ketamine ovenbird This is what they give my nine year old child while they force the burnt toast ends of her broken bones back together. The nurses say that her mind will be somewhere else, but she is quicksilver and sees that this means she will not be unconscious. “Will I feel it?” my girl says, her eyes terrified voids in a paling face. The nurses try to be reassuring, but fail. They say, “Your mind won’t remember the pain,” and my daughter, panicked, says “But that means my body WILL feel it!” You can’t slip anything past this one, not even when she’s just been given a shot of morphine. (I saw the x-ray. The two thick branches that connect elbow to wrist were snapped in two with a terrifying amount of space between the splintered ends. I moaned when I saw it and said, “Oh my god” before I knew words were looking for an exit, and was shushed by the technician.) The nurses administer ketamine through my child’s IV port. She screams while they do it, the poison burning her veins. She begs them to stop, yells, “Can we just take a breather?” but the answer is no. The drugs are already administered and her eyes are already rolling in her head. She dissociates. She dissolves. She goes somewhere I can’t follow. I’m made to stand on the other side of the thin curtain so I can’t see what the orthopedic surgeon does to her arm. If I could see I would become an animal and try to rip him apart to save her. So I stand, blinded, and cry while my daughter screams, high pitched, agonized. She asks again and again if she is alive or dead. She asks where she is. She asks if it’s over. She asks why there is a horrific buzzing in her ears. She asks if the doctor is real. She asks if she’s dreaming. She asks them to stop. She BEGS them to stop. But the shattered vase inside her body must be reassembled, the fractures sealed with gold, the white porcelain fragments driven home. When I’m allowed to see her she is fighting to come back to the world. “I think I’m almost in The Real again…” she says. She doesn’t remember the violent intervention and my gratitude feels like an overstretched balloon in my stomach. Her arm is in a bright pink cast. She reads the words on a poster by the bed out loud to see if her eyes and brain can coordinate. They do and the words coalesce into sense. I ask her what she dreamed but it’s already gone. I want to wipe my own mind clean too but her suffering is burned into every synapse. My job now, and forever, is to carry this trauma so she doesn’t have to. I lock my own screams away so I can smile at this girl who is a part of me and take her home to a world that will never be as safe as I want it to be. As the drugs lose their grip she says, “I’m alive, right?” and I say, “Yes. You’re alive. Alive and safe and strong and brave and I love you with everything I am, and I will never stop.” We walk out of the hospital together, both a little shattered, but very much alive. 250905 ... nr this made me tear up. your daughter is lucky to have you as her mom, and i hope she heals quickly and gets lots of signatures on her cast in the meantime. 250905 what's it to you? who go blather from