And it was. While I ate it, I thought about my pre-surgery relationship to bread. I had given it up, along with dessert and wine (although the wine part only lasted one day) while on a quest to get skinny. But since being at Lyndhurst, my recipe for survival included all bread, all dessert, and—in place of wine—copious amounts of Metamucil.
When I finished eating every last crumb, I folded the wrapper and then resumed crying. I missed Rich so much. I missed waking up to him and I missed our Sunday morning walks. I missed the simple joy of wanting something and then standing up and walking across the room or the mall or the field to get it. I even missed schlepping the laundry basket up from the basement. I missed using my body to be cute, missed standing in front of a mirror and posing in a new pair of shoes. I missed dancing with Henry in the living room, missed standing back to back with Joey to gauge how much he had grown. I missed sleeping on my stomach. I wondered if Rich would grow resentful of having to take care of me. And could he possibly still be attracted to me? Maybe attraction is layered. What if the attraction he felt for me was finite, a layer sloughed off with each sad stage of my rehabilitation to which he’d borne witness? Maybe all that remained was one thin, quivering husk ready to fall off at the slightest disturbance.
Eventually, I let Rich go back to work to earn our real bread and butter. I pushed back to my room, exhausted from all the crying, rolled myself onto my bed in the middle of the day, and went to sleep. Almost two hours later, I woke up in a panic and in pain. I hadn’t taken any oxycodone since first thing that morning. I was surprised that no nurse had ensured that I got my dose until I remembered that it wasn’t their job to chase me down and remind me I was in pain. My physio was set for three fifteen with a new therapist standing in that day for Amanda. I moved as quickly as I could to get ready, which is to say that I moved very slowly. My back felt as if it had been pummeled with oranges. Hot sparks and static lit up my body. I didn’t see the point in going to physio—I was useless without my painkillers—but not showing up was not an option.
The PT room was almost empty. Most appointments took place in the morning, and it was almost three thirty, close to quittin’ time. The substitute PT, Grace, was sitting on the blue plinth, her knees spread wide with her hands resting on her thighs.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said.
“I’m having a very shitty day.”
Grace said nothing. Had she heard me? The look on her face was inscrutable. I thought: If she tries to hug me, I will punch her.
“Do you want to walk?”
“I don’t know how.”
She kept her eyes on me as if I might take off but called over her shoulder, “Sarah! Come spot for me!”
I didn’t bother looking up again to see who Sarah was, missing the only opportunity I would have to meet her face to face.
“Let’s go, Ruth.”
I was hauled up out of my wheelchair and pulled somewhat upright. With very little time to process what was happening, I was on my feet, which felt as if they were skimming the surface of water—not quite standing, not quite floating. I never wore shoes in the PT room. Amanda always began our sessions by giving me a quick foot massage, pulling on each of my toes and rubbing my arches to “turn them on.” But Grace didn’t bother with any of that. Once my shoes were off, I was up. I could feel a presence behind me, a pressure. This was the unseen Sarah. I couldn’t tell where her hands were or what they were doing, although I had a very clear image of me as a marionette with Sarah as the master pulling the strings. In front, Grace was half crouched and holding tight to my thighs. I gripped her shoulders for support. Whatever pain I had been experiencing when I arrived had either disappeared or gone into hiding when faced with these two tiny Amazons.
“Left knee, left bum! Right knee, right bum!” Grace barked.
“Do I look like a joke?” I yelled. I felt as if I were battling forces so fierce, the only way to get through it was to be very loud. “I don’t want to look like a joke!”
“You look good. Now stop thinking and walk!”
“Am I hurting you?” I asked Grace, who, I learned, was five months pregnant.
“No,” she said, even though she was sweating. “Go! Pretend you’re keeping up with your kids.”
I didn’t dare look at my feet. Not since the surgery had I put such blind faith in a stranger. I figured that if I wasn’t falling, then I must have been doing something right. I must have been touching the ground, although I couldn’t really feel it. I sensed a pressure on my heels but not on my toes. Momentum and determination—Grace’s and Sarah’s more than mine—propelled me around the room. All I have to do, I told myself, is make it back to my wheelchair. When I did, I flopped into it, breathing heavily.
“Okay,” Grace said, catching her breath, too. “How did that feel?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Those better be happy tears,” she said.
I nodded my head and then I called Rich.
“I WALKED!” I screamed into the phone.
Within minutes, he had sent out a mass email with the subject line: She Walked.
•
“This is a problem,” I told Rich the following day when I received multiple texts, emails, and phone calls from people who believed that the struggle was over and I was back to my old walking self again.
“But you did walk,” Rich said.
“Not on my own, babe. I was basically yanked around the PT room by two surprisingly small women. You can’t tell people I’m walking.”
“But you walked.”
“Not really, Rich.”
“I told people you walked because you walked. You did.”
“Honey.”
“You walked.”
“Okay.”
My surgeon cousin Joel popped by a couple of days later. He found me in the gym, pinned inside the standing frame. I dinged my call bell and Morgan hauled the lever and lowered me back to the ground. Joel and I went back to my room, where I showed off the homework he had texted me to do: rub my right foot against my left leg from knee to ankle; repeat on opposite side; tap my toes on the floor ten times with each foot.
“See?” I said. “I can do all of it.” Granted, it looked loopier on the left side than on the right, my foot waving around drunkenly before touching down. I was so focused on my feet that I didn’t notice Joel disappear behind my chair. He shoved his hands underneath my armpits to pull me upright.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Let’s see you walk.”
“Are you crazy?! Joel, I’m scared—put me down!”
My feet skittered around the floor, blindly searching for a toehold.
“I won’t drop you, I promise. I just want to see where you’re at.”
“Joel!”
“Just try.”
I moved like dead weight. Was this how I walked with Grace and Sarah, I wondered? With them I felt airborne, euphoric, like I could do anything. With Joel I flopped around my room like a ragdoll. I could hear him trying not to grunt. I knew he was testing more than just my strength. He needed to see how successful the surgery was, how well he had taught his friend and fellow, the neurosurgeon Dr. Ginsberg. I could see that he was feeling personally responsible for my progress.
“That’s enough, Joel. Put me back in my chair.”
He lowered me down and then took a step back. We were both winded.
“So?” I asked.
“Your right leg is strong—it’ll be fine. It will probably take your left leg longer to catch up. You might be left with a little shuffle.”
He demonstrated with his hand what he saw when my leg was in motion: like cleaning a table with a sponge, a gentle circular movement. Something shifted in my stomach. I had seen people walk like that, with that draggy leg, the very definition of lame.
“Well, that most certainly will not be happening to me,” I said, pulling myself up tall.
He shrugged.
“I am not going to shuffl
e, Joel!” I yelled.
After he left, I allowed myself to feel furious for a while and then I made a decision: It was time to supplement my physio with some outside help. I knew just who to ask.
I had met Sal, a private physiotherapist from outside Lyndhurst, while he was working with The Captain, a patient in the only other private room in our unit. Sightings of The Captain were rare—he complied with the only mandatory patient requirement, which was to show up for physio for one hour a day. Otherwise, he stayed in his room until Sal came knocking. It seemed clear that, given the droves of visitors he had and the catered dinners that arrived daily for him and his family, The Captain knew all the right people. If PT Sal was good enough for The Captain, then he might be good enough for me, too. Without much thought, research, or consultation, I hired him.
We didn’t settle into a groove right away, but I had learned that first impressions in this strange new land couldn’t always be trusted. Even Dr. Asshole, my nemesis from the hospital, proved to be a more complex character than I had originally thought. Three hours into surgery, it was Dr. Asshole who was the messenger sent to speak to Rich about my progress.
“You mean that guy, the toe-tester guy? Was he in my surgery?” I asked Rich.
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“Was he nice to you?”
“He was okay.” It pained him to admit this.
“But we hated that guy!”
“I know.”
“I liked hating that guy.” I sighed. “Now I can’t hate that guy.”
“Me neither.”
Sal had just bought a new house and was looking forward to the arrival of his first baby. His wife was seven months pregnant and he talked a fair bit about how that was affecting both of them. He told me about his furniture shopping trips, proudly name-checking all the brands. I tried to keep up with his banter, but it was hard to concentrate on anything other than where my leg was, which was often hoisted at a ninety-degree angle with my foot resting on a chair, making me look like a drunken heron. Sal’s hands were strong and I felt confident he wouldn’t let me fall, but it didn’t mean I could hold his poses forever. My right leg quivered and swayed, threatening to give out. I wanted to ask him what I should be concentrating on, what I should feel “activating,” but Sal had moved from talk of furniture to talk of renovation.
“Okay, I feel more than buzzing now,” I cut in. “My leg is stinging.” Sal gently lowered my leg to the ground.
“You should know,” he said, “your nerves will get worse before they get better.”
This news flash didn’t scare me—in fact, I took it as a good sign, since at that moment my leg had never felt worse. After a few more sessions, Sal encouraged me to get out of the hospital and come to his spinal cord rehab gym. This seemed like a good idea.
On the day I went to Sal’s gym, I had already completed a morning PT session with Amanda and I was exhausted. When I was first admitted to Lyndhurst, it struck me as absurd that in a twenty-four-hour day, only one hour was devoted to actual physical therapy. Surely I could handle more than that, I thought. But after each session, it was all I could do to stay awake long enough to wheel myself back to my room.
Sal’s gym looked much like Lyndhurst’s, but with less activity. I was the sole patient there, which meant Sal could fill the space with more talk of all the things he and his wife were planning in their rush to get ready for the baby. He was moved by the way his wife’s body was changing and this made me feel a surge of warmth toward him. He laughed a little recalling the long skirt his wife had been favoring and which she wore with her Birkenstocks. As her belly pushed all her other clothes out of rotation, this particular outfit was proving to be the go-to.
“I told her she looked like a Jew.” Sal laughed. He was pulling on my clueless toes, trying to activate them.
“Like a what?” I asked.
“Like a Jew.”
I didn’t tell him I was Jewish. I’m sure he would have apologized, but I was so tired, so done for the day, I couldn’t summon the strength to get into it. I concentrated as hard as I could on his instructions, which meant that I became very quiet, but because I had already established myself as the chatty sort, my quietness proved to be unsettling. I could sense Sal trying to figure out how things had gone off the rails. I felt bad for him and also mad at myself for disrupting the tone of our appointment.
“I think you’re ready to try stairs,” Sal said, switching gears. We made our way to the nearest staircase. He was beside me, encouraging me, trying to get things back on track. I locked my chair into place and then tried to stand on my own. I gripped the banister while Sal used his hands to manipulate my legs into a walking motion, but I couldn’t get my foot to move in concert with my knee and my thigh and my glutes. Frustration burned through my body. Sal’s words swirled. I stopped listening and started thinking about how distressing the ride over had been, how my cabdriver had hopped out to help me, how he had leaned into my chair to push it up the ramp in the back of the specially outfitted taxi. He anchored my chair to the floor and pulled a seatbelt tight around both the chair and me so that I was fixed in place. My purse sat primly on my lap, my hands folded over it. When he was finished fussing, he took the driver’s seat and told me how he was a hand healer back in his country, and that he felt strongly that the key to my recovery was swimming. Given the healing properties I experienced daily in the shower, I wanted to pursue this conversation, but I had been far too preoccupied with getting to Sal’s gym in one piece. And now I was tired, mad at myself for being so naïve as to think I could do two rounds of physio in one day, and dreading the drive back.
As the hour wound down, I saw my taxi driver backing his car up to the end of the wheelchair ramp. I thanked Sal, who had also run out of steam. I sat as straight as I could while the driver bolted and belted me into place. I was tight-lipped for the entire ride back, unable to eke out even the most benign mm-hmms to the story he was telling me. When we got back to Lyndhurst, the security guard at reception saluted me and I saluted him, but I didn’t stop for our usual chat. I went straight to my room, transferred to my bed, lay on my side facing the window, and cried until it was dark. It wasn’t Sal that upset me. I knew he was a decent guy preoccupied with the wonderful changes about to happen to his family. I was upset because I could remember with greater clarity how it felt to be pregnant than how it felt to walk.
9
Step 4—Be the Mom
“Do your drugs make you high?” my girlfriend Joanie asked me in a whisper one afternoon.
It was a perfectly reasonable question that I met with a frat-house response: “I wish.”
Prior to the surgery, narcotics played a very minor role in my life. I only took Ativan to fly, and on those rare occasions when my stress level manifested in a thumping heart that became too percussive to ignore. Post-surgery, however, I was amazed at the ease with which I cycled through my drugs: morphine, Percocet, oxycodone. Though frightening and evocative, they were necessary. The pain in my back was so thick, so seemingly impenetrable, the drugs barely took the edge off, let alone made me feel good. For this, I was profoundly grateful. I never requested more than my prescribed amount, not because I’m a martyr but because I’m a chicken. The constipation that followed was simply not worth the extra measure of pain relief. I started cutting down on my dosage in the hopes that I would be rewarded with a more smoothly running digestive system, but was furious when my body refused to cooperate. I noticed, however, that the decrease in my oxycodone didn’t really cause an increase in pain. Very quickly, I weaned myself down to just one dose a day—before I went to sleep. I called my cousin Joel to brag.
“Taking just one a day is useless,” he said. “Stop taking them, period.”
So I did what he said, and it was like falling off a cliff.
I was up the entire night. I lay there, counting backward from a hundred, trying to ignore the riot that had broken out in every single part of my body, until i
t occurred to me that I didn’t have to just lie there—maybe it was time to start reading again. I found a book on my Kindle, bought it, became engrossed in it, and read right up to the part where the mother thinks she is pregnant again only to learn that her pregnancy is actually ovarian cancer. She dies a few pages later.
I was ten days late for my period. I had told one of my nurses and she joked that maybe I was pregnant. I laughed off the absurdity—I was forty-seven and Rich had had a vasectomy years ago. Still, I added up the symptoms: nausea, no period, bloating, headaches. I went to the Internet and cross-referenced my symptoms with those of ovarian cancer. By the time Dr. Zimcik came to see me the following day, my nerves were rattled beyond anything gabapentin could control. I barely had time to register her pink pants and black-and-white polka-dot shirt before I cried out, “I think I have ovarian cancer!”
“Okay,” she said, cocking her head to the side. “I’m not going to tell you you’re crazy because what you already have is exceedingly rare, but I will tell you this: I am more likely to win the lottery tonight than you are to have ovarian cancer.”
She stood up, looking for something. “Where are the gloves in here?”
“In the bathroom.”
She disappeared and came back in seconds. She moved quickly and brightly, like a polka-dot firefly.
“Would it make you feel better if I did a pelvic exam right now?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Just lay back.”
She felt my cervix, my uterus, my ovaries, but her probing fingers barely registered.
“It all seems really good, Ruth.”
Why is it so hard not to cry when a doctor says your name? I wanted to hug her, but I knew how pathetic that would look.
“You’ve been through a lot,” she said, standing up to go. “You can tell me anything and I’ll listen.”
“I think you’re wonderful!”
There. Not nearly as pathetic as a hug.
•
October crept in, tiptoeing around me. I called Joey.
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