When I think back on these years, what stands out isn’t just the medical reality I was living with, it’s how fiercely I wanted to keep up with the world around me. Kids don’t measure risk the way adults do. When I was young, I measured belonging. I measured fun and the fear of being left out. And for a child with physical limitations, that desire to fit in can be louder than caution, louder than pain, and sometimes louder than common sense.
This post is for the parents who are trying to balance protection with possibility. The ones who hold their breath while their child insists on trying anyway. I want to show you what that determination can look like from the inside, and why letting a child try, even when it scares you, can become part of the resilience they carry forward.
“Let’s just say my recovery took a turn the day I decided rules were optional and gravity was negotiable.”
Learning to Move in a New Body
After the surgery that fused my knee straight, I woke up in a body that no longer moved the way it once had. There are moments in a medical journey when language simply can’t carry the weight of the experience. I could tell you my knee wouldn’t bend, that every movement required strategy, that nothing about standing, sitting, or walking was automatic anymore but those are just the facts. They don’t quite capture the disorientation of suddenly living in a body that no longer follows the rules you’ve known your whole young life.
So before I go any further, I want to offer you a small window into what those early years felt like. If you’re able, please try this:
Sit in your chair, extend one leg straight out in front of you, and keep it completely rigid. Now try to stand up without bending that leg.
Feel the shift in your balance. Notice how your weight has to redistribute. Pay attention to the way your body instinctively wants to compensate.
That awkwardness, that sudden awareness of how much you rely on the simple bend of a knee, was my new everyday reality.
What My Gait Really Meant
What most people didn’t realize was that my gait wasn’t accidental. It was engineered. When Dr. Salter fused my knee, he made two things a priority: that I could walk smoothly and that my left leg would keep growing at the same pace as my right.
He positioned the fusion so I wouldn’t have to swing my hip or hike my body to clear the ground, and he was careful to avoid the growth plates around my knee so I wouldn’t end up with one leg shorter than the other. There are growth plates in the knee, and damaging them in a child can affect how the leg grows.
Most of the time, it worked beautifully. If I was just walking, people didn’t notice anything. But if someone stopped long enough to really watch me move, or if I was tired, that was when the difference showed.
Growing Up Faster Than My Body Could Keep Up
And there was another piece most people wouldn’t think about: by grade six, I was already nearly 5’9″. I wasn’t just learning to move with a fused knee, I was doing it inside a body that had shot up faster than my coordination could keep pace with.
Getting out of a chair meant shifting my whole centre of gravity. Climbing into a car meant planning every movement before I made it. Standing up from the floor felt like solving a physics problem with no instructions.
My height made everything a little more awkward and a lot more noticeable. I was a tall kid moving in ways no other kid moved, trying to make it all look effortless when nothing about it was.
But even with all those challenges, I was still a kid at heart. Determined to reclaim whatever pieces of normal childhood I could.
Childhood Doesn’t Pause for Caution
Once I was home and settling into my new reality, I pushed every boundary I could find. I challenged my parents’ patience on a near‑daily basis, not out of defiance, but out of a stubborn desire to keep up with the world around me.
“Resilience often looks like a child doing exactly what they were told not to do.”
What came next wasn’t rebellion or defiance, it was childhood. Completely uninterested in medical caution. And it was the year everyone around me began to understand that my resilience came with its own complications. It was also the year I began learning, without realizing it, that reinvention doesn’t always start with bravery. Sometimes it starts with a kid who just wants to skate, climb, run, and belong. No matter the consequences.
Which brings me to the part of the story where caution and childhood collided.
Where Recovery Became Reinvention
If you grew up around me, you already know: safety was more of a suggestion than a rule. Caution didn’t stand a chance!
After all the careful adjustments and new routines of those early months, you might think I settled into a safer rhythm. But the truth is, once I realized I could still move, differently and awkwardly, but still move, I went right back to being a kid. And kids don’t ease into life. They leap and they chase. They test every boundary put in front of them.
One afternoon, not long after the fusion, my mom came home with her arms full of groceries. As she walked up to our front door, I sailed past her on my bike, my left leg stuck straight out in front of me, pedaling only with my right. I can still picture her face: a mix of shock, terror, and that particular brand of parental disbelief that says, You have got to be kidding me!
She almost dropped the groceries. I almost pretended I didn’t notice.
To me, it was freedom. To her, it was a heart attack on wheels.
And of course, the bike incident wasn’t the end of my creative problem‑solving. I pushed every limit I could find.
The Hill, the Barbies, and the Physics Problem
On another afternoon, I decided I wanted to run down the hill in our neighbourhood, chasing a little plastic car full of Barbies that had escaped my grip and taken off at full speed.
Predictably, and spectacularly, I went head over heels.
The next thing I remember is sitting in front of the TV, an ice pack balanced on my knee, watching The Brady Bunch like nothing unusual had happened. (If this doesn’t date me, nothing will.) My mom was on the phone with Dr. Salter, explaining what had happened. He asked if I was in pain. She said no, just some swelling.
He told her, “If it stays swollen, bring her in next week. She couldn’t have done anything serious. She’d be in agony.”
When the swelling in my knee didn’t go down, my mom brought me back to SickKids. Well, it turns out I had fractured right through the fusion.
I didn’t understand the seriousness of it then,
My surgeon Dr. Salter, examined me with the calm, steady presence he was known for. I was then admitted and he reset the fusion and placed a cast from hip to ankle.
When it was time for me to be discharged, he made me stand in front of him and raise my hand in the air like I was taking an oath. He then asked me to promise him, sincerely, and can I say, impossibly, that I would slow down.
The Moment Adults Realized I Didn’t Feel Pain the Same Way
But even that moment of solemn warning didn’t fully capture what the adults around me were beginning to understand. They couldn’t trust my pain levels anymore. I didn’t react the way other kids did. I didn’t collapse, cry, or scream. I just kept going. Even with a fractured fusion.
To them, it was alarming. To me, it was Tuesday.
“Not every beginning is chosen, but every beginning shapes who we become.”
And because I was still very much a kid, stubborn, social, and allergic to being left out, the adventures didn’t stop there.
Ice Skates, Roller Skates, and the Need to Keep Up
Once the cast came off and I was moving again, I went straight back to doing all the things I wasn’t supposed to do.
First up: ice skating. Everyone in my neighbourhood was doing it, so why not me? I refused to be the kid watching from the sidelines. So there I was, gliding across the rink with one leg that didn’t bend. My parents aged ten years that first winter.
And then came roller skating, because that’s what we all did in the ’80s. The music, the wheels, the freedom! I wanted all of it. And I was good at it! Never mind that every adult in my life had gently (and repeatedly) suggested that maybe, just maybe, wheels weren’t the best idea for a kid with a fused knee.
But try telling that to teenaged me.
So yes, to my mom and dad, if you’re listening from the past: I am so, so sorry. Again!
I wasn’t trying to be reckless. I was just trying to be a kid. A tall, fused‑knee kid who wanted to keep up with her friends and feel normal for a little while. Even if it meant giving my parents a few extra grey hairs along the way.
Kids don’t think in terms of risk or long‑term consequences; they think in terms of fun. And I was determined to have some. I didn’t set out to break rules; I just grew up in a decade where breaking them was practically a hobby.
Becoming Myself, One Misadventure at a Time
Hindsight has a way of revealing what childhood can’t: those years were less about healing and more about becoming. Every scraped elbow, every improvised workaround, every grey hair I gave my parents was part of the slow, clumsy process of figuring out who I was becoming. I wasn’t just healing; I was reinventing myself one misadventure at a time, long before I understood that reinvention was even happening.
🌱 This post is part of my Early Years Series — three stories from the beginning of my journey.
Read the full series:
- Look Mom, I Can See You!
- The Decision Beyond My Years – Growing Up With JRA
- Rules? I Thought They Were Suggestions!
This is such a good write up on what one must go through with JRA & JIA.
It’s hard to digest but you are a hero. So much determination & grit.
Thank you ever so much!