Relationships

This summer, I was looking an ultrasound picture of a friend's soon-to-be-born daughter. It reminded me of when K was born. He had a tough delivery. At first, the medication they gave me to induce labor worked too hard all of a sudden and they had to give me medication to slow labor, break my water, and then add more saline to take the pressure off his head. He was trying to be born ear first, goofy kid. That was the first stress on him. Then, he insisted on being born facing sideways rather than facing up or down, and every time the doctor tried to turn him, he beligerantly rotated back. At one point his umbilical cord got compressed, and his oxygen levels plummeted, as well as his heart rate. At that point the doctor was working hard to get him out and caused a brachial plexus injury (damaged nerve in the neck from the head being pulled or turned too hard or too quickly or too far).

He was born with a huge bruise on the side and top of his head, from trying to come through ear first, and had a paralyzed, limp left arm, from the brachial plexus injury.

We were happy he was alive and seemingly well.

It wasn't too long after that that I remembered his ultrasound from a day or two before his birth. Both arms were moving. In the first few weeks, when we weren't sure if he would regain the use of his arm, or how much he would regain, it seemed to us that it really didn't matter. We loved him and he was ours, no matter what worked and what didn't. The arm is mostly healed now. It is a little weaker and the shoulder blade wings a little, and there is a little less range of motion; but the average person cannot tell. And K himself does not know.

As he has gotten older and we have seen more of his personality, we wonder how much, if any, was caused by the trauma of birth. He is bold and impulsive. Is this the brain injury or his genes? He has very poor vision in one eye. He has trouble processing words that he hears. He has more than a few ADD characteristics. Is any of this attributable to his birth?

We can see his arm moving clearly on the ultrasound, but we cannot know how well he sees, or how well he listens, or how well he focuses.

I think, if I had to choose, I would rather have to deal with a physical disability than a mental/social one. We can easily see the paralyzed arm and know that if someone doesn't extend their right hand to shake ours, it's because they cannot. We cannot easily see the mental/social/perceptual disability. If he calls a boy "kid", the boy thinks he is being rude, but doesn't realize he lacks the ability to remember his face or his name. If he is bold in wanting to "enforce" the rules, he gets perceived as a bully by others, rather than as someone who lacks inhibition by means of a brain injury.

I guess the reason it's so much harder to deal with the "disabilities" we cannot see, is that it affects his relationships with people. Not that a physical disability doesn't, but people can SEE a physical disability and just accept it as fact; whereas they cannot SEE the mental ones and they are less accepting of this kind of thing.

Maybe someday I will get to know the K as God intended him to be, before the injury of birth. But until then, I will just love the K as he is, for who he is, and enjoy and mold those attributes that tend to irritate others. I don't know if he is who he is by design or by accident; but it doesn't matter, because who he is is all I know. And it just breaks my heart that the rest of the world cannot love him like I do...and that I cannot love him like God does.

I guess what I will take from this, for the rest of my life, is not to criticize other people for this or that; but to just accept them as they are and be happy about who they are.