“Pins and Needles”
On
that Monday morning in February of 1997, I could feel the cold wind brush
against my face. I was hungry, and that was expected. I hadn’t been allowed to
eat for twenty four hours. The doctors who were doing my surgery had met with
me the week before to discuss plans for my operation, and casually mentioned I
couldn’t eat a single thing exactly one day before my surgery. Even when my
stomach rumbled, all I could do was drink lots of water. Damn them. I hated
them for lots of reasons, and after the month I had been through, I think I had
the right to. But right then, I hated them because they said I couldn’t have
food. I wanted to eat!
On
the way to the hospital, I was somewhat excited. That’s a strange feeling for a
nine year old fifth grader to have when it comes near due time to having
surgery. I was missing school, so I was sort of happy about that. All my
friends wished me luck and knew that I would be in school the following day, so
no worries there. They knew I would be okay. At least, now everyone could be
sure. A month earlier, no one could have predicted what would have happened to
me. Of course, I knew. I knew the entire time. The Ouija board never told lies.
It
was Christmas morning, 1996 when I received the infamous Ouija board as a gift.
I loved that game and had been playing it with friends for months before at
sleepovers, where we would ask it questions. The dial would move and guide our
hands like fingers over a map, searching for the right path to the right
answers. Being fifth grade girls, we wanted to know who secretly had a crush on
whom, which girl was the most liked, who would be the first one to get a
boyfriend, stuff like that. But what I asked that Christmas night was
different.
After
all the presents were opened, after all the relatives arrived, and after all
the bits of crumbs were scraped off our plates, my two cousins, my sister, and
I headed downstairs to consult the Ouija board. I decided to be the first one to
test it out, so I asked the first question.
“Ouija
board, will something bad happen to me soon?”
My
cousin Melissa joined me as we put our fingers lightly on the surface of the
dial. It began to float its way over the board while we sat, silently waiting
for it to tell us my fate. Our fingers posed, our breath suspended in midair,
our eyes wide with excitement. Finally, it spelled out ‘y-e-s.’
“Yes!
Yes! Oh my god! It said yes! Holy crap! I hope it’s not serious!” I said, with
a hint of awe and surprise present in my voice.
“It
probably means that you’ll trip over yourself at school, you klutz,” my cousin
said.
We
all laughed. She was probably right. This game was used at little girls’
parties to see who liked who, not to grant bad things to happen. Or at least
that’s what I thought before that day in early January came.
It
was after school, and my sister, my neighbor Lucy, and I were innocently
playing ‘school’ downstairs in the basement. But, unbeknownst to all of us,
there was a needle in the rug from when my sister last sewed. None of us could
see it. Yet there it was, gleaming, standing upright. Innocent, yet foreboding
and threatening. The Ouija board was going to be right.
The
next thing I know, I take one step. My right foot no sooner strikes the needle
than I fall and collapse onto the floor, cringing, crying, screaming bloody
murder. Lucy screamed too, my sister freaked out, and my dad came running from
the room next door, all of them wondering why I had fallen like a lifeless
soldier upon the ground.
My
dad held my foot in his hands. Tears were rapidly descending down my cheeks and
onto my shirt. I was rocking back and forth. I was a mess. I didn’t care. I had
just stepped onto a needle! I said I felt it pierce through my foot, but my dad
saw no evidence of that. I told him that it was there, that I could feel its frozen
sharpness cut through my flesh as we spoke. Being nine years old and more or
less a cry baby, he didn’t quite believe me. No one really did. But I was convinced.
The Ouija board had been asked a question. It had answered. No one believed, but
it came true. Painfully true.
For
almost a month after that, I endured the most pain I have ever felt in my life.
Every waking hour, every moment of the day, was like being tortured in hell. My
foot seemed separate from my body; a tense stump with constant and shockingly
fresh, cold pain. It felt like not just one, but a thousand piercing needles
stabbing through my foot.
I spent the next couple of weeks in a
continuing effort trying to prove to the world, including my family and friends
who I trusted, that I indeed had a needle immersed in my foot. We tried
everything. We tried soaking my foot in hot water with salt to try and draw the
needle out. They gave me painkillers. We visited the doctor twice. The first
time, I received a Novocain shot in my foot. I remember walking in the room
that day, seeing nothing but sterile, eerily white walls, white floor, white
containers, white table bed, white everything. Whoever was there must have
heard the piercing screams that erupted from me that day. I almost
hyperventilated while my mom held me down, my body emitting waves of sweat and
suffering. My sister and dad stood sympathetically off to the side, watching
while I struggled and wriggled helplessly on the table like a fish out of
water. The doctor, of course, didn’t believe there was a piece of the needle in
my foot either. And for a while, she proved it, saying, after she jammed the shot
needle around my foot during the most excruciating ten minutes of my life, “I
can’t seem to find anything. There’s no needle in your foot.”
I wanted to say, “Bullshit.” I almost
did, too. I was not joking around. I didn’t want any special attention. I
wasn’t looking for an excuse to skip gym class. I just wanted this stupid
needle out of my foot. It still hurt, and after three weeks, I knew it had to
be more than just pain. I was not going to give up. No matter what a stupid
doctor said. No matter what.
After that awful day at the hospital,
we tried prying it, poking it, prodding it. But nothing worked. Even my
classmates at school thought that I was faking it. Most of my family, my
friends, and even my fifth grade teacher didn’t really think that there was a
chunk of needle penetrating through my foot. That was the most disheartening
and painful thing of all.
I felt helpless. My closest friends
who knew me for years, even my fifth grade teacher who I also had for third
grade didn’t believe me. I trusted them. Everyone seemed to be in a constant
battle fighting against me. It felt like struggling to win a war when you’re
the only soldier defending your side. No one came to my rescue. I went through
a period of about four weeks where I walked around in the snow, the classroom,
and around home with a boot on my right foot. A boot was the only shoe I could
get my right foot into without feeling a wince of pain. I had to walk on my
heel, toes pointing upward, because the forepart was where it was lodged. It
was so irritating. I couldn’t do anything for myself. I felt so betrayed, like
everyone turned against me. This battle had now turned into a crusade, one to
put an end to the skepticism once and for all and to prove the truth, that
there was something menacing, something hibernating, in my foot.
Most everyone has times like these.
Something’s buried within them, burning to come out. No one knows it but you.
You feel alone, solitary, confined, as if anything you say or do won’t matter,
won’t account for anything. You’ve become a weary advocate desperate for someone
to talk to, to side with you, to share your worries, to take you under their
wing and swathe you with confidence. I needed someone like that, desperately. I
needed someone to help me win my struggle.
Four weeks had passed. My mother had
seen me in pain constantly and, equipped with her motherly instinct, knew that
I wasn’t pretending. She originally requested to have an x-ray done first, but
the doctor insisted upon the shot. Deep down, she knew. I could see it in her
eyes amidst the fear and worry. My mother kept pursuing and finally arranged
for a second doctor’s visit, where the x-ray at last took place. And it was painless.
Thank God. She was still by my side, still believing in me. I felt a little
better and heartened when I knew that she was on my side. My dad and sister
somewhat believed me, but my mom genuinely trusted me. Most of all, she became
my second, my partner, my savior. The one who could give me hope and help me
win.
Then, they found it. They called my
family in, put up the copy of the x-ray, and showed all of us. That picture
showed what took me a month to try and persuade to everyone, that the needle
existed. God damn! It took all I had not to yell out and scream “In your face!”
to the doctors and everyone else who never thought I was right. A mixture of
happiness, anger, and relief all blended together in my head. I was furious
that they seemed to need evidence, other than the trusty word of a
nine-year-old fifth grader, to truly be convinced that a needle lay settled in
my foot. Yet in spite of my deep hatred for these doctors, this also marked the
first time in weeks that I smiled, the first time where I sensed that I had won
a long, tiring war. At last, I had been liberated, for now we truly had
answers. It felt like a great victory for young kids everywhere. And yet not just
for young kids, but for any human being who never had people to believe in
them, to trust them, to have faith in them. I felt like I had made a milestone
in history. But of course, it was a small, personal event and simply meant that
I needed to have surgery, as soon as possible. Nevertheless, victory never
tasted so sweet.
When I got to the hospital for the
surgery, I met the nursing staff caring for me that day. They were really nice,
even made me cards and decorated my room. But what was most striking about that
day was that they all told me how brave I was. Brave. Yeah. They said that if
they ever had a needle in their foot and no one believed them, they would have
gone crazy. Right then, I started to cry. It wasn’t because I was nervous,
scared, or sad, even though at some level I was. Instead, I cried because
finally, the battle was over. I wanted to hug them for not immediately doubting
what I said, what I felt, what I knew to be true. Finally, they had
surrendered. Finally, someone had come to rescue me.
Less than two hours later, I was
rolled into the emergency room. The doctor, looking like the Pillsbury doughboy
in his hospital white clothing, gave me laughing gas, and soon the whole room became
fuzzy. I don’t remember falling asleep, but the last glimpse I had was of my
mother watching over me. She was with me in the surgery room. The doctors said
I could have one family member with me, and I chose her. She deserved it. I
wanted her to be there with me through the whole thing, because after all, she
was there from the start. And for that, she needed to be there for the end.
After the surgery in the recovery
room, the doctors said I did wonderful. They all were smiling. The procedure
went well, and the needle was out. They even gave me a cup with the piece of
needle they took out as a souvenir. I giggled, still drugged up on morphine,
but I kept it. I still have it to this day, as a reminder. A reminder of a
journey filled with pain and agony, but also one of love and faith.
The doctors told me, after the drugs
had worn off, that if I hadn’t persisted, if I hadn’t kept pushing for what I
believed to be true, that I would have died of blood poisoning exactly one week
later. Funny how these things happen, isn’t it? Funny how our lives can be
normal one minute, be changed the next, and become all better again in the end.
It’s funny how life is.
Fighting for what you believe in is
not an easy task. Try asking Martin Luther King, Jr. if it was easy convincing
the entire population of America of his dream for blacks to be viewed as the
white man’s equal. Try asking Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Founding Fathers, Christopher
Columbus, Rosa Parks, Galileo Galilee, even Ray Kinsella in the movie, Field
of Dreams, if they didn’t experience anger and frustration when they
couldn’t convince people of their ideas. I’m sure that any one of them would
tell you that it wasn’t easy trying to get people to confide in their seemingly
foolish ideas. But what’s significant and what remains in our minds today is
that after years, even centuries, of being dubbed impotent, ludicrous fools,
they are now regarded as great individuals who stood by their thoughts and
proved them to be true. George Bernard Shaw once said, “All great truths begin
as blasphemies,” where what you know to be undeniably true is doubted by
everyone you know, love, and trust. It was devastating not to be believed from
the beginning by those who I thought knew me best. I sincerely thought that
everyone would have understood me, no matter how crazy my story may have
seemed.
I guess everyone is naturally
skeptical of things that appear to be improbable. All throughout history this
has been the case. My account is no real different from any other, except for
the fact that it was mine and I could have died! But I also had my mother with
me, every step of the way. All those people I mentioned also had at least one
follower, which made things not altogether strong, but still a little easier.
Even when we can’t see it at all times, there’s always that one gleam of hope
at the end of that palpably dark tunnel of doubt. My mother was that ray of
light for me. Her love and faith in me from beginning to end made that painful,
agonizing battle slightly less strenuous to go through. Thanks, Mom.
Oh, and just for the record, I
haven’t consulted the Ouija board ever since. And if I ever do, I won’t ask it
questions that could potentially end up resulting in death. I think I’ve had
enough needles for one lifetime.
