Chapter Three: Muted Screams

We move on to the following week. It's October 9th, 2005. Everyone is still talking about the OJ Simpson verdict, although I really didn't give a damn. My situation is about to get even worse...

My father's new girlfriend apparently had a chat with him over the weekend regarding my injury, and somehow convinced him that this was an elaborate scheme to get out of doing chores. I was still in so much pain that I could barely get out of bed or stand up, and *any* weight on my right hip brought me to tears. The chiropractor wasn't helping so far. On Monday morning, I woke up and struggled to get dressed for school. I missed the bus, so my father drove me to school. The whole reason I missed the bus was because he took away my crutches the night before, stating that I'd "been on them long enough and would never get better" if I kept using them. It took me five minutes to make it from my bed to the toilet across the hall, and almost fifteen to make it to the living room. I think I actually ran out of tears at one point.

My father got me to school well before the bus would have. I was dropped off in front of the auditorium (instead of near the building where my class was, almost half a mile away on the other side of campus) around 7:15.

Boerne High School is a fairly large and spread out campus, with ten separate buildings, two gymnasiums, and around 1200 students at the time. It was also very fortunate to have had one of the most amazing administrators at the time, Mr. Sam Champion. He made an effort to get to know every one of his students and always addressed them by name when he saw them. He had known me since my days in elementary school, thanks to winning the spelling bee and several other accomplishments. I'll write much more about him later, but it is at this point that he enters the story.

By 7:30, I had progressed about forty feet from where I got out of my father's van. Mr. Champion arrived and parked in the faculty lot directly in front of the auditorium. In retrospect, I was lucky to have been dropped off where I was. Still in tears, I tried my hardest to keep moving while carrying a heavy backpack and being unable to bear any weight on my right side. Sam approached me on his way to the office, and, having seen me on crutches for the previous week, asked me if everything was OK. One look at my face gave him the answer. He helped me hobble to the nearest bench, about ten more feet from where I was, and told me to sit down while he would try to make arrangements for some help. He wasn't sure if the athletic office would have crutches or a wheelchair that I could use for the day, but he was prepared to call just about anywhere to help find something for me. Fortunately, the athletic office had a wheelchair for injured players. He brought it to me, got me situated in it, and then pushed me to his office so I could bring him up to speed. I told him about the fall, what the chiropractor had said, and the argument my father and I went through the night before about my crutches. He must have called my father later in the day. When I finished with after-school band practice, my father was there again to pick me up and he brought my crutches with him. At the time, getting my father to admit he was wrong about something was only slightly easier than gaining access to Area 51. Sam must have been very persuasive.

My father relented on the crutches but still expected me to do "my share" around the house, which included carrying out the trash twice a week. Carrying a 20-30 pound trash bag down a rocky driveway is no easy task with crutches. To make matters worse, the little hellions I mentioned before managed to get away with everything and blame it on me. I became the whipping boy of the house.

The chiropractor gave me a series of exercises to do every day at home to help with my hip. I did them every day and wouldn't stop until the pain was so bad that I was afraid I would pass out. This played heavily into the arguments I would have with my father on an almost nightly basis. I begged him to take me to a real doctor because I wasn't getting any better, and he would always refuse with the same excuse:
"If I take you to a specialist, they're going to call the chiropractor. She'll say that you haven't been doing your exercises and they'll tell you that they won't be able to help you."

The argument would escalate, and my father would start ranting about how I didn't respect him or his authority. It would frequently end with me getting slapped across the face or shoved into a piece of furniture, causing me even more pain. One night I even threatened to call the sheriff...he told me "go ahead, they can't do a thing...and you'll regret it." Like a fool, I chickened out. All I wanted was to get some kind of real help, as it was obvious to me (and apparently, only me!) that the chiropractor was full of shit.

Elsewhere at home, things continued in the downward spiral. My dad's girlfriend (from now on, she'll be known as The Bitch) tried even harder to get my sister and me to leave and live with our mother. Her kids would frequently make messes that would later be blamed on one of us, prompting another argument. Many nights I would lay awake and wish for a quick and painless escape from all of it.

The holidays came, and I spent Thanksgiving at my mother's. It was only the second time since the fall that I had seen my mother, the first being the weekend that it happened. Even her husband noticed that something much more serious was wrong and that the chiropractor was not helping.

During the second week of December, my sister ran away from home. She didn't even ride the bus home that afternoon, opting instead to catch a ride with a neighbor who was a good friend of hers. She told me that morning that she would not be coming home and that I could find her at Kim's, but I was sworn to secrecy. I never said a word. The Bitch threatened to hit me with various kitchen instruments and at one point swung a frying pan at my head when I wouldn't tell her where Amanda was. She remained at Kim's all night and got on the bus from there the next morning. My father, for the most part, ignored it. He never knew about what happened just three days later. Fearing that I would be stuck without the ability to walk for the rest of my life, having every plea for help ignored or answered with abuse, and not having any other way out, I grabbed my crutches that Friday and left. I didn't tell anyone where I was going. I crutched my way over a mile to the Guadalupe River Bridge and stood at the edge. Over the guardrail was a drop of almost two hundred feet, with shallow water and plenty of rocks at the bottom. I stood there on the bridge for almost an hour and chain-smoked the cigarettes I stole from my grandmother's bedroom. I kept thinking that if I went through with it, maybe it would be a wake-up call to my father and, at the very least, things could be better for my sister. I cried as I contemplated the plunge. I had just finished my last cigarette as Mike and his mother were approaching the bridge to come home. They saw me there on the bridge and pulled over. Mike asked what I was doing there, and I told him that since I had no options left, I was going to do my damnedest to make my sister's situation a little better. He gave me a hug and told me to get in the van. We sat at his house drinking coffee for almost four hours, and I made it home just five minutes before my father. The Bitch was furious yet again, demanding to know where I was. I hit her in the stomach with my crutch and told her to fuck off as I had homework to do.

As we progressed toward Christmas, plans were made to send me and my sister off to Tennessee to visit with my grandmother, aunt, and uncle. During the last week of school, we made a visit to Wal-Mart and I left the group for the hardware section. My father finally found me picking out a locking doorknob for my bedroom. He asked why, and I told him "I'm not leaving for a week and giving those little shits unrestricted access to my bedroom. The door will be locked and the key will be with me in Tennessee." I think he finally realized how bad things had become when he wasn't around, and that night the plans were made to send the little hellions to their grandparents' for the same week.

Visiting in Tennessee was more of the usual. My aunt, however, jumped on the bandwagon about the exercises I allegedly wasn't doing. I made a point to show her that I was and that it had done nothing to help the problem. When we flew back, she still wasn't convinced. Fortunately, my grandmother flew back with us to spend two weeks in Texas. After my birthday, we went to my mother's for a few days to repeat the holiday festivities. During the weekend, my grandmother convinced my mom to take me to a real doctor before sending me back to my dad's.

January 2, 1996
We arrived at Dr. Mitchell's office early that morning. I was the first patient to be seen, and I was quite thankful as it turned out to be an all-day affair. The doctor was the only one in the small town of Comfort at the time, but was an excellent osteopath and family physician. After a brief exam, he sent me off to Kerrville for x-rays. Five hours later, films in hand, we were back in his office. It took him all of five seconds to fully process what he saw, and his first words were something to the extent of "And how is it you're even able to stand up without passing out???" He showed me exactly what the problem was. I broke the neck of my femur, separating the main portion of the bone from the ball in my hip socket. Over the three months that had elapsed since the original injury, the femur had attempted to heal directly to my pelvis.

I returned home that evening with my x-rays and an appointment set to see Dr. Earl Stanley, a local pediatric orthopedic surgeon, in a couple of weeks. I told my father to look at the x-ray films and decide again if I had been faking it all along. It took hours for the color to return to his face...

More to come again soon!