Serendipity, for those who don't know, is the wonderful ability to find things unexpectedly. Sometimes called happy luck or happy accident, a few people have more than normal amounts. This is a true story of one of those people.
As an eleven-year old girl playing in a barn, I jumped from the top of a barn hay feeder railing that was about four feet high. I was very near sighted. Everything looked fuzzy and soft to me. However, this time I landed on uneven rock-hard cow clods. Pain coursed through my feet, which immediately began to swell. I tried to stand, but couldn't. I crawled on my hands and knees to the house, where my grandmother found me and helped me inside.
Shortly after, my mother came. We were supposed to leave immediately to travel several hundred miles to the city where my mother moved us from our farm. My mother was furious at both my grandmother and me to discover that my feet were in dire condition. Although she would drop me at my grandparents' farm, sometimes for months at a time, this was only for a few days.
My grandmother said, "She needs to go to a doctor."
My mother protested, "No, we need to leave."
My grandmother pleaded, "She should be carried to the car. Look at her feet! They are badly injured."
My mother didn't want to take the time to get my uncle, who lived nearby. The two argued over the care for me for a few minutes. In the end, my mother forced me to painfully hobble to the car. She did not take me to a doctor.
When we reached the city, my sister was waiting. She was shocked to see my feet and ankles. She also insisted I needed a doctor. Our mother refused, even though we had military benefits with medical coverage. Instead, she told me to sit on the sofa and put my feet up. Over the weekend, the swelling subsided substantially, but the pain remained.
That Monday, the first day of school began. Out mother told me to walk to school, which was a mile away. I did not understand street signs or traffic. My mother had never driven me on the route and I had never even seen the school, which looked different from any school I had attended. My sister eventually convinced our mother to drive me to school, but my mother said nastily, "You'll have to walk home." She could have easily picked me up from school, but she wouldn't.
That afternoon, I walked home, my feet aching with each step. Our mother had not taken me along the route in reverse, I couldn't see the signs to read them, due to my near nearsightedness, and worried I would become hopelessly lost. I made it. My feet were once again swollen and excruciatingly painful. Over night the swelling of my feet went down. The next day, I walked to school and back, as I did from then on. Each afternoon my feet would swell and hurt. Each night they would reduce in size. Over time, my feet swelled less and reduced faster. But, then, several weeks into the school term, P.E. classes began.
P.E. classes required jumping and running, starting with several hundred jumprope jumps. An hour after each class, my feet swelled. Worse, the classes had "gang showers," which I dreaded.
Earlier in the preceeding summer of my injury, my mother abandoned me and my siblings on our family's farm. Our mother moved to the city without us, returning only to drop off food on the weekends, and immediately leaving. My brother remained for a short time, but then was sent to work for our mother's married boyfriend, leaving us two girls alone on the rural farm. Word quickly spread through the community, to no good end for us girls. After enduring a summer of predators, I would do anything to avoid undressing around anyone. I quickly discovered that, if I jumped three or four times a couple of hours before P.E., my feet would swell and I would be excused. In the long run, it did less harm than the P.E., which was an hour of impacts on my feet.
And, so it began. Over the following months, the swelling came, went, and gradually improved. For a few years, it wasn't too bad. But, I never was able to have pretty shoes, my naturally wide feet distended from the injury. At times I felt cursed. Shoe store windows displayed beautiful shoes, however the only shoes I could get on her feet were plain and ugly. I disliked wearing dresses, because the ugly shoes showed. They hurt my feet, even sitting. I mostly wore pants, a little on the long side to hide my feet. Being optimistic, I appreciated I had feet, even if they were ugly feet, although I longed for nice shoes. Serendipity hadn't entered, yet.
Decades later, swelling to my feet returned more frequently and remained longer as I stood, worked, and aged. Doctors said it was lymphedema. The swelling was no longer limited to my feet, but progressed up my legs. Eventually it became too great for me to control. At age 61, I was given pneumatic pump sleeves that covered my entire feet and legs. As the fluid was pumped from my feet and legs, my abdomen expanded. Instead of the fluid being expelled, it would tend to remain in my abdomen, making me appear to be very pregnant, only to seep back into my legs and feet. Doctors and therapists were a bit perplexed, but this is where serendipity happens.
On Mother's Day, at 2 a.m., I awoke with dreadful abdominal pain. I tried every over-the-counter and home remedy in the house for relief to no avail. After hours of being doubled over in agony, my elder son came to take me to the emergency room. A scan showed what appeared to be something the size of twin babies, but it was really serendipity. The diagnosis was ovarian cancer, which tends to be deadly, because it usually detected too late. I was rushed to surgery. Expecting the worst, surgeons gutted me like a fish, removing multiple organs and organ pieces. The surgeon later said, in amazement, the tumors weren't large... they were huge!
In an odd turn of events, the childhood injury to my feet, which caused subsequent swelling to the disfigurement of both my feet and legs, which led to the pneumatic pump, which pumped fluid into my abdomen, which distended my ovaries to an excruciatingly painful level, which caused the cancer to be found, saved my life. That is pure serendipity.
