The invisible bruise

When my oldest was in high school, she would go on and on about this giant bruise on the top of her foot. She would show us her feet. We would not see any bruise. In fact, her feet looked identical, but she would insist that her one foot had a giant bruise on the top. She went to the doctors, they did not know what to tell her. She accused the doctors of being idiots. This went on for years.

One day she demands to go to the doctor again about this bruise that has not gone away for years. I remind her she has been to the doctor numerous times this year. She had complained to two different schools’ nurses. She brought it up all the time in individual and family therapy. Her psychiatrist had heard about it. The physical therapist. The occupational therapist. Her speech therapist. Her cheer coach. Most people just handed her an ice pack and sent her on her way.

Here she is, the beginning of junior year fighting with me to take her to the emergency room about this bruise. She goes on about how she is going to report me to the authorities for doing nothing. I ask to see her feet. They look identical with no bruises. We went outside to see them in daylight because she said the light in the kitchen was making it hard to see. She is yelling and swearing at me the whole time. She is telling me she will never be a star athlete if I do not take care of her.

I suddenly have a thought. I ask her to show me where it is. She outlines this giant section on the top of her foot. I ask her what color this spot is she says it is dark purple, nearly black. I go in and grab my phone. I take a picture of her feet together. I show her the picture. She gasps. “Where did the bruise go?”

Turns out she had hallucinated the entire thing for years. She saw all the specialists and all the doctors and everybody knew about the history of hallucinations in her file. Myself included. There was never a bruise in the first place. She cried a lot that night off and on. She still saw it as time went on, but she would ask if there was a bruise and I would tell her there was not and she would let it go.

Could there have been pain or something else that we just cannot see? Sure. She is known to tie her shoes so tight that she cuts off circulation on the top of her feet, but no matter how many people tell her to stop she continues to do it. That might have been the discomfort she felt that triggered the hallucination to form.

Sometimes you just have to look at an issue another way to figure out what is going on. No matter how many professionals you work with, things will be overlooked. When your children carry as much pain as mine do, it takes a lot of digging to find what is really going on. I was lucky to figure that one out. It was one fight we never had to have again. She had one less trigger to set her off. It was a small victory.