The Longest Shortest Time

The Saw

If you’ve been reading this blog for the last couple months, you know all about how nobody in our family slept for weeks after Sasha broke her leg. Some of you offered theories about how my own anxiety might be contributing to Sasha’s inability to sleep, or how having another person putting her to bed might help. I truly appreciate everyone’s concern and ideas, and now that I am no longer sleep-deprived I’m going to float my own theory.

Are you familiar with those saws they use to cut a cast off a person’s body? The whole apparatus looks sort of like a vacuum cleaner with an end (see left).

Well, Sasha was lucky in that they used scissors, not the saw, to cut her cast off. But that was because they used it when they first put her cast on. After hours of waiting in the ER, 2 sets of x-rays, and a cast application, the doctor needed to score the sides of the cast to allow for the swelling to die down and for leg growth. This saw doesn’t work the way you might imagine—it doesn’t cut in a straight line like a big circular saw. Instead it gets pushed through the cast one blade length at a time until the entire cast has been split. Each time the blade gets pushed through, it stops *just short* of the limb. We later found out through a friend that these saws are designed to not puncture human flesh, a fact that would’ve been very helpful to know at the time. Because here is what was happening:

Sasha was screaming at the top of her lungs.

And flailing her arms.

Jonathan and I were holding her down with all our might.

We told her in her ears, trying to be heard above the screeching vacuum-from-hell-sounding saw, that she was going to be okay.

All the while hoping—praying—that her pinky toes wouldn’t get cut off.

I am totally convinced now that that saw is the reason she wasn’t able to sleep for so long. Some evidence:

1. She is afraid of vacuum cleaners.
2. She is afraid of windshield wipers and obsessed with talking about them. (I think it is both the sound and the blades that scare her.)
3. She sometimes makes a sawing motion with her hand over her feet and says, “Cut off toes.”
4. I sometimes catch her removing her socks and kissing her toes. And she is not one to hand out kisses lightly.

I’ve just finished reading Selma Fraiberg’s wonderful The Magic Years, which I blogged about here after I first picked it up. Fraiberg talks a lot about the inability of young children to differentiate between dreams and reality. And though I will never know for sure, I believe that Sasha was so impacted by that saw (I don’t blame her—I was too!) that she was reliving the experience in her sleep. She would wake up from her nightmare with terror and then be afraid to go back down, or even shut her eyes, because sleeping would just bring the saw back. I imagine that’s why she needed me to be holding her hand as she fell asleep. And that’s probably also why making a book that explained everything helped.

The good news is, we’ve transitioned from lying next to her and holding her hand to rubbing her back to saying “Be right back” to leaving the door open and hall light on and now she is able to fall asleep without us staying in her room longer than it takes to sing a lullaby.

The Magic Years has given me a much greater understanding of what might be going on in Sasha’s mind in times of distress, and what might be causing tantrums. Of course, that understanding doesn’t always prevent those tantrums or sleep disturbances, but I can at least feel less angry and more empathetic when they happen. If you have an interest in early childhood psychology but not the patience for psychobabble, I highly recommend this book. It is a quick and entertaining read and will make you see your child as a magician, a scientist, and a politician at various times in her development. You will learn about fears and approaches to potty training and discipline and sex ed and, perhaps most importantly, a child’s right to feel what she feels.

Isn’t it strange how we were all young children once yet none of the answers on how to help our own kids through the difficulties of this age come easily?

Oh, and for those of you who wanted to see Sasha standing, here’s a picture of her first step after the cast came off.