//------------------------------//
// Chapter One 
// Story: Flurry Heart's Hip Dysplasia 
// by Master Titta 
//------------------------------//

"You've been one brave little filly, you know that?" Princess Cadence, sitting on a chair with her daughter close to her chest, whispered to her daughter Flurry Heart as she gently stroke and ruffled Flurry's mane while she licked on a lollipop she was holding in her tiny front hooves, the only sounds coming her being the fugitive slurps of her tongue and nearly-imperceptible squeaks.

“Mada-- I mean, Majesty, I have to inform you about an anomaly we’ve found in your daughter’s hip,” the doctor, a stout dark gray unicorn stallion with no mane and a black tail, said, while he adjusted his tiny round glasses on his muzzle with his left hoof and handed the sand-coloured folder, labeled Flurry Heart’s name, date of birth and the date the radiography was taken. “In simple terms, the future femur’s head is not in the correct position compared to the hip socket, and risks to hinder your daughter’s mobility.”

With only a vague sense of anxiety in her chest, Cadence nodded and hummed.

“And this entails what? As in, what’s the therapy?” She asked, still stroking Flurry’s mane. The doctor sighed deeply as he broke off eye contact to instead look at the stone below.

“Usually we would try to put a hip cast in position,” he said “but considered your daughter’s strength and considered the head’s position compared to the socket,  I think that hip surgery is in order.”

Cadence’s smile faded like ink off a page exposed to the sun, as the idea slowly sunk inside her head and made her realize fully what it most likely enticed.

“Surgery? Are you sure of that, doctor?” she asked, subconsciously moving her daughter closer to her chest. “I mean, I think we have found ways so that she won’ take it off, or shatter it or otherwise make the cast stop working.”

“Other options would require more advanced skeletal development,” the doctor dryly said as he set the folder down. “As it is, her skeletal structure being mostly cartilage and any other therapy would be pointless at best.”

Cadence gulped loudly, now almost smothering Flurry Heart in her chest’s fur -- much to Flurry’s annoyance, who let out small whines -- as she rapidly scrambled inside her mane to find the sack of money. “Thiswillbefitybitsright?”

“Yes. But not so fast, I am going to need you for a little bit more to schedule the operation.”





Around a week later, Cadence was striding towards her destination with her daughter and the papers in tow. She had been instructed to arrive to the hospital in the early morning, and to bring in only the papers needed to let Flurry Heart go through the operation. Not that Flurry Heart knew, considered her limited mental capacity and the fact she had been brought still snoring, still in her nightly swaddling blanket.

“Let’s get this over with,” Cadence muttered, her heart pounding heavily in her chest due to the tension, under her breath as she rapidly walked away from the offices to instead go towards the waiting room preceding the operatory room. Much to Cadence’s relief, it was empty, allowing her to sprawl herself over a few of the green sets and set her still-sleeping daughter away from her flank onto one of the low tables usually covered in old magazines.

“And now we wait,” she whispered to herself, as she used her magic to pick up one of the ratty magazines, one talking about gossip, allegedly the latest ones, but, due to time, reporting facts that had become trite a few months beforehand, but it didn’t matter to Cadence, as she forced herself to stop thinking to what Flurry Heart was going to go through in the following minutes -- if not hours -- and the consequences, in the short and long run, of the procedure… what was going to be needed to keep Flurry from undoing the surgery, the mistrust that was going to be birthed from such an action, the memoirs her daughter she was going to have about the event…

Cadence’s forehead slowly got wet with sweat, but, before the stills of her cold sweat could run past her cheeks, a door was slammed and a gruff male voice spoke up, declaring. “Up next!”

Cadence gasped, jumped up while rapidly flapping her wings, grabbing an awoken and whining Flurry Heart with her magic.

“I’m right here, show me where to go!” Cadence said, before actually looking at whom had spoken. Namely, a light orange stallion -- his mane perfectly hidden underneath a green surgical hairnet and with his hooves covered in gloves and scrubs -- recoiling and looking at Cadence with pure confusion.

“I’m sorry, I… wasn’t aware of your presence, Mi Amore Cadenza,” he said sheepishly as he rapidly turned around towards the door open ajar he came from.”Right this way Madam.”

Cadence trotted forward rapidly with Flury Heart still in her firm magical grasp, the papers left behind like a stack of completed crossword puzzles, as the stallion ran, struggling to keep up with her.

“Stop madam!” he said, just before Cadence could break through the white door in front of her. “That’s where the operatory room is!”

Cadence abruptly stopped, almost accidentally slamming herself and Flurry Heart into the door in the process. Done so, Cadence turned around towards the doctor, as she now heavily breathed while slowly and delicately handing out her daughter -- who was now squirming in her magic, as she loudly whined and babbled, annoyed due to the chaotic situation she was involved into -- to the doctor, who was now panting and sweating.

“A-alright madam Majesty Cadence,” he said, in-between his panting, as he slowly walked inside the operatory room. “You may not access to the operatory room, but you are allowed to watch the ongoing operation from the window, which you’ll find in the corridor at your left.”

Cadence nodded and turned around, as Flurry Heart was slowly carried inside the room. A few steps later Cadence arrived at the window on the surgery room. From behind the glass, she could see, aside from all the various machinery and the heap of instruments resting on a rolling tray, a shining metal bowl of steaming water atop said tray, two surgeons, fully clad in their aquamarine medical gear, standing by an operating table while the nurse set Flurry Heart down onto the table.

 In a few seconds, in spite of Flurry’s struggles against it, the ECG machine had been turned on and hooked up onto Flurry Heart’s chest and the metal horn cover had been set into place on her. The nurse rapidly set his front hooves onto Flurry’s rear ones, while one of the doctors slowly -- almost ceremoniously -- took up the scalpel and the other bathed the soon-to-be-opened area with disinfectant, which caused Flurry Heart to cease her attempts at struggle to instead look at the doctor’s action, seemingly not noticing the increasingly shrinking distance between her flesh and the scalpel. Cadence, however, was well aware of that and, soon, sweat started to go down her forehead as her heartbeat accelerated and a shadow of angst took hold on her very soul.

Then, finally, the doctor deeply incised Flurry Heart’s skin, causing her to cry out in pain and flap her wings and free limbs around like a panicking chick, while the other doctor, seemingly increasingly, proceeded to sink in the spreading hooks inside her muscles and the thin bloody layer of fat, before tensing up said hook  in order to keep the  cut open.

Cadence winced visibly, her heart clenching at the sight. She forced herself to take deep breaths.

“Calm down Cadence,” she muttered to herself. “Don’t rush in. It’s fine. They know what they’re doing. She’ll be... better off afterwards. Seriously, don’t do that.”

As Cadence repeated this to herself, the doctor put the scalpel down inside the bowl to instead grab upon a small hammer and a chisel with a very narrow head, the latter of which he slowly but surely set over Flurry’s cartilaginous femur, scraping it around the area, before slamming the hammer upon the chisel’s head, sending a piece of cartilage flying away and prompting both the baby filly and her mother to scream bloody murder.

As the other doctor glared and -- judging from the rapid movements ongoing beneath the surgical mask -- scolded the chiseling one while he was busy manipulating Flurry’s femur, Cadence pounded her hoof against the glass, as she let out a choked-out scream at the mean sight of her daughter treated like that. The fact that now the chiseling doctor was now taking a metal plate and a few screws did not help the matters, because it made her jump aside and run towards the operatory room’s door, stopped at the last second by a strong glimpse of rationality, who decided to channel her frustration, worry and shared pain in her tears and a sense of disturbed dizziness, that however did not deter her enough from going back at the window to look upon the ongoing operation.

By now Flurry Heart had stopped flailing around, now only resorting to desperate and uncontrollable crying, as one doctor hammered the plates and the rods inside her bones while the other was busy setting the black thread inside the needle’s eye and the nurse kept on pinning her lower legs down. Finally, the cutting doctor proceeded to almost close down the two halves, thus allowing his colleague to stitch the wound up and then to fully close it by creating a small flame with his magic and sealing the wound’s loose lips by cauterizing them, which prompted a renewed shrill cry of distress coming from an now-hoarse-voiced and tearless Flurry Heart. 

With this done, the nurse lifted the baby filly up and carried up in the air outside the operatory room, causing Cadence to immediately step forward to the door. But, before she could do or say anything, the nurse sped up her pace in her walking away.

“No madam, you can’t have any kind of contact with her just yet,” he said, as Flurry extended her hooves towards Cadence in the attempt to be embraced and comforted, instead of being carried away like that. “We are going to need to put on plaster for the cast and nails to keep her from taking it off with her own powers.”

Cadence abruptly slowed down, biting her lip in the attempt to oblige to the order, as she watched as her daughter being carried off to be treated even further.





“And I think that is why you are deathly afraid of doctors, Flurry Heart, my daughter dearest. That being said, you should really consider getting that eye surgery.”

Flurry Heart, who was now vigorously massaging her operation's scar, glared to Cadence through her thick-lensed glasses. “Mom, do I look dumb to you?”

"Guess that I'm not going to change your mind about this, am I?" She said with a deep sigh. "Oh well, even then... I think you should at least go take a look on how it's done."

Flurry Heart turned her head away from Cadence, grunting loudly.

"I won't. Too bloody, I bet."