Don't Leave Me This Way: Or When I Get Back on My Feet You'll Be Sorry (11 page)

Moving your way up a ladder. Step by step.

IMPACT.
The smell of alcohol and people and linoleum. Face cold against the floor. More walking practice with the therapist.

Your mom is watching.

“Oh, honey, be careful.”

She constantly tells you to “be careful.” As though the words will prevent you from falling, as though the falling is because you’re careless. She says it because she’s deeply concerned for you, but she doesn’t realize that when you fall, it is not because you are being careless or failing to put safety as a high enough priority in your mind. You’re
being
careful. You’re falling anyway.

Parts of your body that look like they are connected to you are following their own rules, or vanishing completely without any warning. That’s the problem.

It’s true, though, that you’ve never been a particularly cautious person, and it is difficult to get into the overcautious frame of mind necessary to move your body from point A to point B. So you say, “Okay,” when she says, “Be careful.”

STAIRS ARE THE
number one enemy. Overactive muscle tone makes your knee impossible to bend. You never can tell when it’s going to happen, but it happens a lot when you’re trying to make it down a flight of stairs. Today, as your mother watches, your knee locks, and the spasms travel up your leg to the hip, locking it in place. Your leg has just become a stilt. The stairs and the landing zoom into a close-up. The therapist grabs your belt at the last moment, preventing another full-force head impact, which is nice, but you are flat on your face again.

“Be careful.”

YOU CAN ONLY DO A FEW STEPS,
with the aid of two people, before you are tired and too unsteady to continue. And it’s not so much walking as assisted striding.

You require three aides to get you “walking” again. One is holding your knee to prevent it from inverting to hyperextension. Another is holding your waist to keep you upright. And a third is leading you while rolling a full-length mirror on wheels with his feet.

Your left knee keeps violently hyperextending—you can see in the mirror that it looks inside out. It snaps backward so hard you can hear bones and tendons cracking. Although you have a disconnect with your limb, you know you’re causing damage. All the therapists’ faces contort when they hear this snapping sound, which is pretty frequent.

“I didn’t realize having a stroke could make me double-jointed. Such benefits I’m going to have. Once I get this walking thing down, I’m going to try out for the Boston Ballet.”

OVER A WEEK
of having three pairs of hands stabilize you pays off. Eventually, you’re able to stand on your own. This achievement allows you to go to “brace clinic,” where you can get an assessment for future mobility. Aides place you between parallel bars with a spotter in front and a spotter behind. You hold one bar with your right hand.

You feel as though you’re in a high school gymnastic event, with the doctor as the judge. The trophy awarded would be the right to hear the words “You’ll walk again.” An award you had, but lost. An award you’ve taken for granted since you were fifteen months old.

You psych yourself to walk.

Your sheer determination grants you two very clumsy steps. But they are enough to prove wrong the people who were telling you that you’d never walk again.

When the doctor who’s watching you says, “You’ll walk again,” you feel great. You already knew that, but it’s a reward to hear it.

He won’t say when, though.

“Okay,” you ask. “Where’s the test for my left hand. Do you have a knitting circle here? You know, I used to play the piano—are my recital days over? How about a sing-along for all the neuro patients?”

THE FACT IS,
it’s very hard to walk when you can’t quite identify where your body is. You stare at the feet and order them to move in harmony, but it is as if your brain is a radio tuner trying, and failing, to get a lock on a clear station.

It’s not that your left side is unresponsive. It’s that it’s missing. If you don’t have any weight on your leg, you don’t know where your leg is.

“I think she’s had enough.”

Talking about you as though you’re not there again, but you’re too tired to protest. They wheel you back to your room.

“Did you see that stairwell at the end of the hall there?”

A fading nurse with no discernable facial features is pouring you back into bed; she nods indulgently.

“I’m going to make it up that thing.”

The nurse is now the color of dusk, a vague outline.

Her voice: “Sure you are, dear.”

ONCE YOU’RE ABLE
to walk ten feet, you ask the therapist to work with you on the stairwell. Thank God for the alertness of this therapist; you come close to falling over the railing and down a flight of stairs. She grips you by the waist of your pants, giving you a wedgie up to your throat—but keeping you from hurtling downward, which is something you’re getting a lot of experience at. You think you may have to have surgery to remove your wedgie, though.

When you walk now, you want to do it reciprocally—right foot, then left foot. Supposedly, you’re not ready for this. But you make her make you do it. And you do.

THE PLAN IS TO VISIT
your house again, then ride to your folks’ house thirty minutes away to visit your family and your son, Rory. The doctors think it will be good for your outlook. Jim has had to get several lessons from the physical therapists on transferring you in and out of a car, no mean feat. He also talks about the time you both spent learning how to get you in and out of the house without a wheelchair ramp.

Either these events took place without you or your memory is collapsing again.

As he drives you home, you stare out the window and are in awe of everything. It has been, you are told, two months since your stroke.

The landscape looks different and the same. The colors are intense. You feel as though you are seeing things for both the first and the last time. It’s as though you’ve been blind since birth and have miraculously recovered the gift of sight.

You arrive home, and Jim backs the car into the garage. You sit staring at the cul-de-sac, the neighbors’ houses, and your yard. He wrestles the wheelchair, and you, into the house.

You’re back.

You left here a hundred years or so ago as Julia, a working mom. You don’t know what you are now. You’re broken.

If you cry, Jim will cry, too. So you don’t. But everything is on the brink of death in the house: the plants, your neglected and apparently underfed cat Winnie, and you. Jim has been working, taking care of Rory, driving to and from your folks’ place, and visiting you in the hospital.

Jim asks if you need anything. It occurs to you that you would love to lie down on your own bed. You ask Jim if he can get you upstairs.

He wheels the chair to the stairs. He maneuvers you to a sitting position on the steps, then drops down and scoops you up, almost, as a fireman would. But he doesn’t really “carry” you up the stairs—it’s half carrying, and half dragging.

“Honey,” you say, “it’s like the scene in
Gone With the Wind
. You’re Rhett, I’m Scarlett.”

He flops you on the bed. You lie together in silence, both sweating profusely from the workout.

“I’m going to make it up that thing,” you tell him, before you doze off.

“I know you are,” he answers.

YOU LEAVE YOUR HOME
and set off for your parents’ house, where the whole family has gathered, waiting for your arrival.

You catch a glimpse of yourself in the car mirror, and worry that the left-side paralysis has made your face—among other things—appear misshapen and asymmetrical. Jim eases the car into the driveway. Everyone quietly watches as he takes the wheelchair from the trunk, sets it up next to the passenger door, and lifts you into the rolling chair.

The silence hurts. You are set up at the kitchen tables like a mannequin.

Mom and Dad actually start fighting over what food to make for you. Dad is bent on making a Brie, tomato, and pasta dish that you’d mentioned to him during one of his visits to the rehab hospital; Mom had prepared another menu. The fight feels far out of proportion to its content. Things are clearly tense.

On your wedding day you are getting ready upstairs, putting on your makeup, and you can hear Mom and Dad bickering about what sandwich you are going to have. Mom has made a seafood salad sandwich and Dad has made a roast beef sandwich. Diplomatically, you say you’d like half of each. You can tell they’re nervous, marrying off their only daughter. You sit down in the kitchen and eat both sandwich halves and everyone calms down.

DINNER SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN EATEN,
because you hear someone doing the dishes and find yourself sitting in an armless chair in the center of the kitchen. Jim has left the room for a moment.

Then disaster strikes. Your center of gravity shifts and you slide off the chair and you hit the refrigerator door with the back of your head before landing in a slump on the floor. The sound is awful, much worse than the pain. You notice that Rory is watching from the other room; his eyes are huge.

Jim rematerializes in a heartbeat; your dad had witnessed the whole scene from the same room. As Jim kneels down to you, Dad starts crying and wringing his hands, saying the fall had happened in slow motion and that he should have prevented it. Everyone is freaking out; they think the fall has caused permanent brain damage, or perhaps that you’re going to die then and there.

Jim immediately wants to pick you up and put you back in the chair as if it didn’t happen. But the jolt has caused muscle spasticity, making your attempts to get up rigid and awkward. You have to lie there until all the misfiring muscles calm down enough to allow him to help you back up.

You keep saying you’re okay, that you simply need to regroup after performing your break-dancing routine. You have now learned the hard way, via the floor, and without any doubt, that you can only sit in chairs that have arms. Armless chairs will always put you at risk of falling.

Falling has become part of your life. It is something you can deal with. Your response is becoming familiar. Whenever you fall, people around you seem to stop breathing. They’re waiting to see if you’re still conscious. You learn to break the tension by saying things like, “I’m a master break-dancer!” You learn a lot about falling. Part of what you have to do when you fall is regroup slowly to give your muscles a chance to calm down. And then you have to check for any broken body parts.

A DINING ROOM CHAIR
with arms is brought into the kitchen for you to sit in while Jim holds an ice pack to the blossoming egg on the back of your head. This formal-looking chair seems oddly misplaced to its environment—which is exactly how
you
feel.

You are getting tired.

The whole family is emotionally spent.

You realize, with some surprise, that you want to return to the rehab hospital. The place that you thought you wanted to get away from. The place to which you had assigned an unofficial anthem: the Animals’ song, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” You ask Jim to take you back there. Which seems strange, considering all the time you’ve spent away from these people you love: your parents, your son…

Rory.

Where is he?

JUST AS JIM IS PREPARING
the elaborate procedure of gathering you back into the car to return to the rehab hospital, you notice that Rory—who had been staying with your mom and dad since your stroke—appears to be having some kind of weird allergic reaction.

He starts to wheeze and his eyes are getting puffy, red, and watery.

Red blotches start to erupt on his face.

Rory was susceptible to eczema and you found that he would get a similar reaction with dogs, especially with dog saliva. There are a lot of dogs in your parents’ neighborhood, and someone suggests that he had been in contact with a dog.

You wonder, though, what role the stress of seeing you fall might have played.

Mom says, “I’ll take him upstairs, soak him in a cool bath, and give him some Benadryl and his allergies will calm down. Don’t worry.”

She can tell you and Jim are worried. You think: Mom raised nine children—she has more experience than Jim or you have. You decide Rory is in competent hands and head back to the rehab hospital.

AT THE HOSPITAL,
Jim gets you into your nightshirt, puts your foot and hand splints on, and settles you into bed. You are exhausted and you can tell Jim is, too. But you’re still thinking about Rory.

“Before you leave, let’s call to see how Rory is doing.”

Jim dials your parents’ number and gives you the handset.

It’s really to make sure Rory is in bed and sleeping comfortably. You also want Mom and Dad to know you’re back in the hospital’s care and okay. But when you call, Dad answers the phone and tells you that Mom has taken Rory to the emergency room because of his allergic reaction.

You begin to hyperventilate as you relay the news to Jim. How much can a guy take in one day? Dad says Mom will call you at the rehab hospital as soon as she returns from the emergency room.

Jim won’t leave your side until there’s a follow-up call from Mom reassuring you both that your son is okay.

You wait. The phone won’t ring.

Half an hour passes.

You say, “Jim, I can’t survive if something happens to my only child. I’ll be suicidal.”

Jim thinks for a moment and then says, “Well, you might get suicidal, but I don’t see how you’re going to do anything about it. You can’t get yourself a glass of water yet. You’re going to have to wait until you’re up and about before you get suicidal.”

You consider this.

“Then you’re just going to have to carry me to the open window and let me do what I do best: fall.”

He stares at you.

What a jerky thing to say to the man who’s going through all the same anxiety about his son and also dealing with the welfare of his wife. You realize it is selfish to talk like this when he is already dealing with so much. But your only child is in danger, and you don’t know how he’s doing, and you shouldn’t have left the house, shouldn’t have fallen down, shouldn’t have gotten sick. You can handle anything that pertains to your health, but seeing someone else you love in pain…

“I’m sorry, Jim.”

The period after the phone call to Dad makes time stand still. You both wait without speaking. Finally the phone bleats and you take a deep breath and pick up the receiver.

Mom says that Rory seems to have suffered an allergic reaction, maybe to something he ate, and that he is fine and in bed sleeping. Because of his reaction, Rory needs to carry an antihistamine injection pen with him now, because the next exposure to whatever substance caused this will be worse than the initial one.

Jim kisses you and leaves to drive back to what must be a very lonely house.

You lie there in a sterile bed, wondering what on earth you had let your son eat. Or breathe. Or see. You feel helpless, a foreign emotion.

You should have been taking care of your child.