Part Eight: What Her Legs Remembered
The physical therapist who had worked with Sophia for the past three years was named Dr. Amara Osei, and she had the specific quality of someone who has spent a career working with the body’s capacity for recovery and has learned to hold both absolute honesty about the limits of what is likely and genuine openness to what is possible.
Sophia called her the following morning.
She described what had happened in the ballroom — not as a miracle, not as a claim, but as a specific, observable event: she had risen from the chair, partially, with the support of her arms and the application of her feet to the floor. She had felt sensation in her legs during this. The sensation had not been full and had not been sustained. But it had been there.
Dr. Osei was quiet on the phone for a moment.
“Come in today,” she said.
The session that afternoon lasted two hours. It was not the session of someone being examined for a claimed recovery. It was the session of someone and their doctor conducting a rigorous and careful investigation of what was actually happening in a body that had, for six years, been operating under one set of parameters and that was now, possibly, operating under different ones.
The results were not a reversal. They were not the dramatic resolution of six years of limitation. They were something more modest and more significant: evidence that the neurological situation was not exactly what it had been assessed to be. That the diffuse damage was, in certain specific pathways, less complete than the imaging had suggested. That the years of the chair had produced something in the muscles and the neural connections that was more complex than simple atrophy.
Dr. Osei sat across from Sophia at the end of the session and said: “I want to be careful about what I promise you.”
“Don’t promise me anything,” Sophia said. “Just tell me what’s true.”
“What’s true,” Dr. Osei said, “is that something has changed. What is producing that change, and how far it goes, and how sustainable it is — those are questions that are going to take time to answer.”
She paused.
“How are you?” she asked. Not clinically. The question had a different register — the question of a person who has been working with someone for three years and who has read the newspaper that morning and who wants to know.
“I found my brother,” Sophia said.
Dr. Osei looked at her.
“I found my brother,” she said again. “He’s eleven years old and he needs a home and I am giving him one.” She paused. “I think — I don’t know how to explain it in terms that are useful medically. But I think for six years I was holding something very still inside myself. Something I didn’t know I was holding.” She looked at her hands. “And when he took my hand, it—” She found the word. “Released.”
Dr. Osei was quiet.
“That’s not medically precise,” Sophia said.
“No,” Dr. Osei agreed. “But medicine is not the only precise thing.”
