I waited until after the cake before I gave my daughter the envelope. Inside was the scan from March and the consultant’s letter explaining what seven specialists had missed. The pain wasn’t from my weight, my age, or the fact that I’d carried three children. There was a compression in my spine that had been visible on the original scan, and the consultant had marked the exact place where it had been overlooked. My daughter read it silently, then looked at me and said she didn’t understand how nobody had seen it. I told her they had. They just hadn’t looked closely enough.
Then she noticed the consultant’s name. Her husband worked two floors below him. She asked whether I’d known that when I booked the appointment. I said no. The consultant had contacted me after reviewing my records and asked who had been managing my medication and appointments. I told him my daughter had started doing it after I fell the first time. He showed me something in my file that made no sense: several notes said I had declined further investigation because I believed the pain was “just getting old.” I had never said that. My daughter looked at her husband, and he suddenly became very interested in his plate.
I handed her the last page. It was a copy of the referral request that had been cancelled four years earlier. The request was for the exact specialist who eventually found the problem, but someone had written across it that I didn’t want to continue. My daughter said she had never seen it. Her husband finally admitted he’d handled some of the paperwork because he thought he was helping. Then I asked why the consultant’s letter said the delay had changed the treatment options. Nobody spoke for several seconds. I looked at my daughter and said, “I didn’t bring this to your birthday to make you feel guilty. I brought it because for four years you kept telling me to walk through the pain. Now you can read what was actually causing it.”
