A Mother To Make A Family

She had to wear closed-toe shoes for work but she wished she could wear ballet flats, something prettier than canvas sneakers. Work dress rules allowed ballet flats but she couldn’t wear them any more. They wouldn’t stay on.

Rose undid the laces and slipped her shoe off. She hated these shoes, hated the fact that she couldn’t wear anything pretty any more. She hadn’t minded these shoes on occasion before, but having to wear them, or something similar, every day had certainly taken the gloss off. She was sick of the sight of them. And the feel.

Once upon a time appearances had been so important to her but she was having to adjust her thinking on that. She was having to adjust her thinking on a lot of things.

Gone were the days of wearing her towering, strappy, glamorous shoes. She was prepared to admit that by the end of an evening out she had always been glad to remove them, they hadn’t necessarily been made for comfort but they had been pretty. Now she had traded impractical, pretty and uncomfortable shoes for practical, ugly and uncomfortable. If she had to sacrifice comfort she wished she could at least look pretty.

Winter would be better, she thought. She could get a pair of flat boots. She’d tried wearing ankle boots but even in the air-conditioned hospital rooms her foot had got too hot and it had swelled up and ached even more.

She rubbed her foot on the back of her left calf, trying to get her circulation going. She knew she was supposed to be desensitising her foot by rubbing it regularly with different textures but she hated even looking at it let alone touching it. How ridiculous that toes that didn’t exist any more could give her so much trouble.

She knew that her toes had had to be amputated. She knew there hadn’t been a choice but that didn’t mean she had to like it.

And now she knew all about phantom limb pain. Thank goodness she wasn’t missing an entire limb; she could only imagine how painful that would be.

She needed to remember to be grateful. Her psychologist had told her to keep a list of all the things she was grateful for and to recall it when she was feeling maudlin. She started to run through the list in her head as she continued to rub her foot.

She was alive. That was a big one. A good one to start the list.

From the outside she looked the same but Rose knew that looks could be deceptive. She was different on the inside and underneath, but she didn’t have to show those parts of her to anyone. She could keep that hidden, which was exactly what she intended to do.

Two—she had finished her degree and was now a qualified teacher. But that was as far as she got running through her ‘grateful’ list before the door into the office she shared with two other teachers opened and her manager walked in. Rose quickly tucked her right foot under her desk, hiding it from view, and slid it into her sneaker.

Jayne was a tall woman, her grey hair closely cropped to her head, her frame athletic, a little masculine. She was hard muscle from all the running she did and there was nothing left to soften the edges. Rose hadn’t known her long but she seemed to be constantly on the go, always training for a running event, a half-marathon or marathon. That was something else Rose wasn’t able to do—run. She’d never imagined that losing three small toes would make such an impact. Her doctors had told her she would be able to run again but she wasn’t sure about that yet.

‘Rose, do you have time to see one more patient before you finish for the weekend?’ Jayne asked.

Rose closed the browser on her laptop as she replied. ‘Sure.’ Despite the fact it was Friday night she had nothing she needed to rush home for. That wasn’t unusual; her social life had taken a battering—spending months in hospital tended to do that—and her confidence had also suffered. She hadn’t dated for two years and she wasn’t sure she was ready for that to change. She had nothing in her life except for work, her mother, her sisters and her niece. But that was okay. That was enough to handle at the moment.

‘The patient’s name is Lila Reynolds, she’s eight years old. Her parents haven’t requested educational support but the social worker is advocating for it. She says Lila is very withdrawn. She’s from Outback Queensland and doesn’t have any family support here in Adelaide.’

Rose remembered being eight years old. That was the year her father had died. The year she had gone from being his little princess and thinking the world was perfect to realising that it wasn’t and that just because you wished something was so didn’t make it real. It was one of life’s lessons that she was relearning again at the age of twenty-three.

‘No one?’ she asked.

Jayne shook her head. ‘The social worker has been leaving messages for her parents but is yet to speak to them. There’s no file yet.’

Rose knew the files were often not much help anyway. The file the education system, and therefore the teaching staff, had access to was different from the case notes that the hospital staff—doctors, nurses, social workers, physios and the like—wrote in. The teachers weren’t privy to all the private and sometimes confidential information about their young pupils but were given just the basic facts. Age, gender, and medical diagnosis were shared but only so that the teachers were aware of any impediments that would affect their learning. They were often given just enough information to put the children into the system but not enough to be useful—Rose could remember one of the other teachers telling her that when she’d first started this job.

‘The social worker thinks it might be helpful to have one of us spend some time with Lila unofficially while she continues trying to speak to the parents,’ Jayne said. ‘She thought that if you had time you might have more luck with getting her to talk.’

In the six months since Rose had started working at the Royal Children’s Hospital she knew she had garnered a reputation as someone who had a good rapport with the more reserved children. She’d always felt a connection with the quieter kids. She could empathise with their emotional scars and now, from more recent experience, with their physical scars as well.

‘And if that doesn’t work,’ Jayne continued, ‘then the consensus is that if you can give her something to occupy her time then she might at least get some benefit from that.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Rose replied. ‘What are her injuries?’

‘She was thrown from a horse and sustained pelvic fractures. She was transferred from Broken Hill to Adelaide and underwent surgery a week ago. Her pelvis was pinned but she is able to get out of bed and can now move around with the aid of a walking frame.’

‘Okay.’

Rose stood as Jayne left the office. She reached up and ran her fingers along the spines of her selection of books that she’d stored on the shelves. Since starting this job she’d added to her collection of children’s books and she chose a few now that she thought might be of interest to an eight-year-old. If Lila didn’t want to talk perhaps Rose could read to her. If Lila had been rushed to Adelaide for emergency surgery she probably hadn’t brought much with her. Reading might help to pass the time and also might prompt a conversation. It had worked in the past.

Rose tucked the well-worn volumes under her arm. She loved shopping in markets and second-hand stores, something her sister Ruby had fostered in her, but while Ruby had always bought clothes, Rose had spent her time searching through the old books. Scarlett, her eldest sister, had started reading to her after her dad had died. Escaping into a book had helped her to get over her grief but it had also fed her imagination. She liked drama, tales of princesses, weddings, romance and young love. She wished the real world was more like her literary world. She didn’t choose to read stories about war or crime or misery. She chose books where the characters got to live happily ever after.

She tugged on the back of her right sneaker, pulling it up over her heel to secure the shoe. God, she hated these shoes. If anything, her foot was even more uncomfortable now than before. She had thought these shoes would be okay but by the end of the day her feet ached and in reality these shoes probably didn’t have enough support. She didn’t think she was on her feet a lot but the hospital was big and there was a fair bit of walking just to get from the main entrance to the wards and to the classrooms. Which was good for her fitness but not so good for her feet.

The familiar smell of the hospital ward assailed her as she stepped out of the elevator by the orthopaedic wards. She didn’t spend a lot of time on the wards, most of her time was spent in the classrooms, but the distinctive smell of the hospital was hard to ignore and hard to forget. She thought it was lodged in her subconscious, a lingering and not altogether pleasant after-effect of her time spent in ICU and the transplant ward.

* * *

She checked in with the charge nurse before heading into the four-bed ward to find Lila. Only two beds were occupied. It was mid-afternoon and Rose knew the ward had probably been full this morning but paediatric patients got discharged quickly and regularly, especially in the orthopaedic wards. There was a high turnover when patients could be sent home to be cared for by their parents.

Rose suspected that Lila would be in hospital for some time. It would be difficult to discharge her home to Outback Queensland if she needed rehabilitation for her injuries. Rose had learnt a lot in the past six months about a whole host of medical conditions. In fact, she’d learnt a lot in the eighteen months prior to that too but that had all been to do with her own experience.

A girl of about five years of age was in a bed to Rose’s left and on the opposite side of the room, next to the window lay a girl who looked more likely to be Lila. Rose scanned the patient names above each bed just to be sure before she crossed the room.

‘Lila?’ she asked as she stopped beside the bed. She was a dark-haired, solemn-eyed little girl. Her skin was tanned and appeared healthy and brown against the white hospital sheets. She was thin but apart from that she looked too healthy for a hospital ward.

The little girl nodded.

‘My name is Rose. I’ve brought you some books to pass the time. Do you like to read?’

Lila shook her head.

‘Oh.’ Rose put the books on the bedside cupboard but she refused to be deterred.

‘What do you like to do?’

‘Ride my horse.’ There was no elaboration but at least she was talking.

‘What about when it’s raining?’

‘It never rains.’

‘Never?’

Her question was answered with another silent shake of her head.

‘Oka-a-a-y...’ Rose drew out the word as she thought about what to ask next. ‘What about if it’s too hot to go outside?’

‘Then I like to draw.’

‘What do you draw?’ Rose asked as she looked around, expecting to see some drawings taped to the walls, but the walls were bare. ‘Have you got any drawings?’

Lila nodded.

‘Would you show me?’ Rose asked.