This is my youngest son, Gage and he’s going to star in my next children’s book. He’s a young man of 23 now, and in year 9 of remission from a Hellish disease called RSD/CRPS. He lived with CRPS for 3 1/2 years. 
Invisible illnesses are not as well known, but they wreak as much havoc as illnesses that are more obvious. Gage had just turned 11, days before, when he first began suffering with the highest amount of pain imaginable. The mountains of RSD/CRPS pain that he climbed, as a little boy, had many adults not believing him, including doctors, educators, guidance counselors who balled up doctors notes, and strangers asking me why I had a handicapped placard.
He tried his very best to not appear weak. One story, that I can share, was that Gage had missed months and months of school at St. Michael’s, as a fifth grader and he asked me if he could go watch his friends play basketball at school, because he had absolutely lived for participating in sports. He climbed the bleachers and managed 15 minutes of watching his friends, until he fainted, due to the immense amount of pain that he was suffering with. He literally fell into my arms and we had to leave the game. And three weeks later, when he found some strength and managed to show up in class at St. Michael’s Catholic School, his fifth grade teacher called me at home and decided after one day of seeing him, that he was embellishing, because she had seen him walking on his foot. (He was in the middle of being ordered to begin using his foot, no matter how excruciatingly painful it was, by his physical therapist and his pain physician.) My heart still breaks, as I tell that story in present day. He was 11 and taking a plethora of medication’s meant for adult cancer patients, in order to attack his pain. Nothing worked, nothing. He was enduring epidurals and having surgeries to burn off his nerve endings in his foot and found no empathy in his fifth grade teacher. Don’t ask me how I still feel about that woman, because I don’t feel like ranting and raving with a vernacular peppered with expletives, today.
I hope to shed a little light on this disease, but it will be catered for children’s minds. I’m not going to “out” any adults that crossed the line toward behavior better characterized for abusers and not educators or people in the health field. (The book that I should write for adults would not be as simplistic and kind, as it will be for children. )
You have one chance to be kind, when you don’t understand something someone’s going through and many people were not kind to me and my little boy, during a very traumatic time.
I stuck by him and it’s now my honor to write a book about that little hero of mine and his invisible illness.
Gage and the Invisible Illness.
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