He could see it all laid out before him, his entire life, and he wondered when it would get back to normal. Would it ever?
The past two years had been the most difficult of his life. How many more traumatic events could they be expected to endure?
The last time he had been in the flying doctor plane on his way to Broken Hill he’d been with his wife and unborn child.
He turned away from the window, his gaze seeking Lila. He was determined to come back with his daughter. He couldn’t bear the thought of returning alone again.
ROSE’S RIGHT FOOT ACHED, complaining about being crammed into uncomfortable shoes. She should have worn socks, she thought, something that would cushion her misshapen foot from the unforgiving canvas of her sneakers, but socks had looked ugly so she’d gone without and now she was paying the price for her vanity.
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.