The Memory of When All This Began

Doctor's Prescription PadFinding my desk seems to be a monthly routine. Find it. Bask in the warmth of my clean office, with my most favorite dinning table turned into desk in plain site, no longer engulfed with the bills paperwork…until the month comes around and I fulfill the same process again. It has its perks. This month it’s brought around memories.

I came across an old prescription, from 2003 to be exact. It was a prescription for physical therapy for access to medical benefits. Seeing this, initially I would have passed it, piled it, moved on…but something rang in my mind. A memory strong, yet faint. The memory of when all this began.

I recalled, after months of our discussion with the doctors and amongst ourselves, the moment when the PA in the pediatricians office announced to us that J likely has Cerebral Palsy. It wasn’t one of the favored moments in my memory. Pushing aside getting a diagnosis for your child. Pushing aside the dreams, thoughts, hopes and understanding of what his life might play out as being smashed into the floor on which he stood as if panicking and ridding the world of just one more tiny spider….

Rude. Unthoughtful. A complete disregard for what a parent might be thinking about, worried about, getting ready to walk down the road of….

He played it out. Physically. As if he were a teenager without any sense of humanity or reality…no thought on what life might even have in store for him. He bent his knees, used a “scissor” walk, bent his elbow and turned in his wrist and gated around the tiny office as any ignorant human would when depicting someone they had no respect for.

All that was missing was some prehistorically incorrect “noise” to go along with his heartless portrayal of how he believed a child with cerebral palsy acted. What brought this down to an inconceivably ignorant and baffling encounter, was this was a medical ‘professional’ giving the information that changes a lifetime to two parents of a 9 month old child.

We stayed with that practice, but never saw that PA again. We reported him. We avoided him and have never experienced something as off-color as this in our son’s journey since; and to this day, I have NO idea what he was thinking.

© Gina St. Aubin

Have you ever had an experience something like this?


(Photo By: KokoPinot / Flickr)

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