Amanda nervously played with her bangs while she tried to figure out how to respond. I could tell she was growing out her hair but was stuck in that middle stage where it was long enough to fall into her eyes but too short to tuck back behind her ears. She kept brushing her bangs aside anyway—her tiny act of futility somehow like my own.
“Amanda,” I said, once the lump in my throat had safely retreated. “Here’s what I think maybe we should do: just one thing at a time from now on, okay? I see now that it’s the only way this walking thing is ever going to work out for me. If we work on one tiny thing at a time.”
Amanda nodded her head, relieved. I suspected this was her plan all along before I decided to push my half-baked agenda on her. I looked at Neil and his patient again. He was bouncing on his toes. His patient looked like he had packed it in for the day.
“So that’s okay with you?” I asked.
She nodded again. I didn’t want her to think I was angry. I just needed to press the reset button. I smiled at her and she smiled back. We were now on the same team.
•
I thought that by the end of my first week at Lyndhurst, I had met all the staff members I was supposed to meet, but there was one more.
“Hello, Ruth! Can I come in?”
“Sure.” A man’s running shoes and wheels pulled up to my curtain as if my bedside were a parking spot.
He threw back the curtain with a ta-da flourish. He was younger than me, handsome, confident. I saw a folder on his lap, an official name in block letters across the top.
“I just wanted to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about the Canadian Paraplegic Association. I’ll listen to your story and maybe I can tell you mine.”
A silence followed while we sized each other up. His eyes darted over me like he was connecting the dots.
“You look really familiar to me,” he said.
Perspiration bloomed above his eyebrows as if I had called it forth.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Kellan.”
Instinctively, I thought: Be polite, don’t encourage, find the nearest exit.
I didn’t think my story was any of Kellan’s business and I resented his casual presumption that I had arrived at some sort of higher ground where I could look back with clarity on what had led me there. But there were steps I had to follow to get him to leave, so I did what was required of me, moving speedily from tingles to tumor to Lyndhurst. Then, sticking to my first rule—be polite—I asked with dread, “How did you get here?”
“Eighteen years ago, I started to have this recurring dream that a tree fell on me. I ignored it for as long as I could—after all, it was just a dream. But I found myself thinking about it too much during the day. It was affecting my school work, everything. So I told my mother, who reassured me that a dream is just a dream. My parents were building a cottage in a heavily forested area. We had a bunch of acres; it was going to be their dream retreat. My brother and I went up north with my dad to do some clear cutting. My dad and I hacked away at this one tree. The law of gravity dictates that when you cut it one way, it will fall the other way. I saw the tree falling toward me, but I wasn’t fast enough, even with my father screaming at me to run.”
The parts of my body that weren’t buzzing were shivering.
“Anyway,” Kellan said, “I’m paralyzed from the waist down.”
That could have been me. I could have been paralyzed from the waist down.
In spite of my rule not to ask any questions, I asked: Exactly how many times did you have this dream? Had you ever cut down a tree before? Did the doctors ever lead you to believe that you’d walk again?
I, too, had had a premonition of something bad befalling me, but I wasn’t about to admit that to Kellan. Before my very first appointment with Dr. Bright to discuss my tingly feet, I had become increasingly paranoid about two back-to-back raffles I had won. I didn’t even care about the prizes; I had entered both raffles on a lark. The first win felt fluky, the second like an omen. They made me consider the other lotteries in my life, all of which I’d won—the guy lottery, kids lottery, friends lottery, career lottery. I had had to work hard to shake the feeling that something horrible was about to happen to me. The last thing I wanted was for Kellan to think he could recruit me to his Paraplegic Association just because I was in a hospital, lying down, with a wheelchair next to my bed. I am not a fucking paraplegic! I wanted to yell.
Instead, I blurted out, “Do you date?” Since the surgery I had been known to blurt out sexual non sequiturs.
“Sometimes.”
“How does that happen?”
“What? How does that work?” His voice pitched upward and his face reddened.
“Wait, what? I didn’t ask that! I meant how do you meet people?”
At St. Mike’s one day, within seconds of my parents arriving for a visit, I had wailed, “Rich will never have sex with me again!”
“Of course he will,” my bewildered father had said, a laugh falling out of his mouth in spite of his gross discomfort.
“He won’t he won’t he won’t!”
My mother had jumped in, maybe to save me but probably more so to save my father.
“Honey,” she said. “Nobody has ever loved someone as much as Rich loves you.”
“It doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter! I’ll never have sex again!”
“I would never ask a person that,” I mumbled to Kellan. Now we were both staring at our laps, as if we were praying, or working through a really tough math problem.
Then Kellan clutched his agenda tightly in his hands. Using the embers of his embarrassment to stoke his cause, he told me with great fervor about the Canadian Paraplegic Association. As he talked about the benefits and hidden joys of his club, I had a bone-chilling thought: Did he know something about me that I didn’t? Did he have access to my files? Was Dr. Ginsberg’s French-press vote of confidence at the hospital merely a way of delaying the truth—that my wandering legs would never ground themselves, that I would never walk again?
“Kellan!” I said, cutting off his spiel. “I appreciate you coming in . . .”
Rule number one—be polite.
“. . . but I don’t want to know about your services. I’ve got enough on my mind. I have no room for this, not one tiny scrap of room, Kellan.”
“I hear ya, Ruth. I understand. But would you be interested in membership?”
“Membership? Membership in what?”
He held up his folder like it was exhibit A. “The CPA.”
“No.”
“Can I ask you a few questions from my questionnaire?”
“Fine.”
He placed the folder on his still legs as if his lap was his de facto desk.
“Your date of birth.”
“Pardon?”
“When were you born?”
“June 7, 1965. Why?”
“Your address.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your address,” he said, evenly.
“Why on earth do you need my address, Kellan?”
“So we can send you material when you make the transition home in your wheelchair.”
I felt sick thinking of the words home and wheelchair in the same sentence. “No! Enough!” I turned away from him and looked out the window, where my people walked and laughed and chased dogs. “I’m not answering any more of your questions.”
He put the package on my bed and I swung back on him. “And by the way, I’m on TV, okay? That’s why I look familiar to you. I would normally say, oh, maybe we went to high school together, maybe we met in line at Costco, maybe we this maybe we that, but let’s face it—none of those things happened. You were watching TV and you flicked past my face scolding Billy Ray Cyrus or or or being some kid’s mother on some kid’s TV show and that’s where you saw me, okay? We don’t know each other.”
I turned back toward the window and instantly felt like an idiot. Maybe he had
seen me at Costco. The second I heard the curtain whoosh closed, I flung Kellan’s folder onto my windowsill where the CPA logo landed faceup.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. The following day, a new nurse tended to me. Young and super eager, her hands shook as she tried to attach the IC to empty my bladder. While she poked around looking for the right hole (“This has never happened to me before! I’m so sorry!”), she told me a feel-good story about a quadriplegic who had walked out of Lyndhurst.
“If he was a quad,” I asked, “what would I be considered?”
“Do you really want to know?”
I said nothing.
“An incomplete paraplegic.”
I looked steadily at her, preparing to fight her on this ridiculous assessment, but she was smiling at me with such unreserved brightness, I wondered if maybe she was a bit off.
“I have to tell you something,” she said, unable to hold it in any longer. “I’m a huge Degrassi fan!”
And then, perhaps to emphasize her point, she rolled me over and shoved a “magic bullet” up my bum.
•
“Touches.” In my previous life as an actress, “touches” were what you had right after lunch, and before you started shooting again—a quick go-over in the hair and makeup chair to ensure that you were camera-ready. But in this new context, “touches” meant a nurse squatting next to you while you sat on the commode, her face level with your thighs while you read, or tried to read, or played with your phone or wrote lists or otherwise made busywork to distract from the latex-gloved finger wrapped in the blue plastic square, like a finger ice cream cone, twisting up your bum to fish out a poo. It was a well-known fact (although I didn’t know this until months later, having stubbornly avoided all Internet searches regarding this subject) that for those with SCIs, walking is only slightly less difficult than regaining bladder and bowel function. My physiotherapy was rarely scheduled before eleven A.M. because “touches” sometimes required a full morning’s labor to produce results, if any. It was also why I forbade anyone from visiting before noon. Morning, I would tell people with a forcefulness no one dared question, was not the best time.
My rehab bathroom was three times bigger than my own doll-size one at home, and tricked out for even the most disabled resident’s use. Once “touches” were over, I would remain on the commode and then roll up next to the bathtub without actually getting into it. The bathroom floor sloped gently toward the center of the room so the water could run toward the drain. There were hand railings on all walls, a harness hanging from the ceiling over the toilet for patients who needed to be lowered onto it, emergency pull cords reachable from any place one might slip, a shelf beside the toilet that housed not just toilet paper but also the ubiquitous beige latex gloves and oversized squares of blue plastic.
Showering consisted of me sitting naked while Rumy washed my back, calves, and feet with the handheld showerhead, then passed it to me so I could wash all the body parts I was able to access on my own. I didn’t even try to pull in my stomach or sit up taller to make my breasts look less swingy—I couldn’t be bothered. Rumy would poke tiny holes in the silence with gentle chatter.
“My son got a job at the grocery store.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sobeys.”
“Ah. Which one?”
“Off Marlee.”
“Oh. I know that one.” In fact, Rich had developed a new routine since I’d been gone. He would take Henry to that grocery store a few nights a week to buy the boys all the things that I wouldn’t: sugary cereals, bacon, ham, Asian pears, Oreos.
“Henry loves that store,” Rich told me. “I love it, too.”
“I’m really glad,” I said, and I was, but it also made me miserable. Did anybody in my house miss me as much as I missed them?
Rumy wasn’t the kind to affect false cheer or to buoy me up with overly large smiles and useless platitudes. She gave me unspoken permission to be my miserable self when I wanted to. But the shower was an elixir. My feet, despite their lack of understanding in the up/down department, could still feel the difference between hot and cold, a lucky break that was rare among SCIs. The heat and the rush of water awakened all my joyous cells, cells that lay dormant until activated by very specific stimuli. They couldn’t always be accessed by visitors or by my kids or by unexpected gifts delivered to my room in elaborately bowed boxes, but the whoosh of water against my skin never failed to make me feel happy to be alive.
One morning, my occupational therapist, Heidi, made a rare trip to my room.
“Looks like Amanda is going to be away today,” she told me. “So I thought we could do something in the OT room instead. Sound good?”
“Fine. You might want to sit down.” I was in the middle of a battle with my shoes. “This could take a while.”
I always wore shoes to physio, although never during physio. I could barely reach over, reach down, grab the shoelaces, and then, once I had finally gotten my drunken left foot down and into the mouth of my shoe, I simply had to go on faith that it had hit bottom. The whole futile exercise frustrated me to the point of tears, but I had made the decision, many days earlier, not to cry in public anymore. Instead, I more or less panted like a porn star.
“There!” I said. My floaty feet were in and my laces tied. Heidi nodded her head slowly, impressed.
In the OT room, I transferred onto the plinth while she rigged some MacGyver-type contraption to help get me back on my feet. I thought occupational therapy was just for figuring out how to access your stove from a sitting position, or for introducing one to the wonders of long-handled back scrubbers, but not today. There was a pointer, a felt pen, a huge whiteboard, the plinth, and a chair. I felt like a contestant on a new game show: Wheelie of Fortune. While Heidi and her assistant set things up, I sat quietly. I rocked back and forth a little, stopped, rocked back and forth again, stopped. I thought: There’s something stuck on the back of my pants. It wasn’t painful or overly uncomfortable, but I wasn’t sure I liked it. I shifted, but the thing attached to my bottom shifted with me. I was growing increasingly aggravated. I slid my hand under my right butt cheek, but turned up nothing.
After watching me grope for a while, Heidi asked, “What’s going on?”
“I think there’s a pen in my pants,” I said. It felt long, narrow, kind of hard.
“I think it’s your bum,” she said.
“But it’s under my bum.”
“No, I think it is your bum. I think you just found your sit bone.”
She waited.
“I think your right butt cheek just turned on,” she said, spelling it out for me.
My right butt cheek was back! It felt weird, it felt foreign, but it was back. I rocked one way, then the other, giving my bum a hug from above. One butt cheek down, one more to go.
•
Each morning, I called home and spoke to Rich and the kids, got up to speed on the shape of their days, got off the phone and cried, endured my “touches,” and—depending on the results—cried again. After that, I would wheel around my room loading up my purse with supplies to ensure I wouldn’t have to look at any of the other patients: two pairs of sunglasses, a notebook and pen, a pencil for my Globe and Mail crossword puzzle, and an entertainment magazine. Packing my purse was easy; parking it on my lap, not. I would wheel a few feet and the purse would slide off. I would bend down (carefully, carefully), swipe it off the floor, then slap it back on my lap, then wheel a few more feet before it would slide off again. I would do the same thing over and over but expect a different result until I noticed one day that the strap on my purse was long enough to wind around the handlebars at the back of my chair. So that’s what I did, twisting painfully behind me to the right, then to the left, to sling my purse over the curved rubber knobs. But the strap was too long and the wheels of my chair rubbed up against the leather, which both slowed me down and gave my bag wheel burn. I unslung the bag from the handlebars and slammed it back down on my lap, then held
it in place with one hand while I wheeled forward with the other, switching hands every few feet to steer so that I didn’t end up spinning in half-baked circles like a dog chasing a squirrel. It was five weeks before I had my lightbulb moment: I needed a knapsack.
After enlisting Rich to purchase one for me, I realized I had another problem: My hands had become raw and blistered from pushing the wheels of my chair. A very good-looking staff member, who also happened to be a paraplegic, found me in front of the elevator one morning rubbing my hands. He had a suggestion.
“Get the leather gloves with the little balls on them. They have maximum grip.” He held out his gloved hands for me to see.
I was reluctant to ask Rich to find some for me—buying them felt like cementing my fate. I asked him what he thought a good alternative might be.
“What about Henry’s batting gloves?”
“But he’s going to need them.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Here, Mom,” Henry said on his next visit. “Try these.”
“Are you sure, honey?”
“Yep.”
They were his tiny white batting gloves with the snap enclosure around the wrist. They fit me perfectly. I wore them every day after that, and the blisters disappeared.
7
Step 2—Learn How to Have Sex Again
Time acquired elastic properties at Lyndhurst, collapsing, then stretching to unimaginable lengths. I didn’t know whether to be surprised at how quickly my new wheelchair had been made for me or aggravated at how long it took. While I counted everything—minutes in the bathroom, hours until lunch, seconds until the end of physio—the days themselves seemed to quickly vanish so that I wasn’t sure whether my chair had taken a lifetime to make or was made in record time.
Either way, when Heidi wheeled it into my room, eight or nine days into my stay, my first thought was, It’s so cute! Heidi and I assessed its merits like it was a new car. I wasn’t sure what was expected of me. Do I take it for a spin? Kick the tires? Inhale that new wheelchair smell? Upon closer inspection, it didn’t seem quite right.
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