The Written Word Pressure Build Up by Elayna Langbecker

PRESSURE BUILD UP
by Elayna Langbecker
5-23-1999

An airplane just flew over. Its sound brings me back to last summer when my big sister told me that if I ate one hundred airplanes I could make a wish, a really big one, and it would really come true. It was also the summer that initiated a big change. For four years I had been free of crutches, pain and seemingly endless doctors appointments. On August 17th I became subject once more to the long hours of waiting rooms, of doctors offices, the x-rays, the surgeries and the false hope of it all ending quickly. That fall I was going into my sophomore year in high school. I had a summer job at my school, doing odds and ends, gardening, sanding, and painting. One bright warm day at work, I was on my bike, a rake held across my handlebars, perspiration beading on my forehead, pedaling past the first grade classroom, when suddenly the edge of the rake hit the building, scraping at the peach stucco walls, throwing me off balance. In that moment flailing widely out of control, something happened. It felt almost like a pressure build-up does inside your ears, when descending in an airplane, I thought at first that something had happened to my brace causing it to put pressure on my left tibia. I rolled up my grubby jeans— nothing noticeable. I got back on my bike and pedaled the two hundred feet to the school office, my mind racing, dreading, No, it couldn’t be…. No, it just was not possible! I sat down near my mom’s desk (she also worked at my school) and pulled back the Velcro straps of my brace and lifted the front of it off. Waves of panic hit me and a queasy feeling filled my stomach, the dreaded was verified. I could see clearly my bone was broken, it was almost perturbing from my papery thing scared skin, the impossible had happened. A sudden calm came over me, and in a low quiet voice I said “Mom I broke my leg”. I could tell her heart went cold, the color drained from her face and I knew the same words that were pounding through my head were also thundering in hers Oh no, not this again.

“Are you the girl who was laughing in the ambulance,” they asked me in the emergency room to which I had been immediately, rushed from the school grounds.

“Yes I was, “ I answered laughing and smiling back. Still in the protecting egg of shock I had little pain. My leg cast, I was sent home. Once home my comfortable bubble of shock burst and I was overwhelmed with the realizations that I could not bowl, I could not baby-sit, I could not garden and, more drastic, I could not walk without the use of crutches. What happened to my freedom? What happened to my life? If I just had been more careful…. In pain and worry I spent the night dreading the next day when I would face alignment of my bone without the usual prescribed drugs because of my stubbornness and dislike for pain medicine. The break not only faced me with extreme physical pain, but also pain of the heart. It was as if I had been torn to pieces.

I was born with a bone disease, Congenital Pseudarthrosis of the left tibia. At the time there were few known cures for this condition, and most doctors suggested amputation. Not wanting to take that road, my parents, did their own research becoming more knowledgeable about this condition than many doctors. After considerable searching, they found a doctor at UCLA, who was doing an experimental method of bone grafting with Bone Morphogenic Protein. My bone eventually healed, but because it was bowed, it kept on breaking time after time. This is the nature of Pseudarthrosis, which literally means “false joint.” And because of it my life has been filled with my leg in a cast and crutches, and an occasional body cast and wheel chairs.

I never really had a problem accepting my leg as part of me, I believe this is because I never had anything but this leg to accept, it has never been “normal”. It has mine though, and the best I have got, so I accept it as part of me. As a child I could not take part in many activities When neighborhood children came over to play, or when I played with my sisters and later with my classmates, our games were limited to those that did not involve running, climbing trees, or getting too wet. To minimize my disadvantages, I made up games in which everyone had to hop on one foot or other games that did not use both your legs. I have undergone numerous surgeries and procedures working with world-renowned doctors to heal my leg. The few memories I have of surgeries have become a kaleidoscope of snapshots frozen for a moment in time. And all it takes are certain smells or tastes to bring those frozen snapshot back into motion. I cannot enter a tire store without being brought back to the bright cool operating rooms that smelled so grotesquely of sweet tires. Eventually we found a method that used an external fixator called the Ilizarov. This technique lengthened and straightened my leg so it was able to heal and I was able to take part in more normal activities with only a small brace. That was the point I was at this summer when it broke again. But instead of lamenting and pitying myself with the fact that I must go through the same process of surgeries and big metal devices, I got over it and opened my eyes to the new lessons that were given to me.

My leg has become my teacher. It forces me to listen when no one else can, and has taught me in a way I must except. It challenges me with the same force that I challenge the world and I learn. Because I can not simply get what I want from it, it stands strong against me. These are the times I realize that I must learn to meet these obstacles, not with the power of the bull but with the fluidity of water. I find many hidden answers and lessons in this leg, or rather the experiences that is brings me. As strange it may sound, I thank God, Karma, Life for this gift. Every surgery seems to envelope itself with false hopes that this will be the last—that everything will get better. But it never seemed to turn out that way. Like a mirage of an oasis in a desert, the resolution is always just a bit farther off. This next summer I am facing more surgery for hip dysplasia, and once again I wonder what the future will hold.

Next time a plane flies over I will look up into the blue expanse of sky and reach for it. I will imagine eating it, the metal bending and breaking in each slow deliberate motion of my jaw. Soon I will reach one hundred and then, with the same truth and power of thought that I had as I ate each airplane, I will make a wish maybe and hope that this time it will come true. I am counting airplanes, and I already know what my wish is going to be.