We are husband and wife; we are not new to each other. She has been making me a better person for more than six years. I stand touched to my core by that fear and by the way she has accommodated it.
Fuck this bullshit. I’m staying! my mind screams.
Will I miss her piano playing? Will I miss watching both hands fly across the keys while both feet race over the pedals of the pipe organ? Will I miss having her ride her Bianchi alongside me while I run? Will I miss the hikes in the mountains? Don’t ask.
Will I miss having her climb, with bare feet, up onto my shoes so she can reach me with her lips and give me a kiss, a spontaneous gesture of love and caring that I have always savored? Will I miss having her right and her left arm looped around me for a hug? Will I miss gazing at her sexy, slim legs and the gentle caresses of her right hand? Don’t let me think about those things. It hurts.
I am here, where I belong, and I am staying. Even if our lives are reduced to the simplest of activities, she can still be my sunset and I can still be her moonlight.
I have done a lot of thinking through the night as well, most of it recognizing the cruel reality that she might be dead by morning. I have dealt with her death and the prospect of life without her. To find her alive this morning is a gift beyond imagining, and I am ready to push on at her side.
“Olsie,” I started, “let’s think about it this way. None of my cancer patients, at the time of their diagnosis, know whether they will get better or get worse. Many do get worse, but they still fight hard. Your trauma was yesterday. You are not going to get worse. We are going to work and fight to make you get better little by little. My cancer patients do this. We can do this.”
I know slow progress both from my practice and from my long-distance running. I have learned that even when you can’t see the finish line, if you keep going, you will reach it. Concentrate on some small goal on the trail ahead of you, and then refocus on another small goal that allows you to go long and seemingly impossible distances without having to think about their magnitude. Running has taught me patience.
I am here. I am staying. I’m happy to be here, even though there is no finish line in sight.
Running to save her switched my soul into reverse. She had been making me a better person for six years. I knew I was a better doctor, a better man, and a better husband yesterday than I had been before we met. I hadn’t done this to myself. Her soft and gentle influence had washed away and abraded some of my sharp edges, anger problems, and perfectionism. Her tolerance of me and my hard personality went beyond patience. It was her.
But she wasn’t finished. There was still a lot of work to do. She owed me a lifetime of this. I wanted a lifetime of it. My soul was not ready for life without her. So I ran to her. My soul was ready to die beside her. So I leaped in front of the train to grab her and hold her. My soul wanted to be intertwined with hers from then on. Dead or alive.
This morning, my soul is not ready for life without her under any circumstances. Where would I go? And, most important, what kind of life would that be?
Fuck that bullshit! my brain screamed again.
So, here I am. I’m staying. There’s work to be done, so let’s get started.
CHAPTER 2:
The Pact
Post-op day two. Into the ICU swept a small, bony woman with chestnut hair gently sagging in a bun on the back of her head. Her thin lips were painted bright red, in contrast with her darkly penciled eyebrows. Her bronzed skin showed early signs of leathering, a trait we came to associate with Austrian and German sun worshippers.
“Guten Tag,” she said curtly but with a smile. “I’m Schwester—Sister—Nora, and I will be your nurse. I am sorry my English is so poor. Do you speak any German?”
“No, I don’t, but Dave speaks a little,” I said, grateful to hear her heavily accented English words.
“The doctors say that you are stable. We will move you to another room.”
Just two days after surgery, with IVs clanking and wheels squeaking, Schwester Nora and an orderly rolled my bed out the double doors of the ICU, down a hall, into an elevator, and out again, depositing me into a regular hospital room on the men’s ward. Dave’s room. The good news was that he was in the bed next to me. The bad news was that our beds were in a trauma hospital. It was time to start moving and learning to do things for myself.
After we were settled and the nurses left, I noticed a mirror lying facedown on the rolling bedside table. It was the kind my hairdresser might hand me. I stared at it, wondering what I’d see. There were already so many body parts lopped off, as if I’d been pruned. I desperately hoped my face would be normal: twinkly green eyes, dimples, impish nose, and even the freckles and moles I had previously tried to wish away. Now, feeling so small and egg shaped, I craved at least one recognizable aspect of my former visage. Screwing up my courage, I leaned over to reach for the mirror. Why didn’t it move? And then I remembered. My right arm was gone. My favorite arm. The one that did everything automatically. The one that my brain was still sending messages to. I stared at the mirror for a while, acutely aware of the pain in the blunt ends of my amputated extremities. I felt as though I could reach out and pick it up with my right hand, but, of course, I couldn’t. My right hand wasn’t there.
I closed my eyes and felt tingling electrical sensations where my legs and arm used to be. I could sense my nonexistent legs bent at the absent knees, my missing lower legs and feet poking through the mattress toward the floor, just as if I were sitting in a chair. My departed right arm bent at the elbow, my hand slightly curved, resting relaxed in the neutral position. How interesting. It was as if these sensations were a safety mechanism, the products of a deceitful nervous system tricking my brain into thinking everything was as it should be, as though trying to forestall the inevitable distress resulting from so great a loss, delaying the dismal reality of being limbless. But if the limbs weren’t there, how could this be me? How could I be alive? How could I be a person when the perpetual motion that had previously defined me no longer seemed possible?
I desperately wanted to look okay, for everybody to still see me as a person, a normal person. At this point, I’d settle for just looking normal from the shoulders up. I closed my eyes and wrapped the fingers of my left hand around the handle of the mirror, dragged it to the edge of the tray, and slowly raised it.
I cringed when I saw my reflection. My pale, haggard face, framed by medium-length, frizzy brown hair, still had scratches and scabs on it. But, worse than that, my right shoulder, freed from the weight of my arm, had floated up to take position next to my ear. With the mirror still in my left fist, I immediately pushed my wayward shoulder back down where it belonged. It stubbornly crept back up.
This was unacceptable. If I didn’t fix this, I was certain that for the rest of my life people would see me as a lopsided egg. I need them to see my face—a normal, happy face. I will make people respond to me by talking to them and smiling; my disposition, at least, is one thing I can control. If my objective was composing a semblance of normality, step one would have to be taming the shoulder. I can do this.
Later that afternoon, Dave’s family and his mom’s best friend, Adrian, shuffled in, despondent and teary-eyed. They huddled at the foot of my bed, not sure where to look and struggling to meet my eyes. His mom, Donna, dabbed at her swollen, bloodshot eyes. His father who was usually talkative and demonstrative, fixed his gaze on the floor, face ashen, shoulders slumped in abject misery. Jack, who was driving at the time of the accident, already looked like he might never recover from this tragedy.
Anguish banished their usual sparkle. Their attempts to speak produced fragmented sentences so soft and tremulous the words were unintelligible. The fragility of my appearance—so divergent from that of the vibrant and intact young woman they used to joke about adopting should Dave ever end our relationship—left them faltering, unsure what to say or do. I suspected that in their minds’ eyes, they were seeing me bikini-clad and pulli
ng weeds in their backyard. Hugging or kissing this tiny remnant of me was, as yet, too much for them to attempt.
Adrian took charge of the emotional scene—a service she and her husband, Johnny, would perform countless times over the next year. Her sweet Southeastern drawl could go from comforting to commanding in a heartbeat, and it became part of the music accompanying my recovery. “Linda, how are you doing this afternoon? Have the doctors been in to see you? Are your bowels working yet?” Today I broke off the friendly interrogation, knowing it could go on interminably if I let it.
They stood with their arms wrapped around each other, unsure whether to accept my giggly, goofy smile, and joking banter as signs of good mental health or of denial and mild psychosis. Playing to the competitiveness I knew they all possessed, I challenged them to the first of many rounds of my newly devised distraction. “Hey, I’ve got a new game called whack-a-shoulder! First one to push my shoulder back down below my ear gets a kiss. Ready . . . go!”
That first night together since the accident, only three feet separated our beds, but Dave and I both felt the need to be closer to each other. He climbed slowly out of his bed, cautiously pulled down the sheet, and gently climbed into my bed. The warmth and strength of his body were simultaneously soothing and energizing. I didn’t know what to do, so I cried. We were tired, but we wanted to hold each other and talk. Not about the bad stuff—there was plenty of that during daylight hours. I turned my head so I could see Dave’s face: his lips and familiar mustache, his blond sideburns, and his green eyes.
I wanted to hug him, to feel his warmth and strength pressed into as much of me as possible, but I couldn’t get my arm around him. Just changing position in bed was almost impossible. Without legs to extend, I couldn’t roll over. Without both arms to push with, I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t even wiggle. It appeared to me that my left arm would have to do the work of the three missing extremities. I grabbed the left bed rail with my hand and pulled. Nothing moved. Using my now precious left arm, I reached across my body to the right railing, grabbed it firmly, and attempted to haul myself up.
My shoulder lifted a couple of inches before a sharp jolt forced me to let go. Suddenly, my broken back demanded my attention. Since it was an invisible injury, it was easier to forget until I moved. Out of sight truly was out of mind. As the days went on, I would find that the agony of back pain overshadowed that of my amputation sites. Dilaudid was the only thing that subdued the torment for a few hours. And therein was another major mental battle for me.
I was petrified that I might become a narcotics addict. As I looked down the road into my future, I could see two outcomes. One was immediate relief of severe back and amputation-site pain. Something to make me feel good immediately and to push away all the issues that were facing us. Something that would let me smile and laugh and be worry free. The other was to figure out how to handle the pain mentally or physically to get through this immediate postoperative and hospitalization phase. To convince myself that even though it would be tough and hurt within the next few weeks, it would keep getting better and eventually go away. Going through this thought process, I was reminded that deep down I wanted to be in control of my life. I didn’t want to take any chances that a drug could seize control.
And at that moment, we were in control of what happened next. With almost imperceptible motion, we leaned into each other, creating a cocoon between the railings of that hospital bed—a place where we learned to cuddle and love in a new way.
“Guten Morgen,” said Nora as she entered our room. One hand held a clipboard. The other rested on the pill arsenal she wore around her waist, a miniature pharmacy she was authorized to dispense based on her assessment of the situation—a system very different from the rigid doctor-prescribed, pharmacist-dispensed, nurse-delivered method in our hospitals at home.
I grimaced and broke into a sweat. Oh God. I don’t know if I can do this again.
Mornings were filled with the customary doctoring and nursing activities of a hospital: eating small amounts of nondescript food; bathing and cleaning up; recording of vital signs and assessment of tubes, catheters, and medications. These mundane tasks led up to the barbaric, excruciating dressing changes that I constantly dreaded.
Dave hobbled, still in his cast, to the side of the bed opposite Nora and took my hand as she spoke in clipped English:
“How did you sleep?”
“What have you eaten?”
“When did you . . .” She searched for the word, then motioned toward the toilet.
“What of you hurts? How much?”
Between her English, Dave’s German, and my emoting, all questions were asked and answered.
Satisfied that she had seen and heard enough, the fifty-year-old spinster decided on the painkiller or sedative of the day. Without ceremony, she unwrapped the foil pill package and gently but firmly shifted my body and shoved the medication up my butt!
“Dave,” I whimpered.
He squeezed my hand and said, “It’s quite efficient. Delivering medications rectally, rather than orally, is actually more successful, because many post-op patients are nauseated and throw up their pills, thereby making them useless for pain management. Administering it rectally is always going to be effective, unless you’ve got diarrhea.”
“Well, I’m not nauseated, and it’s as if she didn’t know I have a mouth, which is fully capable of opening and swallowing pills of any size or shape,” I said. “And it’s so gross!” He patted the back of my hand.
It wasn’t about efficiency or effectiveness. It was about the indignity of it all and the mounting fear of what was coming next.
Once the medication began to take effect, one of the surgeons and Dave would change the dressings. One or two nurses would assist them. Though they all worked quickly and expertly, I screamed as the dressing around each freshly cut and skin-wrapped bone was pulled away. My body reflexively recoiled from each touch, but with nothing to push against, I could only twist my spine and squeeze my shoulders, moves that brought fresh waves of pain and accomplished nothing but to tighten my hospital gown around my neck and expose my body. Each forty- five-minute session felt like a lifetime of agony. When they were finished, Nora would slip her hands under my armpits and situate me upright in my bed, my body swaddled in bandages, then slide her hand up my exquisitely tender right shoulder. Sometimes I screamed. Sometimes I was too exhausted to do even that.
Dave settled himself on the bed next to me as Nora herded the other staff members out the door. He was clean-shaven, and his scabs were healing, but the inner turmoil caused by the necessity of the dressing changes and the pain they caused me played out in his eyes. He looked at me for a long time before leaning in and gently kissing me on my sweaty forehead.
My family arrived on Thursday. There were no cell phones in 1979. They’d scrambled to gather passports and tickets and had gotten on planes, my parents on one and my siblings on another, knowing only what Dave had told them during the shattering call: I was on the critical list in the ICU. They arrived not knowing whether they would see me alive.
I knew how they would feel long before they arrived.
My dad, the textbook stoic pathologist, was devastated. I was his first child. The one who, as he did, played the piano and organ. The one who had followed him into medicine. He would be wondering how I could still be a doctor.
My mother, the talkative one, treasured and admired her oldest daughter with the bubbly personality and easy laugh, the one who craved constant activity and had a zest for adventure. She would be wondering if I could ever recover my joie de vivre.
My brother, Albert, and sister, Janice, who are one and a half and five years younger than I, respectively, were accustomed to my role as the bossy, strong-willed older sibling. Seeing me abjectly dependent was a striking change for them. They would be wondering how to reconcile this egg-shaped bundle of bandages with the vivacious, assertive sister they loved.
In my family’s eyes, lif
e as I knew it had come to an end, a very unfair end for someone who had so much going for her. I’d been a focused and happy child who studied and worked hard. While not touchy-feely, my parents had nurtured all three of us with their words: “You can be anything you want to be.” They were strong people with a loving and supportive marriage, and they’d celebrated with me when I’d found a wonderful husband, someone they admired and respected. Even so, this was a huge blow. The kind that could tear apart even the strongest bonds. The kind that made you question God. Why would anyone want to believe in a God who would let this happen? This grief made it almost impossible to function—to lift your arms, to move your legs, to breathe, to speak.
Their grief might be something I could fix. In fact, I knew only I could do so. I had to greet them with a smile and show them immediately that even though I was still wrapped in bandages, recovery was underway. And Dave and I needed to prove unequivocally that we knew what we were facing and were already setting our plans in motion.
“Dad! Mom!” I yelled, as Jack and Donna led my parents into the room to see me for the first time. They hesitated near the door, trying to stand tall and strong for me. It didn’t work. My mom sank into my dad’s arms, tears streaming down her cheeks. They looked small and helpless. I needed to take control.
“Get your butts over here so I can give you a hug,” I said.
They shuffled toward me, clinging to each other. Sitting up as straight as I could manage, I flung my left arm out toward them, a wide grin splitting my face in two. This would come to be my signature invitation for an embrace. “Come on, what’s taking you so long?” We leaned into each other as they reached the side of my bed. I didn’t let go for quite a while.
In my peripheral vision, I could see Jack standing in the corner, almost as if he were trying to shrink out of sight. Dave and I were worried about this first encounter between our parents. I hadn’t seen Jack smile since we’d been in the hospital. Knowing we’d need their love and support for the rest of our lives, we realized we had to set the stage right now for our families to stay strong and united. They would need to see us succeed in order for that to happen. If I could start the minute they saw us, we’d set the tone for all our future interactions. I can do this.
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