Determined

Based on NY Times Magazine LIVES Column Style

My mom says I was fearless as a child. I was just shy of a year when I reached my plump fingers around a notch in our wicker coffee table and pulled myself upright, sticking one chunky leg in the air in an attempted step. As soon as my hand left the table, all 20 lbs. of me crashed landed on the scratchy carpet, but I didn’t cry. I leaned into my rolls of baby fat, pulled myself up and took a wobbly step. After that moment, I never went back to crawling. I was determined to walk. As her only child, I kept my mom on her toes, wandering off in the direction of friendly faces, birds squawking and anything else that piqued my curiosity.

Paige wanted to have multiple children, but after I was born, the doctors discovered a thyroid issue that would make another natural pregnancy almost impossible. I was a bit of a miracle, and my parents were happy with one healthy child.

And healthy I was. Apart from a few ear infections and your standard case of chicken pox, I skipped out on the whole “sick” thing. I wasn’t a colicky baby. Fevers, colds and broken bones escaped me. I’m uncoordinated so I fell often, but I would just get back up and laugh it off. Once in middle school, my pediatrician called us up and scolded me for not having visited in two years, but what was the need?

Then one morning after a five-hour dance practice at Episcopal School of Jacksonville, I stretched my limbs, groggily reached down to massage an aching muscle and felt a bump the size of a golf ball protruding from my calf.

My mom remained steady as ever and leaped into action calling doctors and making appointments. After an ultrasound and x-ray at Baptist Medical Center, I was presented with an image I will never forget. Glowing against the black background of the x-ray, a bony head of broccoli was growing out of my fibula.

“What is that?” my mom and I gasped in unison.

From that point onward, my mom remained calm, while my emotions reached full volume. Throughout my diagnosis I cried a lot. Uncertainty was the thing that finally knocked me off my feet. My mom was almost taken aback by how out-of-sorts her fearless kid was. Ever the pragmatist, she scoured Web MD to try to understand how this story might end.

Mom spent her 56th birthday sitting with me in a frigid MRI room, resting her head on a chair in the corner, listening to the steady clangs churning out of the MRI machine every few seconds.

The scan revealed an osteochondroma.

Doctors said sometime around the time I was 12 years old, a benign bone tumor had begun growing on my fibula bone. I could leave it alone, but I would have pain when exercising. I could surgically remove it, but then I would risk nicking a nerve that could cause my foot to hang down, a condition called ‘drop-foot.’

After much discussion, I opted for the surgery.

My mom sat in the waiting room, but not for long. My doctor was a burly Texan, a UF Shands Hospital trauma doctor who performed most of his surgeries in poorly-lit facilities across rural countries. He finished my surgery in under an hour.

My mom recognized me again, she says, when I sprung out of my wheelchair and launched into the car, hopped up on pain meds and laughing hysterically. Upon arriving home, my mom set up camp with an assortment of books, movies and treats for the patient, and waited to see how much doting would be necessary. Before long I was reaching for my crutches, pulling myself up and attempting first steps again. The uncertainty was gone. I could do this. We could do this. My mom saw her one-year-old’s determination spread across her 16-year-old’s face.