A Short Story

A silent, anonymous place I was still a child the last time I’d seen it. The hospital was an anonymous place my parents had taken me to, somewhere in the big city, far from home. I didn’t know where I was at the time, but when I saw it again as an adult, there was a match with something stored in my skull: the outline of the building like a stack of building blocks, the primary colours, the silence that seems out of place around a place built for children. Medical science failed me in that hospital. I was diagnosed early with “slow growth syndrome,” and this was the first mistake that science made with me: giving it a name. Slow growth syndrome is no syndrome at all. Some people grow slowly. So what? I was small for my age. I didn’t have a pathology: I had a velocity. I was taking my time. Nevertheless, the doctor wanted to keep an eye on me, so my parents dutifully took me back every two years to be measured and the pace of my growth evaluated for more distressing signs of oddity. I felt fine, of course: I was a healthy young man. Then the trauma began Then came the tests, and the trauma began. I had been labelled with a problem, and I was treated like a problem. Science needs data: the doctor wanted to know something about my blood, something unusual. The test took hours. I remember the painful, short, thick needle that they called a “butterfly needle.” I remember being desperately sleepy, but they would not let me sleep: a nurse would slap my cheeks, and I would strain to stay awake, afraid for my life. I emerged from it as confused and violated as a UFO abductee, dreaming of bright lights and probes. At age twelve, the doctor gravely declared that my skeleton was “five years behind” my chronological age. Would I reach a normal height? Certainly — just later than most people. Was there any medical risk? No, not really — but he was concerned that I might get teased in high school. He proposed a miraculous solution: a new drug, an anabolic steroid, still illegal in Canada. The doctor’s authority was overwhelming. My family had no knowledge with which to protest. He told us it was a risk-free triumph of modern medicine, and we had no reason not to believe him. But the process of science was about to fail me again, because this was an unjustified experiment. Skinny little kid …football player …skinny little kid The drug worked miracles, all right. I grew fast for a while. I didn’t just grow, I thickened. If you line up my school pictures, the effect is striking: skinny little kid, skinny little kid, football player, and then back to skinny little kid by the ninth grade. For one year, I was stocky. And while I was taking the drug, I felt great. But soon after I stopped, my health vanished like I’d fallen through a trap door. I got something like the flu and I simply never got better. Soon I was out of school, too sick to do much of anything, and I stayed that way for about eight years, my endocrine system limping along, its delicate homeostasis disrupted by a drug intended to spare me from locker room teasing. Which it didn’t, by the way. Incredibly, neither my parents nor I made the connection between the drug and the illness. How could the drug be making me sick if I wasn’t taking it anymore? We were that naive about physiology. So we started to search for the answers, and medical science failed me once more: there wasn’t a doctor in the land who could diagnose pituitary dysfunction or deduce the cause of my trouble. Instead, I was sent to psychiatrists. By age sixteen, I was cynical and desperate. A “world authority” Eventually, my parents returned me to the Vancouver children’s hospital. We begged the original doctor — the villain of my story and by this time a “world authority” in his field — to try to solve the mystery of my illness. A team of elite doctors was assembled to examine me: the heads of four departments all contemplated my case. Endocrinology, neurology, cardiology, and — of course — psychiatry! Their diagnosis? They had none. Their recommendation? The man who gave me the steroids in the first place, probably very much afraid of litigation, told us to “go home and think positively.” The failure of medical science was now complete. I never again sought the assistance of the medical system for my condition. After another three years of hell and soul-searching, I finally found answers and solutions somewhere else entirely. Today, I am not just healthy but athletic, and only suffer from the old symptoms once in a blue moon and not as badly. The doctor who played god with my childhood is dead and beyond the reach of a lawsuit. As a footnote, the drug that he gave me may have deprived me of my full height. At 5'3" tall, 99% of Caucasian men are taller than I am. The final irony of my story is that the doctor would probably still think that my height is a problem. He’d be wrong about that. I have an interesting perspective on the world that I wouldn’t trade for anything.