harder to convince a doctor to do it. I went to a counselor who agreed I was aware of the implications of having my uterus removed. I was trying to prevent an emergency situation if I were to become pregnant. In my opinion, there was no reason to keep it if I could never use it.”
“That’s fair,” he answered. “I still wish you hadn’t dealt with so much, so young.
” After a check of his watch, he sighed.
“It’s almost eleven. We’d better get that sleep that Cal talked about so we can get back to clearing my name and finding Hugo’s killer.
Once we’ve done that, I have plans to make, big and small,” he said as he stood and helped her down off the chair.
As they got ready for bed, his words ran through her mind. He had plans to make, big and small, but she was sure as soon as the penny dropped, the small ones would fall by the wayside. She always did.