Her careful phrasing plunged me to a new low. I knew the brain was the sexiest organ of the body, but the workload on my brain was heavy enough as it was. While I spent an inordinate, almost inconceivable, amount of time each day thinking about sex, none of those thoughts were remotely sexy. I was consumed with the most rudimentary mechanics of things, like a sixteen-year-old pondering the eventual loss of her virginity. Would it hurt? Would my nerves freak out? Would it feel the same? Would I feel anything at all? Meanwhile, the daily facts of my reality pretty much killed the indulgence in all things erotic. Every day, I got a paper cup full of pills. On alternate days I was given three milk of magnesia tablets, two laxatives, and a stool softener. I took two vitamin Ds because not spending sufficient time outdoors meant that I required sunshine in a pill; two Tylenol Extra Strength to get me over the hump between oxy doses; and six gabapentin for my nerves, although it was originally formulated to treat epilepsy, which confused me.
“As I understand it,” Dr. Zimcik explained, “and from what other patients have told me, the gabapentin turns down the noise in your body.”
So I wasn’t the first patient to register nerve confusion as noise.
No one could give me a straight answer as to what I could expect from my actual nerve recovery; it was impossible to pin down their erratic nature. Nerves fell into a completely separate category from muscle or bone, both of which followed a rigorous healing process that almost always guaranteed success. If muscle and bone are rule-followers, nerves are complete shit-disturbers. My body was in a constant state of surprise. Anything that touched my feet, for example, triggered a dramatic response so out of proportion to the alleged crime that I wanted to yell: They’re JUST SOCKS! It was almost unbearable to lie on my side, even though this was the best position for my back, because when my naked thighs touched each other, it was as if Woody Allen and Mia Farrow were being forced to hug. But while my thighs were enemies, my feet were Romeo and Juliet. No matter how much I tried to keep them apart, invariably they ended up snuggling, sometimes strangling each other in the sheets. And when my bum wasn’t feeling as if it had been exposed to a hot plate, it would go completely numb, so numb I would have to look down to make sure I was still wearing pants. I learned that nerves, while masters at rattling, were equally adept at playing dead. And it made me wonder: What else in me was dead?
There were so many concerns vying for first position on my list of priorities I sometimes didn’t know where to start, but every day I knew where to end—with a Google search. Sex and spinal cord injuries Orgasms and spinal cord injuries. Woman’s sex life after spinal cord surgery.
In my searches, I found a plethora of pages fueled by panicked women wondering what would become of their sex lives once spinal shock settled into spinal calm. I skimmed the words, zeroing in on the ones I thought offered the most hope, only to be disappointed over and over. Certain that they couldn’t all be pointing in the same disheartening direction, I would keep scrolling through the search engine until, one night, I landed on a YouTube video of a nurse practitioner named Dianne who had made a series of two-minute videos aimed at, well, me.
Dianne smiled warmly while she said there was no reason why I couldn’t have sex. This was a good start. Given the overwhelming number of articles on erectile dysfunction in men with SCIs, I counted myself lucky just to be a woman. But it was one thing to be able to do it, another entirely to feel it. Dianne continued to smile warmly as she told me that whatever sensation had been lost post-surgery from the site of injury on down would not return. My injury was at the T5 level. I had discussed this with Dr. Zimcik. I knew that T5 fit squarely in between my shoulder blades, but I wasn’t sure if it corresponded exactly with a spot on the front of my body.
“Right at the nipple,” Dr. Zimcik told me, holding her hands up in front of her breasts like they were being served on a tray. From my nipples down meant that fully three quarters of my body was sensitivity impaired.
“Oh,” I said. “That explains a lot.”
It explained why I would sometimes forget to take off my bra before I went to bed—my breasts, previously a huge issue in every way, were rendered a nonissue overnight.
“But the sensations will come back, right?”
“I don’t think that will, but—” She was quick to jump on top of her own sentence when she saw me starting to sputter. “Other things will, Ruth. Other things will come back.”
“I’ll never have an orgasm again!”
“I feel strongly that you will.”
“You don’t know. Nobody knows!”
“I’ve seen the numbers from your IC. You need the IC less and less and are able to pee on your own more and more. This is a very good sign.”
I just kept shaking my head, but Dr. Zimcik could tell I was listening, so she kept going.
“The nerves that control your bladder are very close to the nerves that control your sexual responses. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I shook my head.
“I feel very confident that once you’ve mastered one, you will master the other.”
I kept shaking my head.
“You have to give yourself a break, Ruth. Just give it time.”
I was done with giving things time, done with ceding control to the state of my nerves. Nerves were more than just a control panel on my spine; they were my chutzpah, and the time to exercise it was right now. Rich was going to Joey’s high school curriculum night the next day. I waited until I was pretty sure it was over and then I called him in the car.
“Hey, babe. Can you pop by here for a few minutes?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I waited for him to walk into the room before I made the bed go all the way down, then I switched off the lights.
“What’s going on?” he asked, knowing exactly what was going on.
“Come here.”
“There’s not enough room on that little bed for me.”
“I think there is.”
“Okay, Ru.”
He lay down beside me. We kissed for a long time, as if we were new to this, as if there was no possibility of going any further so we might as well make the most of it. He rubbed my back and I felt a little bit here, nothing over there, and then a little bit somewhere else. I thought he touched my bum, but I was wearing pajama bottoms and I couldn’t really tell.
“Go under my pants,” I said. “Ah, I can feel that.”
I felt like a teen in my parent’s house, making out in the living room while my mom and dad watched Barney Miller upstairs.
“Take off your pants,” I whispered.
“Ru . . . ?”
“Take off your underwear, too.”
I took off my pants and underwear, neither of which was easy to do or sexy to watch, I’m sure. Rich did the same and when he did, all his credit cards slid out of his wallet and onto the floor. He got back into bed without even looking at them and we pressed against each other. He smelled the same as always—an intoxicating mix of green jujubes and Diet Coke—and I kept inhaling him, hoping his smell might trigger something deeper in me. I pressed him against me so hard. I could feel him, but it was taking forever to trigger a response in my body. It was as if all my nerves had nodded off when what I actually wanted was for the noisier ones to shut up, not the whole damn system to shut down completely. I chose not to think about it. Through pure instinct, my spaced-out legs hooked over his legs and then his hips. They had done this move thousands of times; they knew where to go. I was proud of them. I had no idea where my feet were, however, until I felt them bang into each other and then pull apart, a little surprised at the force of their collision.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, let’s do it.”
“But someone could come in.”
“Rumy’s the only one around. The door is shut, the curtain is closed, she won’t come in.” I moved the call bell so I wouldn’t roll into it.
“Are you
sure?”
“Rumy told me I could have sex.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t hurt me.”
I concentrated hard on what Rich was doing. I put mental checkmarks into little boxes: felt that, felt that, not sure what’s going on there, ah—felt that. It wasn’t the same as before surgery, but then again, nothing was.
“Well, we did it,” I said after.
“That was crazy. Are we even allowed to do that in here?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
“I don’t care, either.” He kissed me on the forehead, then got out of bed, pulled on his jeans, and started picking up all his credit cards.
“It will be different now,” I warned.
“I know.”
“And I mean, why shouldn’t it be, right? How can things not change after a major life event like this? It’s silly—it’s naïve to think it won’t. I mean, look at us.”
We looked around my room. My windowsill held one vase of dead flowers and one vase of almost-dead flowers, plus five vases with no flowers and a long-handled shower brush that I never used. There were the three framed pictures of us from our trip to Machu Picchu taken in July, only two months earlier, and which I still found difficult to look at. There was a binder with MARSHALL on the side welcoming me to Lyndhurst, which I’d stopped reading after the first page. There was IC paraphernalia everywhere—catheters, blue felt squares, latex gloves, individually wrapped wipes—apples that I’d begun hoarding, Styrofoam cups, and a plastic pitcher that all patients had delivered to their room each morning along with their breakfast. The pitcher had a straw in it. I hated that. Who uses a straw to drink directly from a pitcher? Didn’t people just pour out what they needed into cups? And then I remembered that although my legs didn’t work, other people’s hands didn’t work, or their necks couldn’t bend, or, like young Jimmy next door to me, they were blind.
We were sitting on the edge of my bed. Rich was dressed and ready to go but not ready to go. We smiled at each other. Bet nobody else in this joint just did that, said the thought bubble between our heads.
“You should know something,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m telling Rumy.”
“Oh no no no you’re not.”
“I have to. She’s my nurse. I tell her everything.”
“Oh God.” But he couldn’t deny me. Rich has never denied me anything. “Then I’m gonna split before she gets back.”
“Okay, babe,” I said. “I’s loves ya.”
“Me, too.” Rich left, and I went to the bathroom and tried to pee. I couldn’t wait for Rumy to come back. I couldn’t wait to tell her. I also couldn’t wait to stand up and stroll over to the nurse’s station with my bags in my hands and say, “Ladies, you’ve been awesome, and I hope I never see any of you again.” Having sex made me even more impatient. Obviously, went my thinking, only walking people have sex. Ergo, I could walk. The race was on between joy over having had sex and a complete breakdown over not being able to pee. I gave up on peeing and wheeled myself over to the sink. Just then, Rumy came in. I watched her reflection in the mirror behind me. I could tell from the look on her face that she already knew.
“I had sex!”
“Right on!”
That night, I went to sleep so happy. The next morning, I woke up with a bladder infection.
8
Step 3—Standing Up for Myself
One morning, I opened my eyes to an epiphany so obvious I felt like an idiot for having taken so long to recognize it: I was homesick. I started crying. I waited for Rumy to arrive, but when I remembered it was her day off, I cried even more. I called Rich knowing he wouldn’t be able to talk to me—he would be getting himself ready for work and the kids ready for school—but I didn’t care. My need to be miserable with company was greater than my need to be a good wife and mother. When he answered the phone, I couldn’t even say hello.
“Babe,” he said, “I’m going to call you back the second I get in the car, okay?”
I nodded my head, as if he could see me, then hung up. I kept on crying until he called me back a half hour later and then reined it in once he put the kids on the phone, then continued crying after they said good-bye. I must have had a shower, although I don’t know who helped me with it, and I must have dried my hair and eaten my yogurt and taken my pills, but I don’t remember. It was eleven before I finally got dressed. The day was running away from me and I had accomplished exactly nothing except flushing a seemingly inexhaustible pool of tears. And then two familiar voices rang out from behind the curtain.
“Ruth? It’s Dr. Zimcik and Dr. Emm. Can we come in?”
I was sitting on my bed, my dopey legs hanging over the side. They felt so heavy they threatened to pull the rest of me down with them. I wanted everyone out of the room so I could continue with my full schedule of crying.
“How are you?” Dr. Zimcik asked.
“Okay.”
They both looked at me with doctorly sympathy.
“I’m having a bit of a moment,” I admitted.
Dr. Emm took one step closer to my bed. Her job, as far as I could tell, was Chief Tickler. She came to my room every few days with a feather and a safety pin and then alternately poked and tickled me to see how my nerves were progressing. She also performed the toe test. My job was to close my eyes and guess which direction my toes were being pushed or pulled; I got it wrong every time. But Dr. Emm didn’t have her tools with her that day, which made me suspicious.
“How is your bladder?” she asked.
I knew what was coming: They wanted me to do my own ICs. They stayed for a minute to explain that the risk of catching a urinary tract infection grew with the frequency of ICs administered by hands other than my own. Well, I wanted to say, the good news is that since I just recently had sex right here in this bed, I already have a bladder infection, so the joke’s on you! Instead, I pretended not to hear them. They continued to talk to me about bowels and bladders and voiding. I focused on Dr. Zimcik’s clothes. I loved how she dressed. Rarely a stitch of makeup but always the cutest tops that showed off her delicate collarbone, necklaces that hit just the right spot on her chest, belts that cinched without strangling, interesting color combinations, and, most inspiring of all, flat shoes that made me mourn a little less the fact that I would never be able to wear high heels again. There was lots of encouraging talk about how, once I was able to perform my own ICs, I could be cleared for a day pass home, but what they didn’t know was that I would never cart that IC paraphernalia home with me because I had no intention of working toward such a ridiculously puny goal.
Every few days, Dr. Zimcik was required to ask me what my goals were. Each time, I would roll my eyes.
“I’m supposed to ask you and then write it down,” she would say.
“Well, it’s stupid.”
“I know, I know.”
But I played the game because I loved Dr. Zimcik and I wanted her to love me back.
I always gave the same obvious answers: to walk and to get my bodily functions back. I was convinced that once I was able to pee on my own, the rest of my recovery would fall into place. So, no—I would not be putting my efforts into learning how to do my own ICs. My efforts would go toward peeing in the toilet, thank you very much.
After they left, I resumed crying, then took a break to go to the gym. On my way there, I saw Derek, a patient from my unit. I turned left to avoid him. He was always trying to catch my eye, engage me in conversation. Once, in a weak moment—both on his part and on mine—he told me that his surgery had been botched. He pounded his thigh with his fist.
“Look at that—dead. My legs are dead! I’d like to kick the shit out of my surgeon.”
Tears of frustration sprang to his eyes and then to mine, but I couldn’t cope with anyone else’s problems. I put my hand on his knee—a knee he couldn’t feel—said something consoling, and then rolled quickly back to my room a
nd shut the door.
Once I was sure Derek hadn’t seen me, I made my way to the gym and found a staff member to crank me up in the standing frame, and then I just stood there, fixed in place like a bug squished between two panes of glass. I laid out the meager contents of my bag on the black tray attached to the frame. I wasn’t actually able to concentrate on anything other than standing without my knees collapsing, but the act of placing my notebook and pen on the tray made me feel productive. I put on my sunglasses, not wanting to bear responsibility for setting off a rehab-wide crying jag, and then I stood for as long as I could before the clamminess and nausea set in.
The first time I had been cranked into a standing position inside the frame, Rich and PT Amanda were with me. The act of being upright after so many weeks of only sitting or lying down left me sweaty and faint. They were watching me so expectantly I didn’t want to disappoint them, but I knew that if one of them didn’t crank me back down immediately, I would pass out.
I had lasted less than five minutes that first time. So my goal was simply to last longer than five minutes the next time. That constituted my entire work out: wheeling myself to the gym, getting cranked into a standing position—and standing. I rang the bell on the machine to alert someone that I was done. It was the same bell you see on the reception desk in a hotel or in someone’s house as an ironic joke. Morgan, the pretty girl who owned several different colored skinny jeans and matching Converse running shoes, cranked me down. I transferred into my wheelchair and rolled as quickly as I could back to my room, where I cried and cried and called Rich again and cried and cried.
“I’m going to come have lunch with you, okay?”
My response: I cried and cried. Then I wheeled myself outside to wait at the picnic table until Rich came to save me. For six years, we lived around the corner from a shop with a sign that read, THE BREAD AND BUTTER: the best schnitzel in toronto! We’d never gotten around to testing the claim. Rich placed a brown paper bag on the table and then unwrapped the best schnitzel in toronto!
Walk It Off Page 10