LOAD-BEARING
Photo by Maryellen Brady
The tightness in Naomi's chest was definitely stress related. Testing season. She had thirty-two students under the age of eight, one aide, and a principal who sent emails at midnight asking about testing scores. Stress made sense.
Recess was time to breathe. Sixty degrees and bright, the kind of April day that made Baltimore weather forgivable. The children exploded out of the building like a shaken pop bottle.
She stood at the edge of the blacktop where she could see the whole yard. The whistle around her neck, was handed down from her mom. Teaching ran in the family.
Tobias and Garrett were edging toward an argument near the monkey bars. Naomi watched the geometry of their bodies. Garrett's chin was lifting. Tobias's hands had gone into fists. She was walking over when her chest tightened.
There was no radiating pain, no arm numbness, no sense of emergency. A fist inside her chest pulsed. She stopped walking. It clenched again. Around her the playground continued, screaming, laughing, the percussion of sneakers on blacktop.
Her knees went.
She was clear headed the entire way down. The sky rotated into view, blacktop came up to meet her left hip then her palm. There were children around her. Faces. She knew each one of them.
“Ms. Naomi.” That was Priya. “Ms. Naomi, don't move. I'm going to get Ms Julie.”
Naomi lay on the blacktop and looked at the sky. The sun was very bright. She closed her eyes and went into her white room. Just her own breathing and the hum of the world around her. She'd found the white room when she was seven and had been grateful for it ever since. Clean, empty, and a cool sixty-eight degrees.
Naomi sat in a paper gown on the exam table. Everything was fine. She was going to go home and grade the reading responses she'd left on her desk. Tomorrow she would be back on the blacktop at recess, and this would become a story she told with light self-deprecation at some point.
The EKG was unremarkable.
The x-ray took longer.
“Naomi, Dr. Singh will want to look at these himself,” the tech said. She left the lightbox glowing. “Just a moment.”
Naomi studied her own skeleton from across the room. The structure was odd, a branching habit was forming around her. Extra calcification everywhere.
“Has anything like this shown up before?” Dr. Singh asked, when he came in. He looked at her face when he talked to her, which she appreciated.
“No,” she said. “I've been healthy my whole life.”
She was thirty-four, had an apartment in Federal Hill. Saw a therapist twice a month and lied to by omission. Sanitized, so people didn't get hurt. Edits. She learned early on that full versions were extra and made people uncomfortable.
Three weeks later, the second set of x-rays, showed progression. Dr. Singh referred her to a specialist at Johns Hopkins. The specialist, a bone density researcher named Dr. Farquah, used words like heterotopic ossification and idiopathic. He brought in a colleague. Then another.
The projections were growing inward. They curved toward the center. Toward the hollow of her.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“We're not sure yet,” Dr. Farquah said. “We'd like to do a full skeletal survey.”
The full survey took four hours. She lay very still in the imaging machine. Naomi made her mind a white room. Just the hum of the machine and breathing. She lived in that white room for most of her childhood, so those four hours were comfortable.
The results came back in pieces over two days. Each piece was, in Dr. Farquah's words, consistent with the initial findings.
The extra calcification wasn't only in her thoracic spine. It was in her jaw. Both sides of the mandible, thickened along the hinge joint, as though bracing for impact. It was in her shoulders. Along the blade of the scapula. It was closing in on her heart.
She called her mother that evening. She did this dutifully. The way she watered the ivy plant Brian gave her. She didn't particularly like it but couldn't bring herself to let it die. And you can't regift your own mother.
“I'm having some medical tests,” she said.
“For what?”
“Bone density. Unusual growth.”
“Well,” her mother said, “you've always been dramatic.”
Naomi held the phone against her ear and listened. You've always been dramatic. You've always been sensitive. You've always made things bigger than they are.
She had spent thirty-four years trusting her mother more than she trusted her own memory.
“I have to go,” she said. “I'll call next week.”
She didn't sleep that night.
At her next appointment, Dr. Farquah sat across from her with his hands folded and said there were treatment options. Anti-inflammatory protocols. In some cases, surgical intervention to relieve pressure before the internal growth began affecting organ function. Like her heart.
“Is it going to keep growing?” she asked.
“We don't know what's driving it. If we can't identify the cause…” He paused. “Yes. Probably.”
“What does it look like,” she said. “On the images. The full picture. What shape is it.”
He pulled up the composite on his screen and turned it toward her.
Naomi recognized her caged heart. The geometry of a small person making herself smaller. Curved spine. Hunched shoulders. Ribs tucked. Wrists crossed. The posture she held so often and so long that apparently her skeleton decided to manifest it into a solid cage structure.
From the inside.
“Ms. Pierce?” Dr. Farquah said. “Are you all right?”
She looked at the image of the second skeleton taking shape within the first. The structure that had no name in any medical literature. He kept calling it idiopathic, because we don't know the cause.
She knew the cause. She'd spent a very long time trusting someone else's version of events more than she trusted the evidence of her own body.
The body, it turned out, kept better records than she did.
Written for Bradley Ramsey Pandamonium Prompts.
My Creativity is fueled by tea. Lots of tea.
You are amazing! This was beautiful <3<3<3 Hugs!
Excellent work!!