It's My Life - Stacie Ramey Page 0,2
tells me.
“All done,” Gary says. “Be right there.”
And, just like that, I have to prepare myself for reentry. Into the harsh light of the room. Into the harsh vibe of this life. I leave that other version of me, the one that could move freely and easily, in that MRI tube. And I wonder if I could have been that girl all along, if only Dr. Jacoby hadn’t screwed up.
Two
Looking back on it now, I feel pretty stupid for not figuring any of it out way earlier. It was my own version of believing in Santa—I was told the story so often that I never thought to question it. (We didn’t have to deal with the Santa fallout; I’m Jewish. Mom used to go on and on about how proud she was that they never lied to us, as if the worst crime ever perpetrated on a kid was the invention of a benevolent old dude in a red suit who distributes presents. It isn’t.)
Dr. Jacoby—or Dr. Jerkoby, as Ben refers to him when we discuss the subject—is probably a good guy. He had a really strong history leading up to my delivery. He’s a Harvard Medical School graduate who did his OB/GYN residency at Johns Hopkins. From what I could find online, there were no complaints filed against him. No lawsuits. Very small percentage of C-sections. I’m sure his kids and grandkids love him. He probably volunteers at his church, or cleans stretches of the woods so that animals don’t choke on litter strewn by inconsiderate campers. Maybe he builds houses for Habitat for Humanity or serves soup to the homeless.
He may do a hundred million nice things, but nothing he does now will make up for the day he delivered me.
Because the thing is, I wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wasn’t supposed to have cerebral palsy. That day, something he did caused it.
But I didn’t realize that until this past summer.
Ben and I were taking an SAT study course—his idea—and we were in the midst of a vocabulary practice test. I came to a fill-in-the-blank question: “The doctor was accused of…so they settled the claim in court.”
My eyes danced over the choices. The root of all of the words was mal, as in bad. Maleficent, malevolence, malfeasance, malignancy, maliciousness. Maleficent was the bad fairy in the movie, and that word in particular meant mischievous. I knew the answer wasn’t maleficent, because a doctor wouldn’t be evil or mischievous. The other options—malevolence, malignancy, maliciousness—weren’t the right ones, either.
But a doctor could be blameworthy. As in, “The doctor was accused of malfeasance…”
I started to sweat even though it was freezing in the classroom, my eyes locked on the word malfeasance. I bubbled the answer, so sure of my response, but that word stuck with me. That sentence. A doctor could be accused of malfeasance and settle. The combination of the words, the phrasing, made my mind race.
And everything around me became suspended in time. The air. The sounds of pencils scratching and my classmates breathing. My own breath caught in my chest. Suddenly, I remembered why the phrase sounded so familiar.
The other time I’d heard it, I was six, and we were visiting my Aunt Flora in Florida. Even back then I was obsessed with language and with words. Mom said it was like I inhaled them.
Aunt Flora took us to see these wild parrots that had been released by their owners and had all found each other, forming a parrot community. There were some other little kids there, and we were all being so careful not to spook the beautiful birds. But then I moved and my crutch made a sound, and the birds flew away.
A sour-faced little kid said, “You chased them away with your silver thing.”
“Crutch,” I told him. “It’s called a crutch.”
The kid didn’t seem impressed by the new word I just gave him. “How did you get like that? What’s wrong with you?”
In my mind, it was a ridiculous question. I was born this way, just like he was born short and with weird spiky hair, and I told him as much. I saw my Aunt Flora and my mom exchange a look, and they took us back to Aunt Flora’s.
That night, I had trouble sleeping. It’s not like no one had ever asked me that question before. But this time it sort of got inside me. After tossing and turning for a while, I gave up on sleep, and I snuck into