I searched my bag, found the three pictures that Henry had given me, and put them in my lap. There was one of Joey, looking away from the camera, hands on his hips in a superhero pose, a spectacular view of Machu Picchu behind him. There was also a picture of the four of us, sitting on a bench in a square in Cusco. I was wearing the jeans that had made my legs feel ravaged; you couldn’t tell from the photo how uncomfortable I was. The last picture was of Rich and me, his arm around me, holding fast, as if I might fall back onto the ancient Inca steps behind us if he let go. We both look tired but happy. I found it hard to look at these photos.
Moments later, the doctor came to see me. She introduced herself then sat in a chair at the end of my bed. I pulled the covers a little more tightly around my legs. They were buzzing so crazily, they blocked out all other sensory perceptions. I couldn’t even tell if I was wearing pants. She saw my pictures.
“You were in Peru,” she said.
I nodded.
“My husband and I went,” she said, “before we had kids.”
“That’s nice,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about Peru. I blamed Peru for my current situation. Peru, with its leg-stealing Inca Trail. I hated Peru.
“Did you get altitude sickness?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I told the doctor. “The altitude got to me.”
“Did your husband get sick, too?”
I shook my head.
“Mine didn’t, either. I’m in way better shape than him but I couldn’t keep up. I brought a ton of pills in case this kind of thing happened to him, thinking it would never happen to me. But when it happened to me, I refused to take the pills.”
I had also refused to take the altitude pills. But I didn’t tell the doctor that.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. “Coca tea! Coca tea!” I remembered the Peruvian cook call the morning after we had climbed for seven hours. I lay awake in my tent, searching wildly for my legs. My gloves snagged in my haste to rip the zipper off my sleeping bag. I shook my head to shake off the dream that had obviously broken through the gossamer screen between asleep and awake, but still, even as my eyes stared at my legs, my brain could not fathom where they were. I punched them, pounded my thighs hard enough to make my feet bounce off the ground until, it seemed, from memory alone, I was able to get them to stand up and walk out of the tent.
“Are you eating?” the doctor asked.
“I guess.”
We ate quinoa porridge in Peru, so thin and milky it was more drink than food.
“Do you feel pain?” asked the doctor.
In Machu Picchu town, my rib cage had felt encased in a corset two sizes too small.
“Yes, I have pain,” I told the doctor.
“On a scale of one to ten, how great would you say the pain is?”
“Let’s just say six.”
“Where do you feel the most pain?”
“My back.”
“Trouble sleeping?”
I couldn’t sleep at the hotel. They had mistakenly put us in twin beds. “Can’t move my back, Rich. Can’t move my back!” He woke up and gave me a Tylenol with codeine and told me to try to relax.
“I can sleep,” I told the doctor.
“Trouble waking up?”
“No.”
“So how are you feeling, generally speaking?”
I looked up, finally, at this petite, well-dressed woman in the chair at the end of my bed. Why, I wanted to ask her, did everyone always sit at the end of my bed several feet away from me? Even my own feet didn’t want to be around me.
“Are you asking me if I’m depressed? Is that what all your questions are leading to?”
She smiled at me as if she had known me forever and knew how I “could get.” I was not in the mood for being charmed or charming.
“What’s your name again?” I had met so many doctors and nurses I stopped pretending to remember their names.
“Dr. Zimcik. The ‘c’ is silent. I totally should have changed my name.”
“Dr. Zimcik, would you be depressed if you found out in the middle of your life that you couldn’t walk?”
She smiled at me, and then just as quickly dropped the smile when she saw the look on my face. “Yes, I would.”
“I’m not depressed,” I said.
“Good.”
“Were you going to suggest I take something?”
“Only if you thought you needed it.”
“I don’t.”
She held up her hands. “Okay. Just checking.”
“Sorry—what kind of doctor are you again?”
“I’m the GP here. I specialize in the general care of spinal cord patients.”
“I see.”
“I’ll be checking in with you every day.” She got up and stood right next to me. “You can ask me anything you want.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, okay, Ruth?”
She squeezed my shoulder as she left and paused for a moment as if she wanted to say something more. Without knowing a thing about me, Dr. Zimcik made me feel like I was still the same person I was before. All she had to do was say my name.
6
Step 1—Learn How to Walk
I didn’t know who my first visitor at Lyndhurst would be, but the last person I expected to see was one of Rich’s clients, barely more than an acquaintance of mine. Aaron burst through my closed curtain carrying a giant vase of flowers that fully obscured his face. As I pulled my blanket up to my chest—taking note of the lax security situation—he plopped the vase on my windowsill and then leaned both his hands on the end of my bed like he was giving his calves a good stretch.
“Rich told me you weren’t seeing any visitors, but I was in the neighborhood, so.” He shrugged. “I came by.”
As far as what visitors I would allow, it essentially came down to this: I would only see people I could fart in front of. From that perspective, the list was pretty long. But Aaron was not on this list. And because he was not, our visit quickly became exceedingly uncomfortable. As he talked, I writhed on the bed, my legs flopping this way and that, my fists occasionally pounding the mattress, trying to clench my bum, which was virtually impossible. Even with the tumor gone, I had to concentrate extra hard to figure out where my bum actually was.
“Aaron it’s been really great to see you thanks for the flowers they’re beautiful you have to go.”
As soon as he left, I called Rich.
“I need a bodyguard.”
“Oh, no. Who came?”
“Aaron.”
“What?!”
“Yeah.”
“I just got off the phone with him half an hour ago telling him not to visit.”
“It didn’t work, but I have some good news. I’ve been moved to a private room.”
“You got a private room and Aaron saw it before me? That’s just great.”
Rich had worked so hard with my actors’ union to secure me a private room in the (unlikely) event of a long hospital stay. If I raised my bed to a full sitting position, I could see perfectly out the south-facing window that looked onto a huge, dewy green lawn with a tantalizing glimpse of the ravine below. The grass was largely taken over by hyper dogs and their less-hyper owners. I have never been a dog person, but I made myself zero in on the movement of their quick furry legs as keenly as I studied the legs of their owners. My view would serve as an endless documentary on the mechanics of walking. It made me realize how much of my comic life, as both an actor and a civilian, had been tied up in the way I moved—with my hands and feet providing the bulk of my physical humor—but since my feet had gone rogue, try as I might, I could find nothing funny in their absence, so I looked out the window and took notes.
In those first few days at Lyndhurst, I was overwhelmed with visits from varying hospital staff. Dr. Zimcik, my new GP; Dr. Emm, the physiatrist who treated a variety of medical conditions affecting the spinal cord and nerves; the quiet, young resi
dent chaplain; a social worker. They each had a very specific role to offer in my recovery if I chose to access their services. Because the only question I had for any of them was the only one I knew they couldn’t answer, I barely said anything at all.
When will I walk again? Will I ever walk again? When will I walk again? Will I ever walk again? When? Will? When? Will? When?
I met my primary nurse, Rumy, on my second day there. I assumed I was not the first patient at Lyndhurst to take gait-studying to a whole new level, but I might have been the first one willing to trade in my old, very serviceable walk for a new one, and the walk I wanted was Rumy’s. Her hips moved as if she were walking the shallow end of a pool—slow and languid—and she never rushed no matter how rushed she was. I wondered, if I learned to walk again, would my body naturally go back to the gait it had before or would the slate be wiped clean? I was concerned that the answer to that question was contained in my bum, which was now, as my son Joey so succinctly put it, a dumb-ass. My nervous system, from my belly button down to my baby toes, was firing madly but on different cylinders, my circuitry board having been rewired by a clown. I tried to picture my gait before all this happened, but I could only visualize myself in exaggerated moments: crouched low when my children were little, holding out my arms for them to come to me; affecting a model’s walk when prancing around the house in a new pair of heels; sliding across the tile floor, in socks, surfer-style, to answer the front door. I told Rich how my greatest wish was to somehow unearth a video of me walking the way I did before all this happened.
Joey was the first to let me in on a little secret.
“Uh, Mom? Haven’t you done like a few hundred episodes of TV? You think maybe you walked in any of them?”
Right! I could search YouTube, but it felt too soon. I wasn’t ready to see myself as I once was.
On our first meeting, Rumy asked if I could transfer from my wheelchair to the bed by myself. Every time I was asked a question that began with “Can you,” I felt a rush of petulance followed by a sour stream of anger. At St. Mike’s it was the same thing: Can you put your shoes on? Can you sit up? Can you tell me if your toes are moving up or down? My first thought before I opened my mouth was always: Are you people a bunch of fucking idiots? Or worse: Do you think I’m a fucking idiot? I thought Rumy would be different. What person couldn’t get from their chair to their bed without help? In the interest of starting off our relationship on the right foot, I swallowed my impulse to answer imperiously.
“I think so, yes,” I said, with just the right amount of shyness and deference. Now watch this.
I held on tightly to the arms of my chair for leverage, then pulled my weight up, shifted over (so far, so good), then collapsed right in between the narrow space between my bed and the chair.
“Oh dear! Hold on!” Rumy said, then ran to get help.
While I clung to the space between the floor and the chair, using all the strength I could find, I thought of the neurologist Dr. Shure’s fascination with my string-bean arms. When pressed into action, they proved stronger than the rest of my body put together. Rumy returned with another nurse and a four-foot-long wooden board to facilitate the transfer from my chair to the bed.
“I’m really sorry, Rumy,” I said, once I was safely on the bed, staring at my knees like a chastened child.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You’ll figure out how to transfer in no time.”
“I thought I could do it.”
“And you will be able to soon enough.”
“I keep forgetting why I’m here.”
•
Of all the people I met when I first arrived, the only name I really cared about was the one on my weekly schedule pinned to my corkboard, the one person I had no choice but to meet with five times a week for the duration of my stay: Amanda, my physiotherapist.
I remembered that the punky, highly pierced girl Rich and I had met outside St. Mike’s had told me her physiotherapist was Neil. She said there was another PT named Amanda, but that I should try to get Neil. I cursed my luck. The punky girl had told me how Neil made his patients walk up and down a steep hill in Sunnyside Park, behind the rehab clinic, as a condition of their discharge. I reveled in the image of me traipsing up a hill, my arms swinging, my legs steady and firm, sure of their place on the ground—Julie Andrews singing from the mountaintop, my whole face tipped toward the sky, triumphant.
My first few sessions with Amanda had an awkward feel to them, as if we were both trying to squeeze through a narrow doorway at the same time.
“I don’t understand how to walk,” I explained to her. “I can’t remember what body parts I’m supposed to be activating or in what order. I don’t know when to squeeze, when to lift, when to touch down. I don’t get it.” Then, I had an idea. “Amanda, would you mind walking across the room for me?”
Our bodies were very similar—both of us around five feet two, with the same smallish frame, but Amanda’s body was packed more tightly than mine. Her walk had a refreshing, clean feel to it—like a blade of grass. I was certain that studying Amanda’s gait would be easier than what I had been doing up to that point, which was watching YouTube videos of people walking around Manhattan, first at a normal pace and then in slow motion. I watched them over and over, pausing the video to take note of when a knee bent, where a foot landed, how the distance between the feet remained approximately the same after every step, how the walker looked around without veering off course. I was fascinated by each subject’s almost arrogant entitlement to space and of how easily he or she fit inside it. I would cross check what I was watching on my computer against the dog walkers and toddler chasers outside my window. Between my sessions with Amanda and my YouTube homework, I resolved to cobble my old walk back together again.
But I continued to feel as if I had been cheated somehow. Based on that one brief conversation with the punky girl, I was convinced that Neil was the best possible choice for me. I saw him in the PT room. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, even as I tried to absorb what Amanda was telling me. Neil was wiry and quick. I could practically feel the heat of his energy burning off him. That’s what I needed, I thought, someone who could whip me into shape in record time. Amanda’s energy, by comparison, felt too slow, too measured, too safe. I thought I might never get out of Lyndhurst if I had to work at her pace. So I started lying to her in order to jump-start my recovery.
“Can you feel the floor today, Ruth?” Amanda asked. I was sitting on the blue plinth, staring at my feet. They were complete strangers to me.
“My feet feel quite floaty at the moment!” I said, neatly sidestepping her question, too afraid to tell her that, no, I couldn’t feel the floor.
She was smiling at me, pleased—I think—that I could feel anything at all.
“That’s great, Ruth. Let’s get you up. I want you to hold on to my shoulders and I’ll hold your thighs.”
I watched as she gripped both of my legs with her small hands. “Can you feel that?”
“Sure!” I felt nothing.
“Great. Now I’m going to help you lift your right leg and place it on the plinth beside me so that you’re standing on just your left leg. Don’t worry, though—I’ve got you. Now, can you feel your left glute turn on?”
I squinted. “Wow! I think so!” My leg could have been wrapped around my head for all I knew.
Over the course of that first week, I realized something terrible: Amanda believed everything I said. Encouraged by my tone, which suggested my nerves were responding positively to all kinds of stimuli—touch, floor, fabric—she had an idea she thought might interest me.
“We’re going to get you down on all fours,” she said.
I felt a pressure in my chest, like I was being choked from the inside.
On a much wider plinth, one about the size of a queen-size bed, I got down on my hands and knees, swaddled on all sides by plastic-covered foam rectangles.
“So what’s going to happen h
ere?” I asked in my most raring-to-go voice.
The goal was simple enough: to remain in that position without tipping.
Meanwhile, across the way, Neil was bouncing around like a pogo stick while his patient alternated between smiling as if he was watching a circus act and frowning because he was the next performer up.
“I just want you to lift your right hand off the mat,” Amanda said, carefully, so as not to frighten me. “Not too far, just a bit, and balance on your other hand and your knees. Can you try that?”
“Of course!” My heart beat wildly. I can do this, I thought. The problem is not in my hands. I can feel my hands just fine, I can lift my hands, I’ve lifted my hands a million times before. My knees were wobbling like mad. I stared at my hand, begging it to rise up, but my brain refused to let it happen. My hand was afraid to come up, knowing that the rest of my body could not balance without its support. Come on, I told it. Just come up a little. I smiled at Amanda. She was very still, watching me patiently, giving me the space I needed to figure it out on my own.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe we can start with something else?”
“Sure, Ruth. No problem. How about you try lifting your left knee only. Not too high! Just a tiny bit off the mat.”
“Good idea. I can do that.” But I didn’t know where my left knee was. I looked under my chest and toward my legs, but that made me dizzy. I started listing. The lump in my throat grew larger. I knew I could squeeze out only one more sentence so I wanted to make it worthwhile. “I want to go back in my chair!” I wailed, before falling over.
Amanda moved swiftly—the fastest I’d seen her move—to get me comfortably seated again. I wanted to be the best student she had ever seen—the best student Neil had ever seen, so that maybe he could poach me away from Amanda. I looked over at Neil. He was leaping up and down like a frog while his poor patient watched, utterly confused.
“This is all my fault,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I ask questions, but I don’t understand the answers—or my body doesn’t. I know you’re trying, but I’m really confused. I need to take little sips, not giant gulps. I feel like I’m choking on information.”
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