The Day that Changed us Forever-PART I

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

It was October 1991 that our life changed. A pretty horrible thing happened that changed Patrick and myself forever. Probably turned us into the Republican leaning conservatives that we are now. Believe it or not we used to be very liberal and Democrat to boot.

A lot of what happened during these 6 weeks of our lives is a blur but much of it is crystal clear. Moments that we cannot erase from our minds' eyes.

Our oldest daughter at the time was 1 3/4 years old, due to turn 2 in just a few days. Our second daughter was 6 months old. The day was great. At the time, I stayed at home with both girls because I whole heartedly believed that as a mother, that was my duty. I still believe that.

On this particular day, nothing was much different. Pat went to work, I played and danced with my older girl, gave her a bath, and put her down for a nap, and then wound up falling asleep on the upper floor of our split-level twin home with our 6 month old. I was woke up at about 3:25 by the phone and it just happened to be my hubby calling to say hi.

I had told him that I heard the older one playing in her room that I was going to go out and have a quick cigarette in the garage and get her up. The baby was still asleep so no big deal. While having my smoke, I heard my older one crying. I got off the phone with Pat, put out my smoke and went to her room.

There she was, standing there with her right leg lifted hanging on to her mattress' and a nightstand, crying. Not hard, just in between a whimper and a light cry. I asked her to walk to me but she shook her head no and said "Owwwiee".

So I walked over to her, picked her up, layed her on the bed and took off her pants to look at her leg and noticed nothing. I began moving it, rubbing it, all the while she laid there whimpering.

At the time, I hadn't a clue what could have been wrong with her leg except that maybe it had a cramp in it or something.

I left to call Pat back and came back and noticed a slight swelling in the thigh area. Pat told me to put ice on it and to keep an eye. I hung up with him, and got some ice and when I came back, the leg was twice as big as when I left.

Something was horribly wrong...I called Pat back and told him that he needed to come home so we could take her to urgent care. We only had one vehicle at the time. He thought thatI was over reacting but said he would get home as soon as he could get off work.

I called and made an appointment and waited for what seemed like hours but was really only about 45 minutes.

Our daughter whimpered here and there on the way but nothing too alarming. We arrived at the office still clueless as to what was wrong. The nurse looked at her leg, the doctor requested x-rays and once those x-rays came back, Pat and I were treated terribly. The nurse was nasty to us, the doc told the nurse to tell us to get her to Children's Hospital because she had a spiral fracture of the femur. The largest bone in the body was broken.

With the way that we were treated, a horrible thought occured to me on the way to the hospital. I was crying already because my baby was seriously hurt, I felt like a horrible mother, didn't know what had happened to her to cause such a serious injury, and hated myself for not getting her up before having the dreadful cigarette.

In the car on the way to the hospital, I looked back at my daughter and through tears told Pat, "They're going to say that I did this, that I broke her leg". He tried to assure me that there was no way but I was not convinced, I had a very uneasy feeling about all of it.

To make 6 weeks worth of a hell story short: Yes, they did try to blame me. They wanted to put me in jail, they put a 72 hour hold on our oldest daughter and said she was no longer our daughter, she was their baby, and they were trying to get custody of our baby too. I had cops trying to coerce me into a confession and at a point, the badgering was so bad that I just wanted to say that I did it so they would STOP!!!

They did a complete skeletal exam on her and found no previous injuries, they checked her over for bruises and found a few on her shin which were pretty typical for a toddler and one on her forehead that I had no idea about.

Our pediatrician wrote a letter stating that in no way had we abused this little girl, that we love both of our children and the state was making a big mistake which the social worker and police wouldn't even listen to our pediatrician.

We had a lawyer telling us not to say a thing and a social worker saying that our silence spoke volumns about our guilt. I was told that I would burn in hell for lying, that because I was a young mother with 2 young kids that I lost my temper and broke her leg accidently.

I was given all sorts of madeup scenarios in which I may have broken her leg, examples that cops said they did to their own kids. All of this in the 2 days that we were in the hospital. They even tried to blame Pat, who was at work when this happened and had witness' whom the cops said were covering for him.

To be continued.....

Written by louie0768 .