Little Mary

She grew up in a house full of children, mostly girls, seven of them to be exact, she was the youngest of all the girls, to her it seemed her size had more to do with her age than anything else.  Yet, Little Mary, as her sisters called her, knew she was different in other ways too.  She never had the energy that her siblings had and so while they found activities outside to entertain themselves she would immerse herself in a book.  She always found solace, even as a nine-year-old she found the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, the darkness of them, suited to her disposition.

Little Mary was dark in her mood, she never understood that, why sometimes she would just want to cry.  There wasn’t really anything to cry over, no discernable reason for her sense of gloom.  It was just a part of her that she accepted and even though she felt love from those around her she didn’t feel lovable.  Little Mary saw herself as awkward, she didn’t have the grace of her older sisters, and despite her father thinking that finishing school would help her with her gait, it didn’t seem to work at all. 

But she did it for her dad, went through the process of trying to be the graceful swan.  Many times, while at finishing school, she would cry during her class because it overwhelmed her that she would lose her balance or feel out of breath.  One day, when her dad had picked her up, she asked him if she had to return and the response she received was not the one that she had desperately hoped for.  But her dad looked at her with concern that she had wanted to give up and asked her about the question.  Mary tried to explain to him that she didn’t want to disappoint him, but that she knew it would happen and that it was because being there made her feel ill.  She felt dizzy and sick to her stomach.

It wasn’t long until the stomach aches became almost unbearable for Little Mary and she didn’t feel like eating anything at all. She missed a lot of school and her parents thought that maybe someone was picking on her, making her feel bad about being there with the other children.  She had pulled away in finishing school and now from her elementary class.  After speaking with Little Mary’s teachers her parents became even more concerned about their child.  It was then that the parents that were there, day in and day out, learned that their child had been isolating herself during recess and never joined her friends for a game of tag or kickball.  Instead, Little Mary sat on the steps to the building, alone, book in hand.

One night as she laid in her bed reading her dad came into her room and sat on the edge of her bed stroking her long auburn hair.  He did that sometimes, and she knew she was safe, that her dad loved her.  He looked into the darkness of Mary’s eyes that night and asked if she was alright and it was as if those words opened the flood gates to a rising river.  As the tears rolled down her cheeks her dad cradled her in her arms, assuring her that what ever it was that it would be ok, he would fix it.

Mary knew that her dad couldn’t fix it, even as a child, a little lost girl, Mary knew that she was different and broken beyond repair.  She finally began to open up to her dad about the stomach pains, about how tired she was and how awful she felt all of the time.  Her dad lifted her up that night in his arms and carried her to his car, laying her in the back seat.  This time he knew, he saw the fear in his child’s face and he understood that what was happening to his child was serious and that he needed answers.

Mary’s parents sat in the room with her at the hospital as the doctor’s told them that so far, the tests had all come back normal, but that keeping Mary in the hospital for a few days to determine why her blood pressure was so low and why she was so thin was the best course of action.  Little Mary was scared, she wanted to go home, to be with her sisters and brothers, to lay in her own bed. 

It was days before Little Mary would be released from the hospital with no information for her parents as to the cause of her mysterious illness.  More importantly, the symptoms would linger on for years, coming and going like the seasons of change.  Her stints in the hospital would always result in one missed diagnosis after another.  There would be days during her teenage years that she wouldn’t know if she would be able to get through, survive the odd aches and pain, swallow food or even take the steps required to move through days that seemed like they wouldn’t end.

The end, that was what Little Mary thought she was facing day in and day out and many times she wanted it to end, permanently.  She wanted what she felt to stop, even if that meant that she would no longer see the people she loved.  Little Mary would sometimes wait pensively on the curb, thinking that all it would take for her to end her physical torment was to step out, just at the right moment, just when the car got close enough not to stop.  She never did it though she thought about it, she knew that her religion would see it as a sin, one that she could not come back from or seek penance for.  But she didn’t understand why she had to suffer, what loving God would make her endure it all.

As Mary became an adult, independent of her parents she seemed to be able to manage the symptoms a little better, even thinking that maybe whatever the ailment that she had as a child had been cured with her diagnosis of Asthma.  She hated the steroid medication that the doctors had given her, but she had gained a little weight, she had a little more energy, enough in fact that she had started dating, got married and had children.  For the first time in her life Mary thought she was normal and that in of itself made her happy.

The happiness didn’t last long, though there were several years of it, and when it ended Mary found herself right back where she had been in her youth, seeking comfort not in being a mother, but in her own world of books, of quiet moments and isolation.  Her children going from one sister to the other as she had bouts of hospitalizations.  Moments reflecting on the days she had wanted to step off the curb into oncoming traffic.  There were days when she couldn’t stand without falling, when her legs just wouldn’t carry her, and, on those days, she relied on her sisters to help her and help her care for her children.

Her parents were both gone, and her dad could no longer pick her up and place her gently in the seat of the car, he couldn’t seek out answers for her. The husband that she had brought children into the world with had decided that he was too young to be with someone that couldn’t enjoy life the way he wanted to.  Without her sisters Little Mary would have most certainly perished.

It was her sister that had found her that morning, unconscious, laying on the shower floor. Little Mary was just that, little again, weighing just eighty-seven pounds and her sister was shocked at the sight of her laying there, unaware and nearly dead.  As she called for an ambulance her sister dried her off and slipped a gown over her head, staying by Little Mary’s side until the medics had arrived.

As they lifted her from the floor they began feverously working to save her, starting IV lines, doing heart compressions and squeezing bags of fluid into her.  Little Mary began to faintly hear her sister’s voice calling to her, telling her to hang on, to be there for her children.  Mary listened to the words, trying to comprehend them, but she wasn’t sure that there were really words, that she was even alive.

It would be days before she realized that she was alive, that there were people standing by her bedside or that she had even made it to a hospital.  Her memory was foggy at best, and everything seemed hazy to her.  Mary, though awake really couldn’t focus on words or the tubes that ran into her body, tubes that kept her alive for the time, nor did she know who was there.  What seemed like a lifetime to those that loved her was just an instant to tiny Little Mary for the last of her memories was her going to take a shower, to get ready to lay on the couch like a little bird upon a perch.

When reality finally sank in and her life had begun to come into focus Mary knew that something horrible had happened to her, but she wasn’t sure what it had been, or why she somehow had felt at peace for the first time since she was a child.  She knew that she had spent some time with her parents, that her mother had told her that it was time for her to go home, that there wasn’t a place set at the table for her just yet.  She found that thought odd, for her mother had passed away long ago, she thought it had been just a dream, something from her imagination or the drugs that they must have given her.  She never asked her mother why she should go home, or to whom she was going home to, but her parents where both so beautiful, just as she had remembered them as a child, how they could have been so young in her imagination and yet she look they same. 

An elderly man, in his mid-70’s and dressed in the standard white hospital jacket, walked into Mary’s hospital room as she lay there thinking about her parents, missing them and attempting to fight back her tears. It was comforting to see the person in front of sporting a half smile as he read through the clip board attached to the bottom of her bed and yet somehow, she knew that he had something important to share with her, something that her mother had sent her home to hear.  The longer he stood there reading the more Little Mary felt the need to pull the blankets up tighter around her, as if she was wrapping her self up in her mother’s arms, her words and her comfort.

Finally, after what seemed a lifetime the man in the white coat spoke to her, his first words were nothing more than an introduction, his name was Dr. Ambarth and he was the Chief Endocrinologist on staff at the University Hospital.  Mary was confused, not certain how she had managed to get to a hospital so far away from her home and then he explained that she had been transported there by Life Flight when her regional hospital could not bring her back around, that she had been in intensive care for over two weeks, barely clinging to life.  It was all surreal to Mary, confusing and all she could think about at that moment were her children and where they were, who was caring for them, did they think she dead and never coming back?  Dr. Ambarth could see the confusion in Little Mary’s face and he smiled and assured her that she was going to be fine, that her family had been to see her almost everyday since her admission.  The wave of relief that had come over Mary at that moment in time, even though she didn’t fully understand yet, was immense and suddenly she could feel a physical change in herself that felt almost foreign.

Dr. Ambarth went on to tell Mary that she had been in complete adrenal failure when she had been admitted to the hospital, and that he believed, based upon the information provided to him by her sister, that she had adrenal issues all her life that had gone undiagnosed and that while she may have had some function of the gland the complete shut down almost killed her.  Mary was lucky he had told her, because not many people survived the ordeal she had just experienced.  Little Mary had many questions for Dr. Ambarth, but somehow, she knew that this was not the end, that she would survive and she knew that her mother had sent her home not because she didn’t love her but because she knew what Mary was about to learn, she knew that her daughter would finally be whole.