Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood

by Julie Gregory

  I took bicycling in seventh-grade gym but usually spent the class sitting on the bench, winded and tuckered out, my stick legs swimming in the smallest-size red polyester gym shorts McDowell Middle School offered.

  No matter how hard I tried I ended up in situations that only accentuated my awkwardness. I was on my hands and knees one day in school, markering on a banner that lay outstretched on the cafeteria floor. I was hunched over, coloring; open mouth, lazy tongue drooping into the bowl of a bottom lip slung wide. Heavy glazed eyes; each breath from my lungs pumped as laboriously as if it had been the handle of our well being primed.

  When I slid my hand across the paper, the color smeared.

  I couldn't figure out where the water was coming from. Then I noticed a puddle on the paper and a fishing line flowing upwards. I traced the line with my eyes all the way to my bottom lip. I had drooled without noticing.

  And the older I got, the worse I got. My possible conditions expanded to include genetic disorders and heart valve malfunctions. And the medications to treat them piled up in the kitchen cabinets. Little pills got slipped under my tongue or dropped into my palm whenever Mom said it was time for my meds.

  “Did we give you your beta blocker this morning, Sis?”

  I can't remember.

  “If we didn't, we better make sure we get one of those in ya.”

  It's just a little pill. Sometimes I don't take any, sometimes I get a double dose. I can't tell if it helps. I just feel sick all the time. The bones in my face hurt, my eyelids droop. I never stop feeling sick and I never get better. It just washes over me in various degrees of intensity. Queasy, nauseated, clammy, stupid.

  BY THE TIME I WAS IN JUNIOR HIGH, Mom had built on our old doctor's suggestion of food allergies and decided I was allergic to a lot of things. She used to make me dip-your-toast-in-eggs with crispy edges every morning, and I'd sop up every bit of yolk with a soft piece of buttery toast. But now she doesn't cook me breakfast anymore. I root around in the fridge and dig out the carton of eggs.

  “Julie, what the heck are you doing with those? You know you're allergic!”

  I slide the eggs back and reach for the bacon.

  “At-at-at, we just got done telling Dr. Kate how meat makes you sick. Why don't you just have a bowl of Sugar Pops? But use the powdered milk, just mix up enough to get them wet, you could be lactose intolerant.”

  Mom ordered rolls and rolls of silver-foiled weight-gain wafers from the backs of women's magazines, trying to put some pounds on me. I'd munch on them throughout the day, but they really didn't add much weight and my body shot up like a weed anyway.

  Some days after school, Mom would mix up a big bowl of cookie dough from scratch or use the beaters to fix a box of cake batter.

  “Here, Sis, come taste this. Isn't that good? You can take the bowl in there and watch TV with Danny if you want. Take a break from outside and get warmed up.”

  I shoved great heaping tablespoons of devil's food cake batter straight from the bowl into my mouth, growing sleepier and sleepier. I licked the last of the cookie dough off my fingers and scraped the final silky ribbons of yellow cake mix from the sides of the bowl. By the time I was done, I was stuffed.

  But I felt even more out of it.

  I was having a hard time breathing through my nose, so my mouth hung open and that made me look all the more lazy. I could hardly drag myself out in the winter to do all the work.

  Mom even thought I was on drugs. I had to swear on the Bible that I was not smoking funny weed and it was just my sickness getting worse that was making me act so crazy.

  I couldn't pay attention when she talked. She'd ask me to repeat back what she'd said but I couldn't remember.

  And every time there was a test at school, one that I'd missed knowing about because I'd been at the doctor's, I suddenly felt faint with a headache. As the teacher walked down the aisles, passing out tests, I gimped from my chair to the nurse's office and eased onto the sickroom cot, curling under the school-issue blanket like a pill bug, trying to keep warm and just sleep.

  MOM HAD BEEN BLEACHING ME BLOND for years because she knew how people saw dark-haired girls: little baby-makers just asking for it. White blond meant innocent; before the basement. She usually had me done at Hair Happening, where women no less than eighty gave me a fluorescent tint, and then she did touch-ups at home herself. She'd don the milky plastic gloves and pour lightener onto my roots, rubbing it in with her fingertips to get rid of every last smidgen of brown.

  “Sandy, Jesus Christ, will you just leave the girl's hair alone? Stop turning her into a freak.”

  “She looks like a slut, Dan, with those dark roots, and don't you take the Lord's name in vain with me. The girl needs to be blond!”

  “But she's not blond now, is she? She's green!”

  This was all over a dye job that went down bad.

  “Oh, right! Like those stupid junior high kids are going to notice a dark green tint. Give me a fucking break! They're kids, Daaann. You are nuts, Dan, just nuts!”

  This time at Hair Happening, I'd lucked out with Lancaster's only gay hairdresser. He held my fried ends up and said, “This is a no-no.”

  Between our doubly dosed chlorine-drenched pool, the hard well water of the farm, and the constant bleaching, my hair looked like a decorative hearth broom. But Mom was the paying customer. When he swiveled me around to the mirror, my head had turned a toxic nauseating hue of burnt orange. The hairdresser pleaded with her, “For God's sake, don't do anything else to it for six months. It's going to fall out.”

  My hair literally glowed. Mom drove straight to the grocery store and we walked the long aisle of hair color, with her doing primary mixing in her head, trying to figure out how to get me blond again.

  Chestnut Roasting was her choice. She reasoned if she put the brown over the orange, she'd get yellow. But the whole of my head turned a deep, bile green with an electrifying hint of copper. Sea plankton would have nested in there if I'd gone swimming. After those fatal results—fatal for any chance I might have had at being popular in my entire junior high school life—she gave me a choice: Go back to school as is or wear one of her blond wigs. Mom insisted that seventh- and eighth-graders just weren't savvy enough to notice hair color that defied nature or even entire synthetic scalps of hair, molded into semipermanent shapes with names like “Barb” and “Platinum.”

  WHEN I GET ON THE BUS the next morning, it's pitch black. But as dawn rises light into the windows, kids are going, “Heeeyyy, is your hair green?”

  “Uhh, no!”

  But I can't hide. Each kid that gets on is checking out a head of hair never seen before at McDowell Middle School. I rush off the bus into school, as if speed alone will keep me invisible, but instead I am a blur of putrid green sprite darting through the halls. Kids laugh and point. I'll be banished, ridiculed, eaten alive. How am I going to survive this?

  In homeroom, Missy Morrison, my one link to the insiders' track with the popular kids, laughs hysterically and tells the class I'm totally punked out, just like these super-cool videos she's seen on MTV. She's one of the few kids who gets cable—and some don't even have a TV—so her opinion turns the tide.

  I'm trying to tone the whole thing down. And Missy thinks it's so cool that I'm not bragging, but actually laying low on the praise, like only a cool, green-haired, unfettered true nuevo visionary would do.

  Before the day is out, I'm some sort of hero, having sent a message to the student body about freedom to do what you want despite the norm, choice to express whatever you feel, and control over how you want to look. There's no way I'm telling them my mom did it, and they wouldn't believe me anyway. For the first time since fourth grade I've got friends. I revel in the attention, ink notes to Missy in big fat cursive letters. Our handwriting morphs to match one another's. I slip into my new identity the moment my foot leaves the last step of my hillbilly bus. I sign my six-page letters to Missy Morrison: Friends Forever.

  THE
FOSTER KIDS WERE A CONSTANT source of uneasiness, radiating an insecurity that Danny and I often took advantage of. They would stand in pictures with feet perfectly together, spines rod-straight, hands aligned symmetrically in front of them, as if faultless body posture alone could win them the approval and acceptance of being part of a family. They shined faultless unnatural smiles, pulling back their lips to thrust out perfectly lined-up teeth at the camera. They always wanted so desperately to fit into the picture, but they never did. No matter how young they were or how long they'd been with us, they never crossed the bloodline. And they didn't get called by their individual names unless they were in trouble. Instead they were just “the foster kids,” as in “We're coming up with the foster kids” or “I've got to take the foster kids with me today.” Danny and I felt the split between “us” and “them” early on, but even though we hated them at first, we still tried to at least call them by their first names.

  Over the next six years, we had a small crew of them: Timmy, Penny, Bradley, Rudy, Janey, Martin, Ricky, Lloyd, and later Maria. Lloyd stuttered, some of them had learning disabilities, and all of them had been removed from their own homes for some kind of abuse or neglect. They came and went. Some stayed for years while others breezed in and back out again on the revolving door of being an unruly child. Mom had a good track record with the agency because she'd take any kid the caseworker called us with, and she'd take them that day, that hour even, but she quickly weeded out the older ones by sending them back. What determined if they stayed was how young they were and how docile they could be made.

  Maria was the last one to join us, and she was my favorite. With her tiny features and her little voice, she was always trying to help, to make things better, to do whatever was needed to keep everybody happy, even when it meant splitting herself into tiny pieces and trying on multitudes of characters, depending on who she was with, what position they'd taken in relationship to Mom, and how Mom was reacting to it. And it was her pictures that shone the brightest. For everything that happened to her under that roof, she built a parallel outreach into the world with her smile and kindness and the loyalty of a pound puppy. She was determined not to lose hope.

  And sooner or later, each of those foster kids seemed to develop a medical mystery of their own; some traveling the well-worn path to my one-shot old doctors, with the same symptoms, getting the same tests, until we were all on a slow-roasting rotisserie that even Mom could barely keep up with. Luckily, their medical expenses were picked up by the child welfare system.

  ONE DAY MOM KEPT ME HOME to go with her to one of Lloyd's appointments. I heard him scream and whimper clear down the hall into the waiting room. Nobody had to tell me what was happening. He was getting a tube shoved into his urethra and injected with that burning iodine dye; the color, the feel, of liquid scorch. A flavor you can taste in your blood, without your tongue. He was nine. I heard him scream and an electric sickness shot down the wire into my own belly. I shot up board stiff in my chair and snapped my knees together.

  When Lloyd came out, he walked funny, bowlegged and to the side. He could only look at the carpet. I studied the checkout desk where Mom was waiting for him. She put her hand on his shoulder, asked if he was all right.

  Nobody talked in the car. Mom made a few jokes but Lloyd and I couldn't muster the fake it would take to even pretend we weren't both sickened, he by the fact that somebody'd put a tube in his privates, me by the fact that I'd had the same thing done. We both felt the shame, but we occupied secret bubbles, separate from one another.

  “Well, goddammit! Why do I even try for you ungrateful bastards? I was going to take you out to Long John Silver's but to hell with it. I try my damnedest to make sure you kids are healthy and this is how you treat me. Like shit.”

  “No, Mom,” I pipe up, “I'm just carsick, that's all. We'd like to go to Long John's.”

  “Well, Lloyd, you got anything back there to say for yourself?” She glares into the backseat down at Lloyd, so tiny and faint.

  “Ye-yes, San-ney, I'll-I'll-I'll go-go out to eat.”

  “Hmp, I bet you will, you stuttering little creep.”

  HOW LONG CAN YOU STARVE without side effects? If everyone around you tells you you're sick, if they keep testing you for what's making you sick, do you think, when you're thirteen, that you aren't? You feel sick, right? It's true what Mom says. You can't keep up. You are tired. Isn't there something wrong with you if you feel sick all the time? If you miss school by going to doctors and miss school by lying in the nurse's office half the day? Is it the wrong medication that makes you sick? Or the three different kinds you take all at once?

  My childhood wish has come true; I have turned paper thin and translucent, as if a strong wind could whisk me high into a blue fall sky like a brittle veined maple leaf.

  Mom goes to parent-teacher conferences and meets with my teachers individually about my heart condition. I hear the story, over and over. My stabs of chest pain, my shortness of breath; causing low oxygen to my brain, which explains why I'm doing poorly in school. I sit in the chair next to her, sucking air in through my hanging mouth. I just want to lie down and fade away. They are to keep an eye on me and send me home if I look faint. Teachers slice me a sideways glance as my sunken collarbone and accordion frame slink through the halls.

  “Watch her,” they're thinking, “she could go anytime.”

  IN A WORLD OF BLOOD DRAWN and tubes shoved and veins seared with needles, of meds and headaches and missing school, of flunking and sneaking off to the nurses' office when another test comes up, how long before you start to help them find the cause? How long before you start to look through medical journals like Mom does and read about your symptoms so you can give the doctor some ideas of what to check for? How long before you get off your ass, be an adult, and start helping the people who are trying to help you?

  WE'RE ON OUR WAY TO THE NEW CARDIOLOGIST, Mom white-knuckled at the wheel. This will be the third and final one Dr. Kate has sent us to, and we've waited months to see him. If he can't find anything, Dr. Kate says, it's probably not my heart.

  “I'll show those goddamn no-good sons a bitches at the hospital that I'm not crazy. You are sick, goddammit, you've got a heart problem, I knew it all along, and those assholes over there at that country-bumpkin hospital don't know what the hell they're talking about.”

  “I know, Mom, I know. Don't worry, we'll get to the bottom of it.”

  “Well, we are going to go see this guy and get to the bottom of this, for Christ's sake.” We slam into a parking space, she unfolds from the car and ruffles the heat out of her top; smoothes down her white slacks.

  “C'mon now, let's get in there, and I mean now, goddammit.” She pins me to the trunk of the car with a glare. “You are going to tell him what's wrong with you, what's happening to your heart. You understand me? Sharp chest pain. Shortness of breath. You got it?”

  “Yes, Mom. I'll tell him.”

  WE SIT IN THE ROOM waiting for the doctor. He breezes in, spends five minutes, breezes out. He's young. Good-looking. He doesn't spend much time but gives Mom his undivided attention and concerned, perplexed facial expressions. My mother gives him her own concerned, perplexed facial expressions. Their concerned, perplexed facial expressions ricochet off of each other. She immediately calms. He's going to do another heart monitor. We're going to keep it on me double the length of time, just as Mom suggests. He signs off, slapping the chart into the plastic container on the door. My mother sighs; finally we are going to get to the bottom of this thing. I'm happy, too. As I was sitting on the examining table waiting for him, I started to think, maybe it's not my heart. Maybe it's something like my appendix. There was a kid in school who had to get his taken out and he was fine after that. Just as I was about to squeak up, the doctor strode in.

  Now that he's going to do another test, I know he's on the right path. He's so confident. He'll take care of everything. I can't believe I thought we were wrong. I don't want to have n
ew doctors. So I have to wear the monitor for two days instead of one, so what? At least somebody will now find out what's wrong with me, instead of those stupid doctors who don't know anything.

  They lather me up. Mom steps out. The Bic slides down my chest. I hover above, think of Dad and his lathering brush, Agent Orange pukes, watch the girl who is getting her chest shaved, only she can't see me because I watch her from around the corner of the room, peering in from the hall. They squeeze the jelly on, press round white wafers on top, tape them down. The wires jut out my pants zipper. I'm so glad I don't have to go to school like this.

  On the way out, my mother is humbly thankful. She emits a subtle radioactive electro-undercurrent of thrill that we're making progress. And she has decided to send me to school after all; my teachers need to see just how serious this heart condition is.

  In the car we ride home in silence. I gulp air down, belch it back up. Mom reaches over and gently tucks a strand of loose hair behind my ear. Her soft graze sends electrifying goose bumps spilling down the side of my body. We are going to get to the bottom of this. I have got to show them what's wrong with me.

  I gulp air down. I hold my breath. This time, it's going to be until I can feel my heart skip.

  “WELL, IT LOOKS LIKE what we've got here is a possible case of periodic rapid heart action.”

  I'm in the exam room, fully clothed, sitting on the table, while they look at my test results, spread out over the exam counter.

  “Does that mean we'll have to go in for open-heart? I mean seriously, Michael, I'm not opposed to it if we can really find out what's going on here. I've been reading up on a new pediatric valve syndrome, and I'm wondering if you could do a test just to rule that out.”

  My mother is now on a first-name basis with my cardiologist. They stand near each other when they consult. In an effort to clarify the confusing results of my latest monitor reading, he is personally explaining to her the odd fluctuations on my heart graphs.