Everywhere I Go I Hurt Myself

My daughter is in a constant state of infirmary.   I don’t know how much of it is her and how much of it is the vision impairment, but her legs are a mess of cuts and scrapes.    I remember as a child noticing how I had scabs all over my legs and arms while my friends and classmates seemed to have unscathed limbs.   I wasn’t sure if it was because I was reckless out in the woods, a slow healer or just plain clumsy but it was that way for most of my childhood.

My daughter is in the same situation, although a lot of her injuries come from running into things she didn’t see.   She’s pretty good at handling getting hurt.   We try not to coddle her and have been backed up by her play therapist saying her temperament is feisty and she wants to figure out and deal with things herself.   I asked if we should hug her when she’s hurt or let her have her space (she doesn’t like to be touched when she’s dealing with pain).   Dhruti said we should give her a choice, asking her if she wants a hug.   She said knowing we’re there to hug her is more important than the hug itself, which she might not want at the time.

But she does get hurt.    A lot.   Thankfully she is getting a tiny bit of vision back.   Let’s say a normally sighted person has 100% vision.   My daughter has about 1% in her right eye, consisting mostly of lights and maybe a color or two.   Her left eye was at about 10% for a while until the cataract progressed, taking her down to 5%.   Then the hematoma from probable head trauma (mild head trauma, but mild is catastrophic given the state of her eyes).  

That took her down to what seemed to be 0% in the left eye.   We’re now back at what I’d say is 3-4%, enough to know something is looming out there to avoid or feel for with her hands.    We’ve lost the peripheral vision she had and she can’t ride her bike or scooter.   Maybe more to the point she won’t try because she knows she can’t see enough to do so.

But she’s not running into everything anymore.   But accidents still happen, for instance she miscalculated where the porch steps were yesterday, ending in her falling down and scraping the entire back of her thigh on the bricks at the bottom.   She’s fine today and acts like it was nothing, but then that’s what she always does.

Sometimes I get a window into her mind though.   The other day she told me, “everywhere I go I hurt myself.”   It’s hard to keep your composure when your child says something like that.

The Big Boy Update:  My son still has eczema.   He had fierce eczema when he was a toddler.   We were slathering him with lotion and steroid cream every day just to keep it manageable but he seemed to grow out of it.   It flares back up though from time to time.   Usually he won’t let me put anything on it even though I see him scratching a spot to the point of dermal damage.   Tonight was different though.   Perhaps it was because he wasn’t ready to sleep and wanted to come downstairs to see what I was doing.    He crept into the bedroom and then told me something about hearing sounds and being afraid.   Then he showed me his armpit.   It was a mess.   He wanted to see a picture so he could zoom in and look at it.    I put on some medicine and then took him back to bed and then I came down here to write this.   Hopefully he’s fallen asleep and is more comfortable now.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The above blog post topic was sort of a downer, so let’s end on an up note with my daughter for tonight because while she has a lot acting on her negatively in her life, she remains a very positive little girl.   This afternoon she was playing with some musical instruments and making up a song.   She stoped to tell my son and me, “I love daddy, mommy and my brother—they’re the best people in the world.”   Then she thought for a second and added, “And me.  I love me too.”