Chapter 8 #3
"Yep." I try to shrug off the reminder of those sessions with Nancy and how much it hurt to hear echoes of her ableism in my family's well-meaning pressure to try one more cure and hope for a full recovery, with no regard for what I wanted. It’s been years since that last round of surgery that finally brought my daily pain down to a dull, bearable throb. Around the same time Bram and Ty met.
I should be over this. I know Bram and the rest of my family pushed me toward Dr. Ozmond out of love, they wanted the best for me.
From the first consultation Ozmond’s team made my feathers bristle.
The static human orthopedic surgeon and his brother, a physical therapist, shared a background in static avian wildlife rehabilitation and a dogmatic belief that generations of their family working with injured hawks made them the premier experts on shoulder reconstruction and flight restoration for avian shifters.
Nonsense. Voicing my skepticism about their promised results and questioning their authority got me sent to their staff therapist, Nancy.
She promised to help me work through ‘my resistance to healing’ which is what ultimately forced me to stop trying to keep the peace with my family and take back control of my health, so it mostly worked out in the end.
It’s the middle that sucked. I left every session with Nancy ready to explode that she didn’t understand and even more hopelessly entrenched in my isolation and dread of the upcoming procedures. She had me questioning what was wrong with me for not being excited about the possibility of flight.
Our sessions felt like an insidious drumbeat of subtle implications that any problem with the treatment plan was a failing on my part.
She never said it in so many words, but her questions inevitably alluded to fixing whatever character flaw made me so lazy, so pathetic, that I refused to endure any discomfort or put in any effort to get better.
You can’t ‘hard work and willpower’ away scar tissue and atrophied muscles, but she sure wanted me to believe I could.
It took talking to CIara to realize therapy that consistently made me so depressed I’d turn up on her doorstep unannounced after each session ready to fall apart might be making things worse for me.
In retrospect, maybe that was part of why I let our friendship drift so much, the sense that I was putting too much on her already full plate when she had her own troubles to deal with.
Being a single parent to a toddler is hard enough without all the medical complications Luca was dealing with.
Still, I’m glad I went to her with my troubles then and now. She was the one who pointed out that not wanting something everyone said I should want didn’t make me worthless, it meant I needed to figure out my goals and whether what I was doing was actually getting me any closer to achieving them.
Clara gave me the courage to fire Ozmond’s team.
She offered me a place to land if confronting my family and the rest of the flock with my choice to accept I will never fly again and not to go through with the experimental surgeries went poorly.
She celebrated with me when I found a shifter specialist who listened to what I wanted out of my medical care: less pain and more range of motion, in that order.
It's been three years since that last surgery to remove scar tissue gave me what I needed to move on with my life, and I still have to focus on grounding myself in the here and now just thinking about Nancy and her headgames.
I focus on the scent of the pool's brine mingling with Clara's natural omega sweetness and the familiar echoes of water splashing and Hilda's voice counting out an exercise for Luca.
The grounding exercise calms my reaction to the reminder of the overzealous counsellor who had no business telling me sheer grit could help restore my raven's flight. Calm suffuses me. Nancy doesn’t get to play with my emotions anymore.
Clara is watching me with a slight smile on her lips.
“So, is that a yes?” she asks. The fact I actually have the skills to recognize I need to calm down, let alone doing it without prompting is new.
“Yeah.” I nod.
I remember the last time we really talked with vivid clarity now.
It was this past spring. I helped her get Luca home after Elric’s fledging ceremony and we spent half the night talking over mugs of tea in her kitchen.
She told me all about him being accepted into the medical trial for a new therapy to control his muscle spasms.
And she asked if I’d given therapy another go after Nancy. When I told her I’d made a few attempts to start but it was never a good fit, she gave me the number for a shifter from one of her caregiver support groups to call.
"I can tell. Good for you. I still hate that quack." Clara pats my back now, offering me comfort and I gently rest my head on her shoulder.
"Fair, except calling her a quack is an insult to our fellow avians.
She was awful though. I decided you were right about reporting her.
Mostly so she doesn't pull that shit with other shifters who actually do need help redefining their identity after a life-altering injury like mine. Not sure it went anywhere, but at least it’s documented now. " I huff grumpily.
Clara chuckles. "Good for you. I know I was a bit pushy suggesting that at the time. It's why I haven't brought it up again. Figured it might feel like more pressure and you get enough of that."
I snort. "Nah, like I said, you were right.
And it was the right amount of pressure to make me realize I wasn't wimping out by choosing a less risky surgery that met my needs instead of risking my ability to swim for a tiny chance my bird could fly again some day and never-ending experimental procedures to fiddle with my nerves in both forms. I needed that. "
"Happy to help. Anytime. You've seemed a lot happier lately, but I always seem to catch you while you’re in the water and I don’t want to disturb you."
"I have been happier. Mostly. Still working on getting some of the flock to see past the wing, and my moms and siblings to stop treating me like I'm made of glass, but you know what that's like." We both grimace.
"Yep." Clara says, tight-lipped with all the things neither of us need to say about the flock's flaws, for all they're family to us both. Even the most loving family is complicated and this is another of those things we don’t need to put into words.
"I'm not sure how you let it roll off your feathers living there all this time. I couldn't."
"Eh, my family is working on it. And it's different for me to pick my battles and push back against the worst of it for myself than it is for you to watch their words land on your kid's back.
" I shrug. "Looping back around to self-care, and at the risk of being too pushy with you, what would make it seem possible? "
Clara glances reflexively toward her kid, and of course I knew the answer, but still, letting her tell me what she needs is important, it makes her admit out loud that she actually has needs. "I just, need to know he's safe before I can even think about anything like that."
"Okay, that makes sense. Is there anything, even something small while he's with Hilda that would let you recharge while he's with another adult you trust?
Cause if you need extra eyes on him for his swim therapy sessions, I'm here almost every morning that the pool is open for my daily laps.
I could pick him up, bring him to Hilda and then home safe to you after his sessions, and be swimming in the lane next to him, available to be his emergency adult while you have an hour to yourself if you want. "
"I couldn't ask that of you, Winny. If something—"
"Hilda is certified for this, right?" I cut off her fretting.
"Yes. Of course."
I nod. "And there are life guards on duty. Good ones who dive into action the moment a kid is struggling. I saw it myself with the niblings at open swim."
"I know," Clara snaps. "Word gets around the flock faster than wings.
And I know you wouldn't offer if you didn't truly want to help.
It's just not that easy to trust he'll be safe out of my sight, Winny.
Fuck, it's been ages since the two of us did anything together and I'm supposed to impose on you with an ask that big? It feels like too much."
"Flock sticks together." I repeat the truism that most of our fledglings roll their eyes at.
We've all heard it from the shell so often the words have lost their meaning and teenagers aren't old enough to appreciate that it's a value our rave actually backs up with actions.
Most of the time. Even when they cock up by assuming everyone in the flock has the same needs instead of checking what the shifter they're helping actually wants.
Clara snorts. "Yeah, only sometimes they stick around like a particularly bad molt. Sorry, I'm not used to an offer that genuinely might help. If Luca is comfortable with you taking him to his session once a week, that would be amazing. Only if you're sure?"
"I'm sure. You have my number so we can hash out the details and everything as we go once you talk to the kid, yeah?
I get that it's hard to trust people, but there are other folks in the flock who would be happy to keep an eye on him for you sometimes, you know?
My moms are practically running a daycare racket with the amount of my niblings underfoot all the time lately, they'd barely notice another squawking bea—noisy mouth to feed.
" I kick myself for almost calling Link's mouth a beak.
Because unlike the other kids, his mouth wouldn't be interchangeable with a beak and that's the kind of unthinking reminder of his differences that I know she worries about him absorbing.