ROPEIK: Preparing for phase four

Today, in honor of the end of this little editorial journey, I want to take you back to 1997. Or maybe 1998 – things from that era tend to run together. In any case, our destination is New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Silver Spring, Md. (mascot: the brontosaurus). I am in second grade, and I am about to do something precocious.

Backstory: after failing my kindergarten eye test, I was diagnosed with amblyopia, which is a kind of lazy eye that doesn’t rove around. Basically, it meant my eyesight was lopsided to the point of near-blindness in my left eye. So from then until fourth grade, I wore glasses and, every so often, a patch on my right eye. I always used to say it was to give the left one exercise. I was an adorable little pirate child, goofy-looking and a big dork, with ambitions of being a paleontologist and a love of Star Wars. (Harry Potter was, at this time, barely a twinkle in my eye.)

You might recall that I mentioned, what seems like a very long time ago now, that my current injury attracts a lot of interest from kids. Well, in the days of the patch, I was in the thick of interested kids, being one myself. I got stares, heck yes. I got questions, I got comments, I got envy from nerdy little boys and teasing from snooty little girls. Being, of course, an aloof and emotionally mature 7 or 8-year-old, though, this didn’t bother me too much. I had my prepackaged explanation (I just gave it to you, too) and plenty of extra patch-shaped Band-Aids to share. I knew eventually that we’d grow up, my eye would get better, I’d move on. So I dealt with it. I think I was too young to consider doing anything else.

But being precocious and all – did I mention that I was precocious? Because it was out of control – I was not satisfied with small-scale information distribution. So when the opportunity arose to take things to the next level, I went right for it. This opportunity came in the form of some routine all-school assembly. At the end, the teacher or whoever was leading it asked if anyone had anything else to share. And yes, baby Annie raised her hand.

I marched right up there, patch and all, in front of the whole school, and I set the record straight: “A lot of people ask about this eye thing,” I assume I said, “so I just wanted to tell you all definitively what the story is.” Well, maybe I didn’t use the word “definitively,” but at any rate, that’s what I proceeded to do. It’s not a very complicated story; really, outrageous as it kind of seems that I did it, I think I had the right idea.

I’ve been thinking about this family-favorite anecdote a lot this semester. For years, hearing about this thing I did when I was younger, I thought it was funny. I thought, assigning no special relevance to this knowledge, that I would never do something like that now, now that I’m older, now that I have a sense of propriety or modesty or necessity or something like that.

At the beginning of this semester, when I first knew I’d be spending months at home recovering from an injury I could never have expected to have, writing this column seemed like a natural route to take. I would miss The FreeP; I wanted to keep using my brain, keep writing, try to act like I was on campus as much as I could. I thought maybe I would have something interesting to offer as I underwent this strange new experience. I had a new perspective on living with a handicap, on the unpredictability of the world and on what it means to grow up and how.

I thought, I’ll have nothing better to do; maybe I can share some of this with BU. Maybe we can all try to learn something, or just be a little entertained. Maybe I can just rant about Harry Potter for 13 weeks. They don’t have to read it. I’m just writing.
I know that I’ve had a lot of remarkable things happen to me this fall. Certainly, the speed and breadth of my recovery have been remarkable, and sometimes I think my attempts at resilience have been a little remarkable too. My boredom has definitely been remarkable, but so has how fast the semester has flown by. I’ve met remarkable people at the National Rehabilitation Hospital and learned remarkable things about how the world works and how people can endure the worst, and maybe become better for it.

But it occurred to me as I was trying to think how I could possibly put a cap on all of that, that the actual exercise of writing this column could be construed as a bit remarkable too. I thought back to my patch speech at that assembly in second grade. I’m sure that choice didn’t seem remarkable to pint-sized me. And now, pint-sized no longer, I still don’t exactly find the fact that I’m writing this column particularly surprising. It’s just a way to explore what’s happened to me, to keep people in the loop and try to get everyone’s heads around it and its implications a little bit.

I guess, though, that it is kind of an insane thing to do – spending three months sharing 800-word snapshots of intimate secrets, emotional rollercoasters and embarrassing Harry Potter-related panic attacks with the entire BU community. Well, I have few regrets about it. Call it what you want; for me, it was just part of the process.

It just makes me think of something I heard at the hospital soon after I was discharged. One of my parents asked my doctor whether I was supposed to be doing any of the exercises I worked on in physical and occupational therapy at home, now that I was going to be doing three or four hours of therapy per week as opposed to per day.

Not really, said my doctor, because now that you’re back in the world, life is therapy. Everything you do is part of your recovery; everything is a potential challenge, an opportunity to figure out how to deal with your injury. So I suppose this has just been a part of my regimen, and I want to thank you, nebulous readership, for acting as a sounding board.

I was up at BU this weekend, finally, finally, finally. It felt amazing to be back – to see friends, old haunts, professors, as though I’d never left. But at the same time, quite unexpectedly, there was also an element of deep terror: to realize that in six weeks, I’ll be back for good, dealing with a packed academic, extracurricular and social life on top of continuing recovery and inclement weather. I don’t know if I’m ready, but I guess I won’t ever know that until I’ve tried.

Onward and upward, then. We’ve been through phase one, dealing with the crime; phase two, dealing with the hospital; phase three, dealing with home. Bring on phase four.