by Dale Mayer
She pointed ahead and said, “Go grab one.”
Dennis came around from the back and said, “Let me grab the tray for you.”
They waited while Finn awkwardly wheeled up to the cooler and tried to open the door. It took several attempts to open it without the wheelchair being in the way, and, at the time, he appeared frustrated and flustered, as if wondering why no one was helping him.
As Fiona and Dennis watched, she smiled and whispered, “Gotta love it when they start.”
“It’s always tough, isn’t it?
They watched as Finn finally pulled back enough to figure out how to open up the door and then wheeled around and grabbed the water, and, just because he was in there, he grabbed three.
Dennis chuckled. “I can see this guy’ll make sure he gets what he wants when he wants it.”
She smiled, walked past Finn and said, “Come on. Let’s go this way. We’ll sit outside.”
She didn’t give him a chance to argue and headed for a table that was half in the sun and half out. She put her tray down, waited for him to roll up beside her, and she asked, “Which side do you want? Sun or without?”
“No sun,” he said briskly.
She nodded and removed the chair so he could sit easier. Dennis placed the other tray down, and she sat across from Finn. She grabbed one of the bottles of water and asked, “May I?”
He stared at her resentfully.
She grinned and said, “Around here, the more you can do yourself, the better off you are. Yes, it took you several times to make it, but that’s not the issue. Celebrate the wins. You accomplished your task, and you did it very quickly. I was impressed.”
He looked at her in surprise, and then, as if realizing she was serious, he smiled, grabbed a bottle of water for himself and said, “I did, didn’t I?” He grinned and held up his bottle, and they tapped them together, saying, “Cheers.”
Finn had to smile. He hadn’t realized just how affected he was by being watched—or, in this case, by appearing stupid, awkward and like he couldn’t do anything. It was a completely different thing being in a rehab center like this where everybody appeared to be in similar circumstances. When he was in the hospital, everybody jumped to help. And maybe that hadn’t been the best thing for him, but it had been easy and stress-free. The last thing he needed was extra stress.
But somehow he didn’t think that same let-me-help-you philosophy would work here. It seemed to him that Fiona watching him and waiting for him to deal with it in that calm, unfazed manner of hers showed a lot about who she was. He wasn’t sure that he liked it, but he admired it. He also admired that she didn’t seem to care whether he approved or not.
She smiled at him. “Not quite what you were expecting, was it?”
He shook his head quietly. “No. I’m used to people jumping up and helping.”
“I get that,” she said cheerfully. “But think about the advantages of us not doing that.”
He frowned at her, but her grin widened. His shoulders sagged as he agreed. “I still don’t like feeling like a fool.”
She stared at him, her gaze gentle. “The only fool is a fool who doesn’t try,” she said.
His brows came together as he thought about that. “I’m sure there’s something very philosophical about that,” he muttered. “But I’m not really seeing it.”
She smiled. “Appearances matter to you, don’t they? You have this view of who you are and what you should be, and, anything different than that, you’re not willing to accept.”
“Is anybody?” he asked, wanting to challenge her on that. He shifted uncomfortably. “Besides, you’re my nurse, not my shrink.”
She settled back and looked around.
He wondered if he’d hurt her and immediately felt bad. “I’m sorry,” he muttered.
“No need to be.”
“Yes, there is,” he said. “I didn’t mean to come across as an arrogant asshole. Apparently, I’ve been doing a little bit too much of that lately.”
“Or, you are somebody desperate for the same chance that you see everybody else getting,” she murmured. “The thing is, when you’re desperate, it doesn’t happen.”
Her words were like a sock to his gut because so much truth was behind them, but how did she know? He stared down at his water bottle, wondering.
“Everybody comes here with that same look,” she explained, her voice once again cool but warm. “And you have every right to it. This is your life. This is your physical body. This is your future. You have to want this change, to be the best you can be. You have to be hungry for it,” she said. “But you have to be willing to do the work to get there. And the work is not always the work that you think it’ll be.”
He stared back at her. He didn’t even necessarily want to go down that train of thought. But what she was offering him was tantalizing. “Is that part of your shrink duties?” he asked, but he tried to keep the sarcasm out of it.
“We’re all shrinks here,” she said, “because we’re all people who walk this world called life. None of us are any better than you. None of us are any worse. We’re all here on this journey. We’re all at different stages. Just because I’m healthy and seemingly whole and have a job where I get to help people become healthy and whole doesn’t mean I’m ahead of you. On the contrary,” she said, “I’ve learned so much on a day-to-day basis from each and every one of you that I know that I’m further behind.”
She almost took his breath away. He took a sip, trying to gather his thoughts as he considered her words. “I guess you’ve seen it all, haven’t you?”
“I keep thinking I have, and then I get a new patient with a new set of problems and a new set of beliefs and a new set of handicaps, and I realize that, yet again, somebody new with something different has presented which I haven’t seen before, and it’s another opportunity to learn.”
Her words were hard-hitting, and yet, so damn meaningful that it made him feel small. “It seems like, every time you open your mouth right now, you come out with something incredibly prophetic, and it makes me feel even smaller,” he admitted. “I had no idea my insecurity was such an issue.”
“What I’ve found,” she said in a conversational tone, leaning forward and linking her fingers loosely in front of her, “is that whenever we’re up against a new challenge—in your case, your physical disabilities—it makes us all feel very insecure because it’s different. We don’t experience a stable footing to stand on. We don’t know what we’re up against, so we don’t have the confidence to know if we can handle it. It’s as if the mountain seems to be so big that you just don’t have the coping skills, so everything falls apart. And the first thing to go is your sense of confidence, your sense of security, your ability to do versus maybe I can do.” She cut her roll in half and offered him half.
He stared at it and then nodded. He leaned forward, wincing only a little at his back as it twinged with the movement.
“Did you lose that kidney too?” she asked, her tone so normal and commonplace.
He laughed and said, “I did. That and a bunch of other stuff.” He picked up the half of her roll, took a bite and slowly savored it.
She nodded and said, “You haven’t allowed yourself much in the way of food, have you?”
Instinctively he gazed at his waist.
She nodded, “Because whatever goes in has to come out, and you’ve been avoiding what comes out.”
He flushed, looking around, wishing she kept her voice low.
“If I were to stand on this tabletop and yell out to everybody that you have a colostomy bag,” she said comfortably, “not one person here would give a shit or be fazed by it.”
“How do you know?” he asked in horrified fascination. “Do you do that to all the newbies who come here?”
She stared at him in surprise for a moment and then went off in a peal of laughter. When she finally calmed down, she wiped the tears from her eyes, still chuckling, and said, “Oh, that was great,” sh
e said. “No, I don’t. I should though, shouldn’t I?” Still chuckling, she checked her watch and said, “Not sure what time your next appointment is, but I have to get going.”
“What time is it?” he asked.
“One.”
He nodded. “I should go too. I’m not exactly sure how anything works here, but it seems like it’s not really been set up yet.”
“That’s normal until everybody on the team gets up to speed,” she said, standing. “Do you want a hand back?”
“I think the answer that I’m supposed to give you,” he said, “is, No, I’ll do it myself. But the honest truth is, I would. I’m quite tired.” He lifted a hand to see it trembling.
She gave a decisive nod. “I’m taking my lunch back to my desk. Let’s get your drink and your lunch and bring it back with you.” She quickly packed up a tray, put it on his lap, walked behind him, pushing him toward his room.
“Are you supposed to see me this afternoon?”
“Yes, I am,” she said. “Will you be there, or will you run away?”
“I was thinking that I really wanted to see you,” he said. “You have a take on life that’s refreshing.”
“It’s because I like to take life by the hand and give it a good shake and see what falls out,” she said, still laughing.
“Like I said, refreshing.”
Chapter 4
As soon as Fiona got Finn back to his room, with assurances that he was fully capable of getting onto his bed and that he should lay here and close his eyes for a bit, she placed his tray of food on the night table and headed back to the nurses’ station with her lunch. She was still chuckling about his comment, asking if that’s how she introduced all newbies to the center, because it wasn’t a bad idea.
From the very start, get over the embarrassment, get over that humiliation, get over the unseen worry that people were whispering behind their backs, so that everybody knew upfront exactly what the problem was, and then they could get on with it. They could move past all the initial hurdles with a modicum of effort.
She was all about being transparent, about being outspoken, but she’d learned that one had to tread carefully because most men’s egos were fragile. She’d also found that men made the worst patients if they still expected to be a big, strong, hunky he-man type.
In this place, sometimes they needed to cry like a baby. Sometimes the fear, the worries, the pain were just too much for the he-man image. They broke down, and they always felt embarrassed afterward. They always felt like they had somehow broken some male pledge to be strong forever. It took time for them to adjust to the fact that this was normal behavior and that not everybody could be strong all the time. Not only that but it sometimes took the strongest of men to let out that pain, let out that grief, so they could wake up the next day and start all over again.
She’d seen some of the PT sessions that were absolutely, unbearably painful. And it was her job to help ease that pain in whatever way she could so that the patient could get up the next day and do it all over again. Eventually, over time, it got easier. Eventually, over time, the pain diminished; and eventually, over time, they didn’t need her. That was both a sad and a great moment. Because they could sleep on their own then. Having seen the progress, having seen that momentous change was the tipping point in their recovery.
Everybody went through a process, but everybody’s process was different. It’s not enough to think that everybody processed things differently, because, of course, they did, but everybody experienced things differently too. That meant everybody’s tipping point was different.
Wouldn’t it be nice if she could say, “Five days of doing this and you’ll hit that tipping point. When you wake up on day six, it’ll be as if you scaled that mountain. You’ll feel like you are David who killed Goliath.” But it wasn’t like that. Sometimes the tipping point came at six months; sometimes it came at three months, and sometimes, for some people, it took years.
She’d had one patient who was here for six months. He went home not quite as healed as much as they all expected for him, and, when he came back almost a year and a half later, he’d walked into the center as a visitor, visibly healed in body and mind. Not in a wheelchair but standing straight and tall, wearing casual jeans and a T-shirt, and she’d been shocked and delighted to see him. She’d walked forward, held out her hand, shook his and said, “Wow.”
He grinned and said, “And that’s why I came back. When I left, I was a mess, and I wasn’t ready to listen to anything you had to say. I wasn’t ready to hear anything you wanted me to hear. I was a slow learner. But I did get the message—finally. I’m here in town, and I deliberately made this trip just so I could see you and could let you know that I finally found that tipping point. For me.”
Tears had come to her eyes, and she’d flung herself into his arms and hugged him hard. It had been mutual, and, when he’d left, there had been more tears in his eyes too, but he’d become a whole man, a healthy man, and she’d never ever seen anything better.
Even now she could feel the tears in her eyes, that sense of joy, that beautiful sense of accomplishment of knowing that that broken man had reached that point in time. They still corresponded. He was back out West again. She knew that she wasn’t important in his life now, but she’d been important then, and she’d been important up to the point that he had needed her to be. And, once he didn’t need her anymore, he’d moved on, and that was the way it should be.
Was it her fault that she gave a little bit of her heart to each and every one of her patients? Maybe that’s why she had no relationship now—because she’d given away so many pieces of her heart to these men who had shown her just what a real man was.
She didn’t want the jocks. She didn’t want the slick businessmen, and she certainly didn’t want the successful millionaires because money didn’t matter. She saw money here every damn day. Money made no difference because money didn’t give you the spirit to get up in the morning. Money didn’t give you the courage to crawl out of bed to face PT when you knew it would hurt and it would send you crawling back in tears, wishing you could die so you didn’t have to face another day. Money didn’t do a damn bit of good when you had to crawl inside yourself to find out who you really were, because, at the end of the day, we were all poor unless we had built up our own riches, and we had that bank account of self-reliance to draw on in times of need.
Like the real men she’d seen here had done.
That was the kind of man she wanted.
Two days later Finn slowly worked himself out of bed and did several loosening-up exercises, as he’d been instructed. When he was done, he pulled out his tablet to check what was on his list today. As he sorted it out in his head, he dropped into his wheelchair, headed to the bathroom, quickly went through his morning ritual. By the time he made his way back to the bed, he could already feel a sense of exhaustion. He was never big on routine. It was necessary for many parts of life, but he’d always found it was a difficult thing for him to get into in his personal life.
But he didn’t have much choice here. He literally tapped items off his list as he went through everything, and the list was extensive, as if they knew that he might skip one of every two items on his list. He also knew that tablet sent the same tally in real-time so that everybody else on his team could see what he’d done—or tried or skipped—at any time.
Sure, he could lie and tap and say he’d done all these things, but that wasn’t who he was. And just staring at the list was both empowering and terrifying.
He slowly dressed, wondering when he could get fitted for another prosthetic. That would make a huge difference to his mental state. He stared at the wheelchair and wondered if he was ready to go with crutches. He’d done a lot of work on crutches before, but his back …
He grabbed the crutches and walked to the doorway, awkwardly opening it, and stepped out. He took several deep breaths as he looked around and realized that the cafeteria hadn’t looked quite so
far away when he was in his wheelchair, but, now that he was on crutches, it looked miles away. It shouldn’t matter. He’d been there and back many times. It was amazing how being on crutches made the world look different. Still, he figured he could go for breakfast, maybe not make a fool of himself, then could come back and switch into the wheelchair for his first PT session.
He wasn’t looking forward to it, and he was waffling as to whether he should even eat beforehand. The last thing he wanted was the embarrassment of having this colostomy bag filling while he was in a PT session, and yet, he knew it probably wouldn’t be the first time for his therapist. It would just be Finn’s first time. Muttering, “There will be a lot of first times coming up,” he slowly worked his way to the cafeteria, happy to feel his body getting into the swing of things a little easier than he thought. But he also knew how damn easy it was to overdo things.
At the cafeteria, he’d managed to get a tray off the stack and onto the runner, and, as he hobbled along, he saw Dennis at the end. He beamed when he saw the crutches. “Moving up in the world, are you?”
Finn grinned back at the wonderfully even-tempered man and said, “Maybe, but I could fall flat on my face trying to get to a table with a full tray.”
“I’ve got your back there, not a problem. What can I get you for breakfast?”
Finn settled on a nice omelet stuffed with veggies, a big glass of juice and a little bit of fruit. As he got his tray to the coffee station, he studied the tray and wondered how he would ever make that trip to the table. He’d seen others do it easily enough, but he figured he’d dump everything on the floor.
While he was still frowning, Dennis came, snatched the tray from in front of him and said, “Lead on.”
Laughing, he hobbled his way forward so he was out on the deck again. Dennis placed the tray on the table in front of him and said, “Enjoy.”
He disappeared without giving Finn a chance to even say thank-you, but he called it out anyway. Just because Dennis couldn’t hear it didn’t mean Finn didn’t need to thank him for the help. He laughed because he figured that was also something that Fiona would agree with. That thought uppermost, he tucked into his breakfast and settled back with his coffee. He was thinking a refill would be really nice, but it was too damn far away. He watched as some other guy walked with a tray, while on two crutches and talking to his buddy. Amazingly the man made it to his table, sat down and never spilled a drop. Finn shook his head in amazement.