Moving Forward in Reverse (8 page)

I stared at Amber’s blood-splattered face and she smiled back. How
had this happened? The week had been going so well in comparison to the last,
what with my dalliances with Kathy and growing dexterity with the hooks. And
now this?

Dazed, I shook my head and tried to remember. Amber had come to
change the bandages on my feet – a routine procedure I underwent every few
days. We were chatting amicably, swapping hospital gossip and news, and then
there was blood. So much blood. It began spraying around the room, gushing from
the end of my left foot.

‘I’ve got a bleeder!’ she yelled as she clamped her hand over my
foot. But the blood wouldn’t stop. It started squirting through the gaps in her
fingers. Frantically, she grabbed the gauze she had just removed and bunched it
at the top of my foot. Lines of red streaked her face, neck, and clothing.
Splatters adorned the wall behind her.

I stared wide-eyed at the scene before me: blood-washed like the
crime scene of a murder mystery, Amber saturated in red like Stephen King’s
Carrie.
This can’t all be coming from me.
The blood was everywhere;
seeping through the gauze, staining her hands, clumping in her hair, drooling
down her cheek.

Another nurse came sprinting into my room with Dr. Henrickson, who
happened to be in the unit, on her heels. ‘Hey, Doc H!’ I said – or thought, I
couldn’t be sure which – in happy surprise. Whatever the case, he paid me no
mind as he headed straight for the bathroom.

Hope he isn’t about to puke,
I thought facetiously.

He had a towel in his hand when he came back out. ‘Get a central
line kit, Joanne,’ he said coolly to the second nurse. I realized I was smiling
dopily at the scene unfolding before me as if I really were watching a movie.
That’s
not right,
I thought and tried to straighten my expression.

Dr. Henrickson wrapped the towel around my foot. Amber slid her
hands from the gauze to the towel, squeezing so hard the veins on her neck
popped out. I probably should have felt fear – my life was on the line, after
all – but I wasn’t afraid. I trusted the people who now held my life in their
hands (again). Whatever the outcome, I’d know they’d done everything they could
and no one could have done more.

A gasp from the left drew my attention. Kathy stood in the
doorway, her expression aghast. She spun on her heels and dashed off, yelling,
‘I’ll call surgery,’ over her shoulder as she went.

Surgery?
I thought in dismay. I hated surgery. They did a lot of cutting in
surgery.

The second nurse was back. She passed a surgical kit off to Dr.
Henrickson as if it was a baton and they were in the midst of a relay race. (
I
hope you’re winning.)

He strode to my right side. Joanne tugged on the foot of the bed
so Dr. H could move behind me. I looked across my body at Amber. She winked and
smiled at me. Blood now saturated the towel and was dribbling from the ends. It
dawned on me then that I must be in deep shit for Amber to smile like that.

‘Scott,’ Dr. Henrickson said from somewhere above me, ‘I need to
put in a central line. It’s going to be painful but if I don’t do it you’ll
bleed out before we can get you to surgery.’
Bleed out,
I silently
repeated.
Translation: die.

I blinked at him, which apparently wasn’t enough consent because
he prompted, ‘Okay?’

I didn’t say a word or move a muscle.

Someone lowered the head of my bed until it was below the level of
my feet. Dr. Henrickson wiped something down the right side of my neck. He
barked out orders to the second nurse and I felt fingers pressing into my neck.
They pressed, paused, then shifted and pressed again. After a moment they found
what they were looking for and held fast.

A sharp pinch at the side of my neck. I wanted to flinch away.
Pain or death
,
those were my options
.

Tears stung my eyes. He had told me it would hurt. I hadn’t
understood how much.

Pure, unadulterated pain washed over me. Suddenly it was all true:
this was me; that was my blood on the walls; it was my life they were trying to
save. None of it had felt real without the pain – agonizing, brutalizing pain.

My vision wavered between blindingly white light and crisp
clarity. Two men raced in with a gurney. I saw them advance on me from the left
in spurts of lucidity. I was lifted and shifted. Then we were on the move. I
could hear Dr. Henrickson’s cool voice hovering around me,
Stay with us,
Scott!
Stay with us…

I could see the flash of lights passing overhead and felt a chill
settle over me
.
When we rolled out of the elevator into the familiar
pallor of the operating room, my teeth chattered around a gaping yawn.

So tuh-tired,
I thought and shivered as we entered the OR.

‘Hi, Scott,’ an unfamiliar male voice said, accompanied by a firm
hand on my shoulder. I lifted my eyelids one fraction at a time and struggled
to focus on the masked face above me. The impression I got was of round jolliness.
He had nice, close-set eyes and dark barely-receding hair.

‘I’m Dr. Mixter,’ the jolly doctor said. ‘You don’t remember me,
but we spent some time together last month.’ Just behind this unfamiliar doctor
someone was tinkering with a tray of tools.
Surgical tools,
my muddied
brain determined.

Dr. Mixter was replaced by a female assistant as he moved to the
other end of the table. The apples of her cheeks bulged and her eyes wrinkled
around the edge of her mask.

‘Everything’s okay, Scott,’ she said softly, stroking my hair with
one hand. ‘Everything’s okay.’ Her cheeks stayed rounded at the edge of her
smile, but the expression in her eyes wavered as she watched me.

Things didn’t look so “okay” in her eyes.

~~~

He stood by my feet, leaning forward slightly. The light blue
shirt beneath his white lab coat, dark tie knotted around his neck, and
expression of compassionate severity on his face all too familiar.

Gazing up at Dr. Mixter from my bed, I could see Dr. Henrickson
stooping over me to say I was officially another digit in the statistics of the
flesh-eating disease. Dr. Henrickson telling me machines were the only things
between me and death. Dr. Henrickson telling me my hands and feet were gone and
I was lucky to be alive.

Here I was again: about to receive a similar prognosis from a
different doctor on a different day in a different unit of the same hospital.
Had I really achieved so much in these past weeks?

‘How’re you feeling today, Scott?’ Dr. Mixter asked.

‘Alive.’

He chuckled, but I hadn’t meant it as a joke. Yesterday was very
nearly the last day I would have felt anything, and it had been shrouded in
torment, defeat, and terror. I didn’t want to think about the emotional aspects
of the day, so I diverted my attention to the technical side of the events.

‘What happened yesterday?’ I asked as he began gently unwinding
the bandage on my right foot. ‘Why was my foot bleeding?’

‘It looked like a staple came loose.’ I nodded. I had figured it
was something like that. Unlike my arms, my feet were still healing and held
together by surgical staples.

‘Not entirely uncommon,’ he continued, and started to chuckle
again, ‘but we sure had to close it right quick.’ I wondered what part of that
statement was meant to be funny. Perhaps I had missed some inside joke in my
severe-blood-loss haze yesterday.

‘You lost a lot of blood,’ he said, sobering up. The cause of the
chills: I was bleeding to death; draining dry.

I cleared my throat. ‘Why does the right foot look so different
from the left?’ I asked. The dissimilarities had bothered me since my first
bandage change. While my left foot was cleanly cut through the middle of the
arch with a small flap of extra skin used to sew it up, the right was a
mutilated stump that was so short it was hard to tell where the heel ended and
what was now the front-end of the foot began. The skin had patches of hair and
looked like someone had taken a meat mallet to it.

He glanced up from his examination then began re-wrapping my foot.
‘Well, the left didn’t have much tissue loss and was a straight, lateral cut
and sew. There was great debate about whether there should be a BK on the
right.’ He looked at me with a sideways grin. ‘Sorry, Below-The-Knee
amputation. Knowing that you were an athlete, I wanted you to have something
that you could possibly run on.’

He thinks I could run on
that? I eyed my mutilated foot with skepticism.

‘It was a bit of a long shot, but I stripped the tissue and
padding from the bottom of your foot then recreated that portion with a
four-by-six-inch strip of muscle from your abdomen and skin from your thigh.
You’ll probably have hair growth on the sole of your foot now, but at least
there’s a bottom to it.’

I laughed. It was all I could do. The whole concept was absurd and
yet here was this plastic surgeon who had accomplished it. When faced with the
possibility of amputating everything below the knee, he instead chose to build
me a foot from a medley of other body parts a la Dr. Frankenstein. Here stood
my mad doctor.

After a moment of shared joviality – tinged with lunacy on my part
– Dr. Mixter straightened from his wrapping and said somberly, ‘There’s no
guarantee that it will work, Scott. You may still lose the lower leg.’

I was slower to return to a serious mindset, but eventually his
words struck home and I let out the last of my laughter in a deflated huff. So
the battle still wasn’t won. Well, that was the lesson to be taken from
yesterday, wasn’t it? Don’t get comfortable; you’re not out of the woods yet.
The fight isn’t over.
Heaven knows when it will be.

Dr. Mixter left my room after mumbling something about how the
foot looked good but I was barely aware of him anymore. What he had said rang
far deeper and truer than he probably knew. It was the mantra of my new life:
No
guarantee. You may still lose.
 

Regardless of the progress I made in the weeks that followed, all
I could think about was my team. Like chasing a rainbow, no matter how much
ground I covered, they remained tantalizingly out of reach. Having designed it
myself, I knew their schedule by heart and spent each match day anxiously
awaiting news from the confines of my hospital bed. As thrilled as I was to
know they were advancing in their season – we were at the top of our conference
and ranked in the national top 20 – it killed me to be so far from the action.
Nothing – not even the hooks – hurt my spirit more than the ache of perceived
abandonment.

Kathy was my closest confidante at the hospital. Since my mother’s
breakdown, I realized it was better to shelter my family from certain trying things.
They didn’t deserve to bear any more of my pain than they already had. Besides,
Kathy was better equipped to witness my darker moments. She was also the first
person I wanted to share my lighter times with.

So when she asked me what was on my mind that morning, I divulged
every detail, sharing my thoughts, my hurt and my hope with my most cherished
partner in crime. The whole time I chattered on and on about the soccer program
and my team, eating up our entire session time, she remained an attentive and
enthusiastic listener.

‘Sorry,’ I said when my ranting and raving had come to an end.

‘For what? It sounds like you have a passion for what you do.’ I
smiled at her and nodded, but the apology wasn’t as much for what I had just
said as for what I was about to say. After a short pause, during which I
reminded myself of how crucial feeling hope for my future was to my recovery, I
spoke my final part.

‘Kathy,’ I said, meeting her eyes with slow determination. ‘I want
to be transferred to the rehab unit at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire.’

Understanding slowly blossomed behind her eyes. I waited,
agonizing over the thoughts she wasn’t sharing. I could see the emotions
struggling for dominance: surprise, hurt, confusion, comprehension, and,
finally, an inkling of sorrow.

Eau Claire was where my profession, my art, and my heart were. At
that moment, I needed them– that constant reminder of what I was fighting for –
more than anything. Watching matches and training sessions on video, as I’d
been doing, and getting news second-hand from miles away wasn’t good enough. As
much as I hated to admit it, I needed that team even more than I yearned to be
with my family and with Kathy and the staff at Mercy Hospital.

After a long pause, she spoke.

‘Eau Claire.’

I pursed my lips and nodded slowly. She looked down at her hands
and I felt the first throes of separation between us.

‘I mean, I –’ I started to say, not even sure where I was heading
but knowing that I needed to say something, anything, to soften this blow for
the both of us.

‘No,’ she cut me off with a wave of her hand and a smile of false
bravado. ‘It’s a good idea. Just hearing you talk about soccer the way you do.
. . I’ve never seen you that animated. Clearly your team means a lot to you and
anything that can make you that excited deserves to have you close by. I’ll
bring it up with Dr. Molin and see what can be done, okay?’

I opened my mouth then closed it; opened it again, and shut it
with a sigh. What more could I say? I had watched the course of her expressions
closely, and the last one I’d seen was resolve.

‘Thank you.

~~~

Only two days after Kathy and I discussed the possibility, Dr.
Molin paid me a visit. I could tell from the moment he sauntered into my room
that he had good news to share.

On cue he said, ‘Hey, man. I’ve got some good news for you.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I played along, even though I knew there was only one
thing it could be.
Well, unless he’s come to tell me we can make a bonfire
out of the hooks. That’d be pretty good news, too.

‘Sacred Heart just called. They accepted.’ There was no holding
back the surge of excitement I felt; a broad, uninhibited smile spread across
my face.

‘Awesome! When do I transfer?’

‘Monday.’

‘Monday?
This
Monday?’ I had expected him to say in a
couple weeks, next month maybe. Monday was only five days away.

‘You betcha.’

Five days,
I mused. Five days until I could get back to my program. 120 hours
until I wouldn’t need a VCR and thirteen-inch television to know what was going
on with my team. 7,200 minutes to become Coach Martin again. Exalted, I wished
I could have leapt to my feet for a victory dance but then perhaps it was best
I couldn’t.
Wouldn’t want to tarnish my upstanding reputation
, I thought
and grinned wolfishly at my private banter.

I was coming back! A deluge of renewed determination flooded over
me. With only five days to go, I would conquer the hooks and any other
obstacles that may stand between me and my team.  Nothing could stop me
now.

~~~

As the news of my transfer spread throughout the Rehab Unit,
visitors started popping in to say their farewells. I hadn’t realized just how
many friends I’d made during my month and a half at Mercy Hospital until they
started filing into my room. Doctors, nurses, interns, and patients alike came
to wish me well. With each new caller, the true depth of what I was losing
became clearer. I had built a home here at Mercy, and not a half bad one at
that.

When the good-byes slowed to a trickle, I realized one person had
yet to give me a sendoff: Kathy. We had talked about it, naturally, but the
conversation had stayed in the safer zones of technicalities and logistics
regarding the move. When Monday rolled around and Kathy and I still hadn’t had
our moment, I began to think consolingly that perhaps some good-byes were better
left unsaid.

Until a tornado of bright blue and dark brown came spinning into
my room. She twirled and whirled and wavered to a dizzying halt at the foot of
my bed, looking over at me with her lustrous smile.

‘I want one hundred crunches and a fifteen-minute sit. Ready? Go!’

‘I’ll miss you, too.’

She sighed and dropped the guise. Walking to my left side, she
wrapped her arms around my neck and squeezed. I hugged her in return, chuckles
filling my ear.

‘My, my you have gotten strong, haven’t you? Don’t crack my ribs
now, Mr. Hulk.’ One more squeeze and I let her go.

‘Take care of yourself, okay?’ I said. ‘Don’t pick on the patients
too hard. They’re not all as tough as me.’

‘Don’t you worry about them. I rule this place with an iron fist.’

‘I know you do.’ Time hung there for a moment, hovering over us
like a blanketing shroud, she with one hand on my shoulder and me watching the
thoughts dance across her eyes. At last, she took a long breath and smiled
another of her signature grins.

‘Go kick some ass!’ With that she turned, spun, and skipped all
the way to my door and out into the hall. I watched her disappear from view
with a sense of sad contentment at how things had gone. I didn’t think this
would be the last I’d see or hear of Kathy the Occupational Therapist. Perhaps
Forrest Gump said it best: Kathy and me was like peas and carrots. She was my
most special friend.

And that’s all I have to say about that.