Kathy Pace Osborne:  

JUST IGNORE THE ANIMALS Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend, Step inside! Step inside! Emerson, Lake & Palmer I had known that there was a circus in town, but with a small son to raise and a business to run, I didn't have the time to be interested. I never dreamed that my life was about to become a sideshow; that an announcement elephant was moving into my life. And I didn't even think dragons were real. If anyone had bothered to asked me, I could have given them a thousand reasons that I had no interest in living with an elephant or a dragon: I had no room to accommodate an elephant or a dragon; I find elephants smelly and dragons likewise unhygienic -- and so on. But no one asked me what I wanted, so in 1986, a baby elephant came to live with me; the dragon came later. The very first thing the elephant did when I wasn't looking was to sit on my hands and render them completely unsuitable for everything that was important in my life: writing, typing, playing piano, caring for my son, doing my job, doing the housework, even eating. My hands still looked like hands, but they functioned like blocks of wood on the ends of my arms. It took time, but my hands eventually recovered most of their usefulness, and life went on. Back in 1986, I consulted an expert who assured me that there wasn't really a baby elephant impacting my life; it was my imagination, a mirage. That expert, a neurologist, had me convinced that the baby elephant wasn't really there, and I believed him. But the baby elephant was there, and it was growing, imperceptibly, day by day. In 1992, the baby elephant, which was still relatively small, sat on my feet for a few weeks. That was quite inconvenient, but before I had time to get really panicked about it, the elephant, nonchalantly got up and walked away as though nothing had happened. I didn't know enough about these elephants to recognize even that it was the baby elephant that had sat on my feet, so life went on again and I pretended nothing had happened. The years pass, my son grows, it is Christmas night of 1996. I am a couple of miles from home, when a young woman gets confused about which traffic light she should follow, the red one or the green one. She thinks it is the green one. Wrong. She blows through the red light, making a left turn and crashing into my car. Thankfully, Evan was not in the car. Long story short, my right leg is smashed to the point that my foot has to be held on with an "external fixator;" one of those things that looks like an erector set. Ten weeks after the car accident, as if life isn't challenging enough, I can't help but notice: the elephant is back. It sits on my hands again, and it isn't a baby any more. In April 1997, I consult an expert, a neurologist, again; one who recognizes an elephant when he sees one. Believe it or not, I was not ter...Expand for more