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“So what’s wrong with you anyway?” She was a girl, my age, with swinging blond pigtails and an annoying habit of smacking her gum. She eyed my leg braces and crutches suspiciously, as if she thought they would bite her. Being the young child that I was, I didn’t immediately realize that this girl was being rude. To me her questions were the same as mine. What’s it feel like to run? To jump? Simple questions with impossible answers, just like hers. What’s wrong with you anyway?
“I have Silver Palsy,” I said, my child-like pronunciation only causing more confusion.
“What’s that mean?”
“That I can’t walk.”
“Why?”
“I dunno,” I said. “I guess I made my legs mad.” She looked at me as if I was nuts and ran away her legs pumping a full force, leaving her questions far behind, but I stayed with them. They echo in my head long after she’s forgotten.
“So what’s wrong with you anyway?”
Wrong with you…
Wrong with you…
Wrong with you…

Cerebral palsy is a term used to describe conditions affecting body movement and muscle coordination. Medical dictionaries define CP as a "Bilateral, symmetrical, non-progressive paralysis resulting from developmental defects in the brain or from trauma at birth.

Throughout childhood my life was one big complicated definition. I wasn’t April, but April, who has spastic CP. You don’t mind if I show this intern a few things do you dear? Warm smiles, cold hands, pulling my limbs in impossible directions. No matter what they do I will never bend. Cute young interns smile at me in pity. A classic case really, no better, no worse never will be. Surgery on muscles I can’t pronounce. Long complicated reasons to way I should sit up strait, don’t ‘W” sit. Strapped into various devices, pain ignored. Will this help her look more normal doctor? How can we teach her to eat? Bathe? What will become of her? Diagnosis, predictions, little charts full of stickers to show my progress. This was Cerebral Palsy, my ailment, my identity, and my childhood.
Some children develop cerebral palsy as a complication of being born early (prematurely). Premature babies are more vulnerable to certain types of brain injury just before, during, or just after birth.
My Dad blamed the doctors, “The oxygen wasn’t ready,” he said. “When you came out you couldn’t breathe, it took to long. Thank God it wasn’t the both of you.”
My mother blamed herself, she never said it but I knew I could see it in her eyes when she watched me struggle to sit up or climb up the stairs at my house. I was always her favorite. This wasn’t about me but about her guilt. Her trying to make up for what she thought she did to me.
My sister was less sensitive about the whole thing. The only one who saw me for who I was in those early years, blamed it on my eagerness. My need to have everything I wanted the second that I realized I wanted it. I must have been born with this thing so I would slow down, appreciate life and what it had to show me.
Me, I didn’t blame anyone, a diagnosis, a reason, none of this mattered to me, none of it meant anything, I didn’t understand the words, but I did understand how I lived and how this thing affected that. All the definitions in the world couldn’t change that nor could all the blame. I knew that even then.
In patients with Cerebral Palsy, one or more of the following may occur: muscle tightness or spasm, involuntary movement, disturbance in gait and mobility; abnormal sensation and perception; impairment of sight, hearing or speech; and seizures.
Wheelchairs, crutches, walkers, braces, handicapped stickers, automatic doors, lifts, ramps, shower chairs, elevators, scooters at the mall, surgery scars, curb cuts, wheelchair seating at the movies, lowered counters, handicap stalls, wide doorways and bars on walls. All of this to make me forget and to remind you that I am different. Muscles tense no matter what, jumping at the slightest sound, never running, jumping, skipping, dancing; words sometimes slurred. Speaking slowly because you think I can’t understand, Speaking slowing because I know you can’t understand. My life is defined as different only because of what you perceive to be normal. This is normal. Things I’ve always known, things I’ll never know and many things neither of us will ever understand.
Most people with CP have spastic cerebral palsy, with two or more limbs (arms and legs) affected. They usually learn how to use their unaffected limbs to do some of what they normally would do with the affected limb(s).
It never occurs to a person who lives their life a certain way that that they night be different until someone points it out to them. To me, running means walking fast, dancing means being taken to the prom with a lot of your sisters friends.

“Everyone with cerebral palsy needs treatment throughout his or her life. Treatment does not cure this condition. It helps people with cerebral palsy increase their physical strength, reduce their disabilities, and prevent complications.”
I had my first surgery when I was days old. There was a small hole in my heart that wouldn’t close so the doctor did it for me, with hands bigger then I was, he fixed me. It wasn’t the last time he’d attempt but it was the only time he succeeded. The second came two years later and then another and another. Each time my parents filled my head with thoughts of doing all the things I wanted to do and with each I was disappointed with the small improvements; they weren’t enough for me. I kept thinking that this wasn’t right, in all the movies I saw no one ever stayed this way. They just decided one day that they were sick of it, and they walked. I would too, I thought, I would too and it would be without the ugly lengths of elastic and metal. By the time I had my last surgery I’d realized that all that was just something they mad up for movies. I was gonna remain this way…forever. Whether I liked it or not, I was April, with spastic cerebral palsy.

“Physical therapy (PT) is one of the most important therapies for people with cerebral palsy. Physical therapy usually begins soon after a child is diagnosed and may continue throughout his or her life.”
Physical therapy is one thing and one thing only, necessary evil.
“Measures of prevention are increasingly possible today.”
Twenty-three years. Twenty-three years of definitions, prescriptions, prognoses, wheelchairs, walkers, braces. Twenty years of therapy, of people staring, of struggling to do ordinary things, of making people see that I am more than just some girl in a limp. Twenty-three years. If they told me tomorrow that there was a cure, I’d never take it. A cure would erase everything I have ever done, my entire life my struggles and my happiness are wrapped up in this thing my parents and doctors wanted so badly to take back. It is not the CP that defines my life, but rather how my life defines CP.

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Favorite Sites
Live Journal A journey of my life!!!
Black Planet
Colors of Ana This page is about eating disorders!!!
Trinity College Where I am going next year!!!
Longwood University Where I hope to be oneday!!!

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