“What?” I asked him.
“This is bad.”
“What’s bad?” I said.
“When you’re at five hundred milliliters, we have to drain you.”
“What am I at?” I asked.
“Over a thousand.”
No comment.
“Just let me do it.”
“No.”
“Please. I have to do an IC. I have no choice.” He was pleading with me, but I didn’t care.
“Get someone else.”
Amazingly, Archie left the room. A few minutes later, Ethel showed up. She moved like a slow yawn. Maybe they had drawn sticks at the nurses’ station to see who would get stuck with me. Ethel had lost. She snapped her latex gloves on, then tried to turn on the light clamped to my bed.
“It doesn’t work!” I screamed. I didn’t care if I woke up my roommate on the other side of the curtain. “Just turn on the big light, the big light!”
I couldn’t remember the word for overhead. Ethel stopped what she was doing to get a better look at me. I immediately shut up. The pain in my bladder was so extreme, I couldn’t afford to have her leave. But I also felt sorry for her: Who could possibly like working the graveyard shift and being yelled at by a pregnant lady who wasn’t even pregnant?
“Please,” I begged her, in my softest, most-likely-to-be-mistaken-for-sane voice. “Please, just turn on the big light and do the IC. The other patient won’t wake up, I promise,” I said.
She didn’t say a single word. I searched her eyes for some kind of softness as she inserted the catheter, but she just looked forward at a spot high above my head. We both listened as an endless stream of my pee poured into the big square of hospital-issue Tupperware; I filled it to the very top. She took the catheter out and pulled my Depends back up. Then she lifted the Tupperware with two hands, grunted, and left. No temperature check, no blood pressure check, no “good night.”
But just like that, my mood, as well as my entire body, felt eight pounds lighter. I loved everybody again—even Ethel.
“Thank you so much!” I called out, but she was gone.
4
Forgetting (How to Be)
Even though I didn’t like anyone touching my bed, I also didn’t want to be left alone. Ever. My body was a stranger to me, a scary stranger, so I made sure that I had company almost all the time. My guest list was a tightly edited group: my two best friends, my two children, my two sisters, my two parents, and Rich. But on one particularly wretched Sunday morning, five or six days after my surgery, my acting agent unexpectedly appeared outside my room. Rich and I both yelled, “No!” when we saw her. Poor Jennifer backed right out, but not before glimpsing how small and unkempt and sad I was. Although Jennifer and I had enjoyed a great working relationship for eleven years and often spent as much time talking about our families as we did about my future employment, I would never dare make an appearance at my agency without projecting my potential as the fittest forensic psychiatrist/vice principal/assistant DA/mother with a dark past/uptight librarian ever. Jennifer’s surprise visit forced Rich and I to close ranks. My husband became not only my tear wiper and social convener, but also my bodyguard.
That same afternoon, my son Henry asked, “Can I lie down next to you?”
I was fine with this, but Rich wasn’t. I think he thought my body parts had been replaced with glass.
“I have an idea,” Henry said. “You close your eyes and I’ll poke you and you tell me if you can feel it.”
“All right,” I said brightly, as if this were a great idea. “Go for it.”
I snuck a quick peek at Joey before closing my eyes. He was staring into his phone, pretending he wasn’t sitting in a hospital room where his mother was lying in bed in the middle of the day. Henry started high up, poking me around my rib cage.
“Felt it!”
I tried to shift higher up the bed as I realized I still hadn’t worn a bra since I’d been there. I couldn’t imagine how I ever would again. Where would the bra sit on my back? Would it snag on the staples? Were the staples there permanently? How many staples were there? I couldn’t ask, wouldn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.
“Mom? Didn’t you feel that?”
“Of course I did!”
I had no idea what he had just touched.
“I’ll go lower,” he said.
“Sure!”
I started cheating, opening my eyes just a touch to gauge where he was poking. I could see he was poking my left thigh, which I still couldn’t feel, still couldn’t understand where it was.
“Scoot around to this side, honey.”
“Why?”
“I’m just more comfortable with you on my right side.”
He considered climbing over me in bed but quickly got down and walked around when he saw the look on Rich’s face. He snuggled back in.
“Keep going,” I said.
He poked my right leg above the knee.
“I fully felt that!” Oh, thank the heavens, I really did.
There was no activity for a few seconds—at least none that I could feel.
I opened my eyes. Henry was looking at me expectantly. Oh, no. I must not have felt what he touched. I was saved from having to explain myself when the doctor came in on his rounds. He politely asked Henry to move so he could examine me. Henry jumped off the bed, grabbed a pencil from my tray table, stabbed my foot, then flopped into a chair and looked hard at the wall.
“Henry!” I said, shocked. “Did you just stab me?”
He dropped his little head in his hands. “Oh, thank God you felt that!”
•
During daylight hours, no one knew which me they would get when they walked into my room. In a way, I had never felt more alive. I was okay. The worst hadn’t happened. I hadn’t died. I wasn’t paralyzed. I focused on all the good things: my back was ravaged yet intact; I still couldn’t tell where my feet were but I could see with my eyes that they were there; my stomach was horribly bloated but I had no appetite and was barely eating so surely it would go down eventually. I was incapable of turning over in bed or pulling myself up or sitting without assistance, but that couldn’t possibly be considered unusual after spinal cord surgery, could it? A lovely halo of positivity followed me wherever I went, which wasn’t far. I had heard stories about people becoming hyper—or manic—after surgery. My mother’s friend, after a hip operation, was caught having an intense conversation with two belts. I wasn’t quite that far gone, but I was indeed coasting on a high—possibly facilitated by the lingering effects of the anesthesia, plus the morphine, or maybe the switch to oxycodone or the switch again to Percocet. People around me reasonably expected me to feel upset and scared all the time, afraid for my future self. But I’m happy, I wanted to tell them, you have to believe me. From where they were standing, I didn’t seem to be the most reliable judge of my own happiness.
At any given hour, I might bawl my eyes out, hyperventilate, laugh hysterically, go bananas over the deliciousness of a peach, weep with love for my children, marvel at the softness of my pajamas, hide my eyes from the sight of everyone, gossip about my roommate with whom I barely spoke, or flirt with Dr. Ginsberg. One day, when Dr. Ginsberg came to see me, I asked him, “So, will I ever walk again?” My overall dopiness made the most serious question I had ever asked another human being sound as nonchalant as an inquiry into the weather.
Dr. Ginsberg raised his hand and then slowly lowered it as if he were pushing down a French coffee press—measured, careful.
“I feel,” he said slowly, “very confident”—pressing a little lower—“that there will be a good”—a little lower still—“outcome.” It wasn’t the definitive answer I was hoping for, but I was just woo-woo enough not to notice. Any signs of bad news merely floated over my head like tiny little opalescent bubbles, easily popped and forgotten.
And then there was the washcloth incident.
Because virtually every bit of business was conducted from my bed—m
y ICs, eating, examinations—it also meant I did my morning and evening ablutions there. Rich gallantly took on these duties. In the morning, he would bring the bone-shaped plastic tray to my bed and hold it under my chin while I brushed my teeth, and then bring me a glass of water so I could swish and spit into it. (I only spat on his hand once.) He would also bring a little dish of soapy water and a scratchy hospital washcloth for me to wash my face. But one day, he had a surprise for me.
“You are going to be so happy,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“I found the best washcloth ever.”
“Okay.”
He pulled it out of his bag. “Check it out!” he said. “Touch it. Seriously, just touch it. It’s the softest thing you’ve ever felt, right?”
I looked at it for a long time. It was orange. I touched it. It was soft and nubby.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“That’s the best part! I found it right under the kitchen sink! I don’t know why I’ve never seen it before. Or why it was there. Actually, why do you put the washcloths under the kitchen sink?”
“Rich!” I yelled. “This isn’t a washcloth! It’s a Swiffer! I use it to clean the goddamn floor!” I threw it at him. He stood there, holding the Swiffer washcloth, looking confused. “You almost made me wash my face with a shmata!” Then I burst into tears.
But something quickly changed. I had been so certain that crying was the right response to this terrible situation; however, when I looked at Rich again, I saw that he was trying not to laugh, which made me laugh, and then we both couldn’t stop laughing.
“But you have to admit,” he said, “it is pretty soft.”
At night, I found very little amusing. Often, I would slam into wakefulness. It was always the same routine: I would throw off the covers in a sweat, wondering where my legs were. Gone. Meanwhile, the right foot—also the same size and shape as mine—would be painfully wedged between the food tray and the bed. “Stay,” I’d tell my left foot while I pulled the dead weight of my right foot back to bed and gave it a stern warning: Now don’t move.
No sooner would I position my left leg than it would wander off again like it had had its bell rung one too many times. As strange and frustrating as it was to play this game of hide-and-seek with my own body parts, when the sun came up it seemed a lot funnier. When Rich and my parents arrived for their daily duties, I would report on all the places where I’d found my feet in the night. They would listen and laugh, but I could tell they didn’t find my stories as funny as I did. They were scared. And the truth was: So was I. None of us knew what the endgame was.
One evening, my cousin Joel came to check on me long after visiting hours were over. Somehow he’d managed to skip right past Rich’s bodyguard presence in the hallway. He whooshed the curtains open around my bed and threw the covers off my legs.
“Joel!” I yelled. “You can ask first!”
He stared at my cockeyed feet.
“Let’s see you walk,” he said, pulling up a chair at the end of my bed, ready for the show to begin.
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean you ‘can’t’?”
“What do you mean what do I mean? I can’t walk.”
He sighed, then stood up again, raised his hands, palms facing my feet. “Press them against my hands and start bicycling.”
I lifted both my legs at the same time, ignoring the ripping sensation down my spine, and concentrated hard on getting them to stop waving around. After an alarmingly long time, I got both feet onto his palms. That was it. I had to stop for a breather.
“Move them,” Joel commanded.
“I need a minute!”
“Go!”
My feet moved like the wheels on a wonky grocery cart.
“Oh,” I said. “My God.” It was the first time I realized how bad my coordination was.
A shadow moved across Joel’s face. He understood something I didn’t.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s why you can’t walk.”
“Why?”
“Proprioception.”
“Huh?”
“Your legs don’t know where they are in space.”
This made no sense to me. And then, just like that, it was the only thing that made sense to me. It answered the question my body had been asking for months: Where the fuck are you?
“Will it go away?” What I meant was: Will my legs ever know where they are again?
He thought about this, a few possibilities running through his mind. “We’ll see,” he said. “You’ll be in rehab longer.”
Longer? Longer than what? Word had come down: A room was available at Lyndhurst. Some paperwork needed to be done, arrangements for transfer made, and in two or three days I would be leaving. But how much longer was I going to be away from my family? How long, exactly, would rehab take? I didn’t ask. Instead, I squeezed my eyes shut and took a second to shove the panic back down my throat. “I don’t quite get this.”
Joel sighed.
“The tumor was sitting on your proprioceptive nerve, which is the nerve that tells your body where it is in space. It’s like the other sense, the sixth one.”
My legs and feet had amnesia. I could only assume my bum was in the same boat.
“But there’s good news,” Joel said. “Didn’t I tell you that if you were able to move your toes after surgery, everything would be okay?”
“That reminds me. One doctor who does rounds—not my beloved Dr. Ginsberg,” I told Joel. “I can’t remember his real name so I just refer to him as Dr. Asshole.” Villains were hard to come by at St. Mike’s—if they were there at all—but I needed one. I chose him. “Anyway, he does the toe test on me every morning. I close my eyes and I have to tell him if my toes are moving up or down. I have no clue. I fail every time. It’s like grade-eleven math all over again.”
I was more disturbed by this than my light tone suggested. Although I saw my toes moving, I couldn’t actually feel them moving.
“I texted Howard.” Joel said.
“During my surgery?”
“Right after. I’ll show you.”
He came to the side of my bed and scrolled through their many text exchanges. Most if not all the texts revealed my cousin’s need to know if my toes were moving, his messages taking on greater urgency as time went on. Well? Are they moving? Yes or no? Are they? I could feel the tension in Dr. Ginsberg’s replies. I don’t know yet. She hasn’t woken up, Joel. They could have been college students tracking the progress of a friend whom they were responsible for getting hammered the night before. I looked up at my cousin. He was four years older than me and more than a foot taller. He didn’t always have patience for people, but for some reason he has always had a soft spot for me.
“You were worried about me,” I said.
He put his phone back in his pocket and sat down as if he hadn’t heard.
•
After I’d spent four or five days in the hospital, almost all of it lying down, Dr. Asshole told me I needed to start spending more time out of bed, sitting up. So one morning, when my sister Karen and my girlfriend Sheryl came to visit, I sat up. Karen had just finished telling me that, as per Rich’s and my request, she had found and interviewed a wonderful nanny named Ellen who was willing to help the boys and Rich at home, and could start right away. I was so relieved to hear this. Ellen would pick up Henry from school and be there to make dinners and clean up and hang out with the kids until Rich returned from work. I wanted to find out more, but sitting was hard work. I was feeling light-headed and clammy. Karen and Sheryl were talking about something and I was trying to listen, but I felt sweat dripping from my neck and back. There was a massive dead spot on my spine where I felt nothing. I needed to lie down, but didn’t want to interrupt the conversation. The buzzing in my entire lower half was relentless. I glanced at my phone—I’d been sitting up for only ten minutes, which was already eight minutes too long. I had the sense one of my f
eet—I wasn’t sure which one—was caught under something. One of my knees was waving. It was as if a beast was awakening under the covers.
“I have to lie down,” I blurted out. “I’m so sorry!”
Karen and Sheryl leapt to their feet and quickly flagged down a nurse who helped me back to bed. Visiting hour was officially over.
Each day after that, I was able to sit up a little longer, until finally, Rich took me for my first walk outside. I hadn’t felt the sun on my face since before I came into the hospital. That was near the end of August. It was now the end of the first week of September. Normally I hide from the sun, having taken all the warnings about its treachery firmly to heart, but on this day I rolled along with my face tipped rebelliously upward. The sidewalks were bumpy in a way I’d never noticed before. The plan was to get to the diner diagonally across from the hospital, but the streetcar tracks proved prohibitive. We took the road straight ahead, with Rich clumsily negotiating my wheelchair over all the cracks and curbs. We felt like champs when we finally reached the glassy café. There were two charming little tables out front. Rich parked me in the sun, but there was still a slice of shade to dip into if needed. I was showing Rich how I could move my ankles up and down. My right foot looked pretty straight, but my left foot veered out like there was something it really needed to see over there.
Next to our table was a young woman. She looked like she might have been a street kid once. She was wearing oversized button earrings, the kind that enlarge the hole to frightening proportions; a horseshoe ring through her nose; pink hair poking out from under her little po’boy cap; and a patchwork maxi dress. Her sad, tidy father was with her, drinking his Starbucks and smoking the last bit of his cigarette.
“I’m just watching what you’re doing,” she said. “That was exactly what I used to do. Are you going to Lyndhurst for rehab?” she asked.
“I am.”
“Oh, you’re going to absolutely love it!”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m going to love going home.”
Walk It Off Page 5