Her father nodded when I spoke, as if I was the only person who understood why people went to rehab: not to love it, but to leave it.
“I guess you have a spinal cord injury, too?” she asked.
“Oh, no. Nothing like that.” I said. “I had this thing on my back but it’s gone now.”
She nodded. “They all have SCIs at Lyndhurst.”
I looked at Rich. “I’m sorry?” I said. “I don’t know what that is.”
“SCI,” she said slowly. “Spinal. Cord. Injury.”
My stomach reacted while my brain struggled to keep up. “But I don’t have one of those,” I said. “My problem is gone. I’m all better. Just, well, I can’t walk right now is all.”
“At Lyndhurst, they taught me how to walk again. But I can’t go very far. Just from, say, here to inside there.” She pointed with her head to the café beside us. Then she added with a triumphant smile, “I can’t feel my feet!”
I needed to get away from this girl. She kept talking. “You’ll probably get either Neil or Amanda for physio. I had Neil. He’s awesome. Physio is mandatory at Lyndhurst—no skipping! Everything else is optional. You can do yoga, go swimming, tons of stuff. You’ll love it!”
Like I was going to a country club for the wheelchair set. The phrase well-heeled popped into my head and then, just as quickly, no-heeled.
Rich picked up on my cues and rolled me back to the hospital, away from the punky girl and her sad father. Even though I couldn’t walk, had no control over my bladder or bowels, had trouble sitting up, needed painkillers, couldn’t keep track of my legs, and could barely feel my feet, I was fine. I was not an SCI person. The tumor was gone. I was obviously okay.
My happy story and manic phase were about to come to a crashing end.
PART TWO
next steps
5
My New Life in Rehab
After nine long days, I was finally leaving the hospital, but I couldn’t fathom how. I woke up early on the day of my discharge. Nurse Theresa washed me while I lay in bed and whimpered like a toddler. I just wanted to wash myself, standing up, in a shower, alone.
Rich was at home getting the boys ready for their first day back to school. Even though I hate making lunches, I would have given my left baby toe, which was now useless, just to assemble Joey’s baggie of cereals—the only lunch he has eaten for the last six years—and to make Henry’s nitrate-free roast turkey sandwich with Swiss cheese and mayonnaise. Would Rich remember to give them each a piece of fruit, and something salty and something sweet? It had been a while since I had left them an embarrassing note inside their lunchboxes on the first day back to school, but I would have made a point of it this year—Joey’s first in high school, Henry’s last in elementary.
While Theresa washed my hair, my thoughts circled back to just ten days earlier, the night before my surgery. Arrangements were made for the boys to sleep out, since Rich and I had to leave so early the following morning. While they were gone, I left them each a note on their pillow telling them how proud I was of them, how funny and smart they both were. I said that I loved them, but was careful to write it only once so as not to betray my own fears. I didn’t specify when I would see either of them again. As I wrote, I tried not to think of them at ages eighteen and twenty-five and forty. I resisted the urge to make any one sentence too heavy with meaning, even if the worst happened and I died on the operating table and they felt compelled to forever after carry my notes around, parsing each sentence for hidden meaning, asking over and over: Did she know she would die? And if she did, couldn’t she have said something more profound than, “Don’t forget your lunchbox at school”?
My hair washed, Theresa slowly dried it so as not to jostle me too much. I could have wept all over again at the gentle care she took with me, which led me to thoughts of Rich and how we had woken up in the dark the day of the surgery. I had taken a shower—what would be my last one standing up for a long time—then asked Rich to rub down my back with the two antiseptic sponges I had been given at the hospital the week prior—the incision area needed to be as clean as possible. I had dried my hair. No makeup, no moisturizer, no smile. Before we left the house I checked inside my purse to make sure the card I had secretly written for Rich was there. I grabbed my overnight bag, turned on the house alarm, and clicked the door shut. The drive downtown was quick and quiet. I sat hunched in my seat, all my muscles clenched. Rich sat as straight as I had ever seen him sit, his hands in the perfect 10-2 position on the steering wheel. In the parking lot, before we left the car, I put my hand over his.
“I wrote you a card. It’s in my purse.” I started to cry. “Don’t open it unless you have to.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said, squeezing my hand back but still looking straight ahead.
“Unless you have to,” I said again.
Once I was lying on the stretcher, things moved so quickly I scarcely had time to process. My clothes were removed upon arrival and transferred into a plastic bag marked “Personal Belongings.” Rich kissed me good-bye, as did my parents and sister Karen—my little sister, Jackie, was out of town keeping Henry distracted, while Joey was being distracted at my girlfriend Sheryl’s house. Rich kissed me again and then turned away and looked at the wall, his palms together, fingertips pressed against his lips.
“Honey, it’s going to be okay,” I said as they wheeled me into the OR, my arm stretching back behind me. “It’s going to be okay!”
In the OR, everyone was extremely busy. It was almost an excited atmosphere, expectant, like they were all waiting for the guest of honor at a surprise birthday party. The special guest turned out to be the neurosurgeon, Dr. Ginsberg. He came in last and stroked my arm. He smiled at me. That’s the last thing I remember.
And now Nurse Theresa was done with my hair. She busied herself tidying up my room, getting me ready for my transfer to Lyndhurst. I didn’t have much—just my “Personal Belongings,” which now included my bag, my notebook, and some magazines. I checked inside my purse to see what was left in there: my cell phone, an explosion of Kleenex, my lip balm, and the card I had written for Rich, unopened.
“Tell me your story,” I said to Theresa as she finished up. One thing I’d learned while being in hospital: no questions were off limits, even when—especially when—they were personal. The nurses couldn’t tell me when I was going to walk again or if I would ever feel my legs the way I used to, but they could tell me, under cover of night, that their partner was doing time for bringing cocaine into their home country but that he also never forgot their daughter’s birthday. They could tell me about their recent honeymoon. They could tell me how much they missed home and their families living so far away.
That day, Theresa told me her story. She was single, had previously worked as a nanny, had sponsored her sisters to come to Toronto, and wanted to go back to school. She asked me where I lived and when I told her, she clapped her hands with delight.
“I know that area so well!” she said. “I love the challah bread.” She pronounced it kalla. “And the ladies all run. They love to run. To be sexy!”
When the weather was good, I’d pop my headphones on and zip my cell phone into my jacket pocket and run along the Beltline. I passed dozens of other fit women who were running just as hard, maybe to get themselves into the dress they’d been coveting at Holt Renfrew, or to get the young barista they’d been coveting since their divorce, or to look fine for their high school reunion where they were sure to see the guy they had lost their virginity to. We all wanted different things, but we all wanted to look hot while we chased them.
Theresa left and two paramedics and a rolling bed appeared in my room. According to the weather icon on my phone, it was a hot one outside, but the men were still dressed in heavy gear. Their enormous boots announced: We are men and we are here to take care of you. In one swift motion I was transferred from my bed onto their wheeled one. I protested lightly when they put the seatbelt around my waist,
even though I was lying down.
“No need,” I said. “I promise not to hurl myself off.”
What I didn’t say was that my bum might have other plans, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. They joked with me, but the seatbelt stayed fastened. I looked straight up into their handsome faces and knew why women fantasized about paramedics. They had thick arms and good hair and easy smiles. I bantered with them in the elevator and kept it going while they transferred me into the back of the ambulance. I talked while they slammed the back doors shut. We drove out of the dark underground and into the light of day, and I blinked several times before I abruptly stopped talking. A massive knot had formed in my chest. I was terrified. Somehow, impossibly, I had grown used to being in the hospital. I knew what being in the hospital meant. I had a routine, I knew the nurses, I understood shift changes and IC protocol and who best to coax into washing my hair.
I had no idea what this next move meant.
I clutched my purse and pulled my chin down. I could see my chest bouncing with the effort not to start its staccato rhythm—a clear sign the knot was about to come loose, that the tears were about to come gushing out.
“Hey, Pete!” the paramedic on my left said, either ignoring or reacting to what was happening to me—I couldn’t tell which. “Remember that doctor in the synagogue last year?”
“The one who was having a heart attack but refused our help?” Pete said.
“Yeah, that one.”
Then Pete said to me, as if I hadn’t heard, “This guy was having a heart attack, wouldn’t let us help. His wife calls us from the synagogue, it was a big holiday, the one where everyone goes.”
“Rosh Hashanah?” I said.
Pete looked up at the ceiling of the truck, thinking. “The other one.”
“Yom Kippur?”
“Yeah! That one! So his wife calls nine-one-one, ’cause her husband’s not looking so good, and we get there and he’s a heart surgeon and he’s obviously having what we call a ‘walking heart attack’ and he refuses our help! We couldn’t even believe it, right, Kyle?”
“Unbelievable,” Kyle said, shaking his head.
I must have said something to trigger this story, but I couldn’t imagine what.
“Guys,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I really have to cry now.”
Kyle put his hand on my arm the same way Dr. Ginsberg had right before the surgery. It unlocked an even deeper well of tears inside me. I scrunched my face hard to stop them, but all the tears ran out. The guys looked down at their laps while I cried. The ambulance stopped frequently and turned easily and I had no idea where we were. The last time I had lain down in the back of a moving vehicle was when I was a little girl and my parents drove my sisters and me to Grand Island, New York, for a family weekend getaway. We never wore seat belts. We’d sprawl out in the backseat, feet all over each other, playing games.
The ambulance slowed down as it went over two speed bumps, and then came to a full halt.
“Well, Ruth,” Pete said, “this is where we leave you.”
They rolled me out the back and I heard the long steel legs of the gurney collapse and land with a little bounce on the ground. I was embarrassed to be entering any environment this way—prone, on a rolling bed, covered in a blanket, fastened into place, clutching my purse to my chest. As we entered the facility, I kept my eyes trained on the square tiles above my head, playing a game called: If I Can’t See Them Then They Can’t See Me. We moved as one unit—Kyle, Pete, and me—into an elevator and up to another floor where a battalion of people were standing by to greet me: a nurse, a doctor, a resident, my mom, Rich.
“Where am I?” I asked Rich.
“Lyndhurst.”
“I know, but where. Where is this?”
We were five minutes away from our very first house, which meant five minutes away from where the tumor likely first started to grow on my spine—slowly, masterfully, life-changingly. I was working so hard not to fall apart, I’m not sure I remembered my manners long enough to say good-bye to the paramedics or hello to this new set of medics. I briefly wondered why my mother was there and not my father, and then I wondered why my mother was there at all. Rich carefully helped me get settled into the wheelchair sitting right next to the gurney that the paramedics now wished to repossess. Perhaps to mitigate how overwhelming this transfer into a new environment was for me, I was directed first to the cafeteria to relax and get something to eat.
There were two big-screen TVs on the wall, one tuned to the Food Network, the other to CNN. An A-frame board stood inside the door with the day’s menu unevenly scrawled on it in yellow chalk. Four large windows surrounded the cafeteria but only two had a view to the outside, where I could see a gazebo that doubled as a smoker’s hut and a huge expanse of lawn intersected by paved walkways and scattered picnic tables. The other two windows overlooked the wide lobby with the truncated cafeteria that served chips and prepackaged salads and sandwiches for visitors and other bipeds.
My mother pushed me in the wheelchair. Even though the appropriate staff had my written medical story, they needed to assess me in person to see what kind of wheels I required. The chair I was given in the meantime was too big. The back was too high, the seat too high, the arms too high; I looked like a Lilliputian.
In the time it had taken me to be transported to Lyndhurst, the dregs of my post-surgery mania were fully flushed out of my system. There was no joy to be found. There was no funny. Nothing would ever be funny again. I regarded my legs balefully, as if I were locked in battle with them. I blamed them for being a couple of idiots and they blamed me for ignoring the distress flares they’d been firing for the five months prior to my diagnosis. I decided to end the détente right then and there. I gently lifted my legs, one at a time, and placed my feet on the footrest, taking the pressure off my thighs. Within seconds, they wandered off again without my noticing and the tips of my sneakers caught under the wheels, making the chair stop abruptly and my mother and I lurch suddenly forward. I clenched my jaw, reached down, and very deliberately put my feet back on the footrest. We pushed on.
There were only a few stragglers in the cafeteria. Lunch service was over but a man in a hairnet and a thick gold chain—I would learn that this was Neville—came rushing over to greet me. He strongly suggested that I order the stir-fry without even referencing the other lunch choices written on the chalkboard. He offered to get my mother a plate even though she was clearly a guest.
“I’m sure you would like to join your daughter,” he said, leaning forward with his hands behind his back like he was the maître d’ of a fancy restaurant.
“I absolutely would! Thank you so much!”
“It is my pleasure,” he said, and then added, apropos of nothing, “I also have apples if you would like to take them to your room after.”
My mother fussed to get my chair squared comfortably with the table.
“Stop it!” I snapped at her. “I can do it myself!”
Rich was on his cell phone in the doorway with his head down. I watched him approach our table, but he didn’t end his call.
Neville brought us our plates of food. I didn’t know what to make of them. There was soy sauce mixed with something orange seeping out from under exhausted-looking vegetables.
My mother made sounds of yumminess as she chewed and chewed. “This is really good,” she said.
I clunked down my fork and stared at her, but she wouldn’t look at me. I stabbed at my food without eating it. Rich veered away from us, still on the phone, pacing the room. His voice was getting louder and louder. I couldn’t figure out who on earth he was yelling at. Rich is a charmer. As a talent agent, he works hard to smooth feathers, not ruffle them. He has a deep, silky voice and an easy laugh, neither of which were on display as he crisscrossed the room, holding the phone away from his ear so he could yell directly into it. My mother looked alarmed; she’d never seen this side of Rich.
“He needs to yell at someone,” I said.
“So let him yell.”
I went back to stabbing my food.
Once lunch was finished—or, in my case, abandoned—my mother wheeled me to my room. I had a roommate who spoke no English and shuffled across the floor to the bathroom at the speed of a sloth, leaning heavily on her walker. I was as mesmerized by her slowness as I was scared of it.
“If you close the curtain around your bed, it’s like you’re in your own private room,” my mom said, in a sunny-side-up voice.
“I am not living with a curtain around me!”
I had requested a private room, but only two were up for grabs in my unit and both were taken. I should have felt grateful that I had a room at all—there was a long list of people waiting to get into Lyndhurst—but I was miserable and ready for a fight. A pink-scrubbed nurse with matching pink lipstick and white hair came to take my blood pressure and sift through my medical details. I tried to be friendly, but she seemed even less interested in me than I was in her.
“Well, she was a cold fish,” my mother said when the nurse had left.
I tried to work up some anger to defend the cold fish, but settled instead for some wordless snarling.
My roommate began another slow shuffle around her bed and I clenched my fists to my mouth.
“Close the curtains, please,” I ordered my mom, and she jumped out of her chair to do it. “All the way.”
My mother read quietly beside me. I’d been horrible to her all day. It was best for both of us if she stayed close but also stayed quiet.
How was this going to work, I wondered? Although it felt like I had been at the hospital forever, it had been only nine days—just a short enough time to make the staff think I was (almost) always happy. But with those giddy morphine days behind me and an indefinite stay at Lyndhurst looming, there was no getting around the seriousness of my circumstances. I was already feeling responsible not only for my mood but for the mood of my nurses, my worried parents, my kids, Rich. Their good days would be dependent on my good days.
Walk It Off Page 6