Part Eleven: Healing
Leo was discharged after four days. The rib stabilized without requiring surgical intervention, which Dr. Chen said was the best possible outcome given the displacement. He was in pain for two weeks, managed with medication, and was given a full return-to-normal-activity clearance at the six-week check.
The six-week appointment was on a Tuesday morning in January, and the pediatric specialist who had been following his case pressed on the area where the fracture had been and asked Leo to rate his pain on the scale they used, the one with the faces ranging from smiling to crying.
Leo considered it.
“Maybe a two?” he said. “It’s not really pain. It’s more like I can feel where it was.”
“That’s normal,” the doctor said. “Your body has done an excellent job of healing. You should be proud of it.”
Leo seemed to find this funny — the idea of being proud of your own body for doing something automatically. He laughed, the full-bodied Leo laugh that had been absent for six weeks and that I had not realized how badly I had missed until I heard it again.
We went to a diner afterward, the three of us, Leo and Mark and me, and we ordered pancakes because it was eleven in the morning and we felt like pancakes. Leo ate approximately twice what you would predict from an eight-year-old’s body and then asked if he could have pie, and Mark said yes, and I said yes, and we sat in the diner on a January Tuesday and Leo ate pie with the focused satisfaction of someone who had earned something.
Which he had. Which he had absolutely, completely earned.
