DANDELIONS | Julia Michie Bruckner
The aspen glimmers in the afternoon sun, framed by the picture window above the stairs, an impressionist masterpiece come alive. This tree alone convinces me this house needs to be home.
It is November in Colorado, a month of dry browns and rusting reds, muted wide skies and cracked hard earth. The sunflowers have left stalks with umber seed heads, the evergreens’ colors stand out now, snow capping the mountains in the distance like white speckles on slate.
I walk around the backyard. Much of it is damp brown detritus, dead and ready to be cleared out for the compost. Yet I see signs of dormant life — the straggly raspberries poking up from a carpet of amber maple leaves, the spindly lilacs reaching cloudward. These are the plants of my childhood.
We buy the house, a dozen years after my first cancer, and move in the first week of December, just days before our second child is due to arrive. I direct my husband as he places furniture, hands perched on my belly. My abdomen has been stretched and shrunk many times by now, bearing the faded lines and lumps of change. My breasts are bulbous with blue veins wandering like vines. My endometrium no longer shed but bedded down into a placenta, nourishing another new life.
It snows in the days before our son’s birth, the smooth white quieting the landscape. The birds hunt for bits of leaf and berry that still cling to the trees, their gnarled branches outlined against the gray sky.
***
The pothos and dracaena are thriving in the new house. Here there is space and light. I become house plant obsessed, assessing the conditions of each room — whether the light is filtered or unfiltered, southerly or northeasterly, brighter in the morning or the afternoon. I get Boston ferns and African violets for the humid bathroom, a trendy fiddle leaf fig, a parlor palm and an alocasia with bright pink on the underside of the leaves for the living room. I perch cacti and tiny succulents on the south-facing window sills. A monstera sprawls in my bedroom, along with a schefflera, rubber plant and waxy bulbous jade plant. My home office becomes home to a striped maranta that moves with the time of day, a Christmas cactus with fuchsia blooms, a silvery Chinese evergreen and a cluster of calatheas. Different varieties of pothos join my old one, which is starting to climb its arms up the walls. I hang spider plants, lipstick plants, staghorn ferns, philodendrons from the ceilings. The aloe from my mom finds a place in the kitchen, along with some peperomias. The peace lily from my last surgery finds a spot by the TV. My husband jokes one day he will find me dead, vines and leaves tangled around me, suffocated by my jungle of plants. Not a bad way to go, I think.
***
We bring our newborn son home to live with the plants, his sister, and his dog. It is nearly Christmas. He loves lying on his back below the tree, transfixed by the colored lights. He is an eager breast feeder. His 2-year-old sister tries to feed him Goldfish crackers and carrot sticks. He loves snuggles and his bouncy chair.
I first notice his spots when he is just a few weeks old, naked and squirming on his changing table. They are tan, flat, irregular, the largest one splayed on his torso like a spilled latte. At first, I try to wash them off, thinking they are poop stains. They stay. I find more hiding in the chubby rings of his thighs. I take pictures, sending them to a medical school friend who is a dermatologist. I suspect what she will say, but I don’t want her to say it. The spots are the first outward signs of an unexpected inward problem.
I inspect him further, noting an abnormal curve of his left leg, the odd contour of his ankle, the way his left foot doesn’t turn out like the right. Perhaps it is an exaggerated in-toeing from how he curled in my womb. I stretch his little leg over and over, but cannot get it to straighten.
A visit to a geneticist confirms my suspicion, a rare condition I recall from medical school. His cafe au lait spots and leg deformity are right there in the syndrome’s diagnostic criteria. My son has neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), which usually runs in families, though not in ours. After my first tumor, I had extensive genetic testing, looking for lurking syndromes or faulty switches in my DNA, all was normal. His is a spontaneous mutation.
I remember the chapter on NF1 in Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation. Black and white photos showed patients covered in lumpy tumors, their skin freckled, legs crooked, eyes pleading like captive animals. I know what this disease does. Scatters of tan birthmarks will give the look of a leopard. Bone deformities twist the spine or disfigure a leg. Tumors grow; superficial disfiguring ones like barnacles, deeper ones that can become cancerous. I cannot imagine my sweet baby boy with his photo in a textbook.
The future I had imagined for him now seems blurry, uncertain. Will his fragile leg shatter with the kick of a soccer ball? Will his eyes be blinded by tumors, unable to see the flight of his kite? Will young children run from him, thinking he’s a monster? Will he be laughed at? Will his body grow cancer like mine?
I now feel the fear, the grief, the confusion and disappointment I have seen so often in the parents of my patients. They thought theirs was a normal healthy child; we had to tell them otherwise. Yet our diagnosis did not change their love, their protective instincts.
There is no treatment, just screening to catch problems early. Surgery does not usually work for these tumors; when cut out, they just grow back. A colleague tells me of a new therapy that may shrink them, though it is still in clinical trials.
“You will be the best mother he could have,” a friend from residency tells me over the phone, “You can relate to what he may face, after all you’ve been through with your cancers. You will know how to guide him.”
But I can only protect him so much. I set up appointments with the right specialists. He is fit for a leg brace; I pick out blue straps with planets and stars on them. But I will not be able to stop each jolt of pain, deflect each taunt or stare. He is only an infant still, yet I am already thinking of how to help him laugh away the teases, distract him from hurt. I will teach him we are all different, that there is beauty in asymmetry, strength in difference.
***
Spring brings a clear cancer scan for me and the surprise of tulip, daffodil and hyacinth bulbs poking up in the yard. My daughter picks the chives along our stone path, chewing them as she toddles. My son crawls through the new grass in his diaper, picking up scared roly-poly bugs with his plump fingertips.
It’s our first spring in this yard; I do not know yet what grows. Daylilies sprout up around the fir trees. I learn the color of the lilacs — pale white and deep purple —and roses — fire engine red and candy pink. What I thought was a dead brambly vine turns out to be a blackberry bush, its fruit appearing in gradations of cream and blush. Violas cluster under the front bushes.
I learn how to prune and weed, calling my mother or searching the internet for advice - what to prune when, how far to cut back, which branches to leave alone. It seems odd to cut a living thing in order to help it thrive. My daughter calls it “giving the plants haircuts.”
We get a compost bin at a discount through a county program, layering it with the winter’s damp leaves and the first cuts of the lawn. I till the raised beds. My daughter pokes holes for seeds with her fingers. I give her radish seeds to place in her holes; she soon grows impatient and simply scatters them. I pour tiny carrot and lettuce seeds into her palm; she throws them with abandon.
“Mama,” she says, “We plant them in the soul!” and giggles.
***
My son comes to love the dandelions that bring a sprinkle of yellow to our patchy back lawn. He grabs them with his fist and pulls, the milky sap dribbling down the rolls of his arm. He gathers a few and crawls to me, smushing the bouquet at my feet.
Most of our property is not lawn; the patch that is grass certainly does not meet the standards of our homeowner’s association. It’s pocked with thistles, broadleaf plantain, crabgrass and of course dandelions. Suburbia often prefers monoculture, mowing all into pristine uniformity, keeping lawn care and herbicide companies in business (as nature does not give up without a fight). Dandelions do not cower at obstacles like lawnmowers or cement patios. Their strong taproots anchor them, low crowns regenerate new flowers. They push through cracks. I am glad our lawn is in the back, not visible from the street. I am tired of pulling up dandelions for them to just return.
We find the dandelion’s deep roots frustrating, but they draw up nutrients for nearby shallow-rooted plants and loosen the soil to ease the passage of earthworms. The dandelion carries the power to change its environment to serve the needs of itself and its neighbors. It brings bees and butterflies, its color a drop of sunshine.
***
As our son grows, my textbook fears seem sillier by the day. He is walking well with this brace, gaining the fine motor, gross motor and language skills I would expect of any child his age. I rarely notice his spots. No one remarks on them. NF1 is the least part of him.
I recall how my first surgeon warned me not to put much credence in medical journals or articles on the Internet - those are the extreme cases, the bad outcomes, he said. They are a skewed sample. I think of the many “special needs” children I have cared for over the years. I remember how often parents told me, “The doctors said they would never do” this or that or “They said she wouldn’t live past age two, and now she’s turning eighteen.”
In medicine, we have made a science of defining what is “abnormal” and what is “normal,” what is pathologic, what requires fixing. How often do we pay attention to what surrounds the pathology? I am struck by our arrogance, our narrow world of studies and prognostic statistics. It ignores the power of humility and hope, the importance of seeing the assets all around the deficits.
***
My mother would often tell of the “wild salad” they would have with dinner. My grandmother would send her out to pick dandelion greens and watercress, rinsing out the dirt and bugs, dressing it with a mustard vinaigrette. With a tangy sharp flavor, dandelion greens are rich in vitamins A and C and chock full of iron, calcium and potassium.
Only recently have dandelions been considered a weed. Native to Europe and Asia and long known there as a medicinal and edible plant. It earned the name “pissblume” in Germany, “pissabed” in England and “pissenlit” in France for its diuretic properties, helping urine flow and clear kidney stones. Irish midwives ground the root and mixed it with rhubarb, flour, hemp seed, egg, milk and gin into a “pain-killing cake” to feed women in labor. Its seeds were brought to the colonies on the Mayflower and spread easily. Native American communities learned to use dandelion roots and flowers for tea. The greens were stewed with pork and vinegar or chopped fresh for salads. The milk juice was applied to pimples and warts. Dandelion was officially listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia, an important 19th-century medicinal reference.
***
The orthopedic surgeon first told us there would be a strong chance our son would need his left leg amputated below the knee, the bone too brittle and malformed to carry his weight as he began to walk. If it fractures, they told us, it would be hard to heal; that we should consider just cutting it off after the first break rather than subjecting him to the pain of many surgical rods and revisions. An amputation would give him more function, less prolonged pain.
We visit the orthopedic surgeon every six months. At first our son screams and kicks at the X-ray machine, though after a few rounds, learns it will not hurt him and lies still. At each visit, his leg is found to be strong, better mineralized than expected, its bow straightening. He walks, jumps, runs, skips without injury. He stoops easily now to pick his dandelions, his left shoe a size bigger than the other to fit his custom orthotic imprinted with images of galaxies embracing his leg.
***
The dandelion is the flower of Brigid, the Irish goddess of healing, poetry, spring and domesticated animals, its milk nourishing the new lambs. The dandelion’s Celtic name means “little flame of God”; Brigid wears it on her breast, the sunlight then follows her.
Its fluffy seed heads tempt one to blow and scatter them, making them a childhood game with many myths, youngsters blowing wishes as the delicate pappus scatters in the wind, others sticking to their wispy hair. It is said when the down is soft there will be good weather, when it is limp, bad. The number of seeds still clinging on will predict one’s age of marriage, or how long one has to live, or how many children one will have. If after blowing it three times, seeds remain on the stem, your mother does not love you. If you follow the direction the seeds fly, you will find your fortune. Children see potential, possibility and play where others see only a weed.
Julia Michie Bruckner is a writer, artist, pediatrician and mother. Bruckner, an assistant professor of pediatrics at University of Colorado School of Medicine, cares for kids in the pediatric emergency department at Children's Hospital Colorado. Her essays and visual art can be found in JAMA, Academic Medicine, Academic Pediatrics, Bellevue Literary Review, KevinMD and Narratively. She is co-editor of a forthcoming narrative medicine guidebook.