No Tears

It’s a good day in Redwood City, California, home to the San Francisco 49’s training camp, The Museum of Pez Memorabilia and a small girl who plays (or tries to play) in the driveway with her sisters. Wisps of Kinsley’s hair give way to the crisp breeze. Her shoe laces flail wildly about her sneakers. She moves enthusiastically but not too fast.

Kinsley follows her sister, Kolby, and step sister, Mikayla, around the gravel driveway as they kick a soccer ball into imaginary goals. Her lack of coordination, however, makes it impossible for her to keep up. As the ball bounces from one foot to the next, she fumbles from one step then another. It is not in her nature to quit. Every five or so steps, she must stop and regain composure with her sister Kolby at her side. Since the rise her daily seizures, Kinsley is never unsupervised.

Never the less, Kinsley’s sister Mikayla recognizes the effort and sends an easy pass her way. The ball meanders, slowly, to her feet. Her eyes light up for a moment, and she violently attempts to whip her leg straight at the ball. She skims the side of the ball’s worn leather, sending it sputtering to the left. Once her kicking foot lands, she loses her balance. Both knees fold towards the ground. The loose pebbles in the gravel driveway rip open her skin, and a line of blood trails down her left leg.

The moment comes and passes. Her sisters help her up and usher her into the house. Seemingly unphased, Kinsley walks, shakily, in between them. Once inside, her sisters run back outside as she silently heads for her mother. Genée smiles initially but soon spots the blood and asks Kinsley what has happened. Kinsley registers no emotion: no grimace, no moan, no tear, just a distant, impenetrable silence. Genée wipes up the blood and mentally adds the incident to the list of Kinsley’s unexplainable tendencies that come with her Progressive Myoclonic Petite Mal Epilepsy. Although any mother wants to shelter her children from pain, the lack of visible pain or anguish at moments of injury makes Genée long for a time when the only thing needed to restore her daughter to health was to wash a cut, put on a band-aid and give soothing hugs and kisses. Those times are mere memories now. Genée’s motherly healing can only extend to holding Kinsley’s shaking hand during her 30-second sense-numbing seizures that now grip her body between nine and twelve times a day.

Kinsley has not cried in over five years.

The knee scrape doesn’t faze Genée, but the lack of tears troubles her heart.
“When your daughter does not cry for this long; something is terribly wrong,” Genée explains. Will any treatment ever restore Kinsley to a child who can cry when it’s appropriate to cry?