who are the real superheroes?

This is not a picture of me, but it could be. The ward I was in looked exactly like this.
The bed is the same, and it is in exactly the same spot as mine was. This could be the little boy who was in the bed next to me. 
It is uncanny. 
I wept when I first came across this picture.

Truth:

An ugly scar. A permanent limp. A weak heart. The aftermath of childhood illness can last a lifetime. You think you’re over it when the sight of a little blood or the thought of getting a shot catapults you back in time to a place you’d rather forget. One moment you’re a fully functioning adult. The next, you’re a sobbing three-year-old.  Like a stain you can’t get out, like fog that never lifts, it stays with you.

Trivial details rise up out of nowhere with perfect clarity. An aide unloading the lunch cart. The “No Smoking” sign by the door. The pile of Little Golden Books stacked on your nightstand. 

Moments you’d rather not remember surface uninvited. Your mother in tears at your bedside. The mingling smell of antiseptic and stale urine. The jab of a needle and the dull ache that lasted until the next shot was due. You still feel it.

Even if you recovered completely, memories of the ordeal can shadow you all your life. Perhaps as an adult you still use a night light to dispel the fear you felt when visiting hours ended and the nurses turned down the lights in the children’s ward. Maybe you struggle with asthma because of the way the nurses held you down to draw your blood. Smothering you. Maybe your gut still cramps up the way it did when the doctors lined up around your bed and insisted on pushing on your belly right where it hurt worst. Every last one of them.

Or, maybe you still have trouble swallowing pills because you were too young to get them down when you were sick. Instead your mother crushed them and slipped the powder into applesauce or pudding in a failed attempt to mask its bitter taste. Maybe your favorite threadbare teddy is still packed away in a chest in the attic. All visceral reminders of the ordeal you endured as a child.

Traumatic memories can release an outpouring of emotions that can stop you in your tracks. Something as simple as getting your flu shot, or having your blood pressure taken, or hearing an ambulance in the distance with its siren wailing can set the whole thing off again. Palms sweating. Heart racing. Hands shaking.

I was three years old when I went into the hospital. How is it I remember the exact arrangement of the beds in the children’s ward? The pattern of the afternoon sunlight reflected across the wall? The name of the girl in traction across the room from me? Alice. Ten-years old.

How does it all come back to me in technicolor detail when some days I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast?

*

"Sometimes real superheroes live in the hearts

of small children fighting big battles."

~unknown~

jan