“Thank you, Shawn,” I said. “You’re so kind. I’m sorry about all this.”
“No, no, ma’am. Not at all, ma’am.”
I left the store on shaky feet.
Service Ontario was right next door. If I was worried about them questioning the renewal of my permit based on how well I was walking, I’d pretty much taken care of that problem. My jeans were ripped right through on both knees. I didn’t even care. I kept my sunglasses on. The right lens was all scratched up. It was uncomfortable to stand. I had “sway,” as Mitch, my outpatient physiotherapist at Lyndhurst, called it, which meant that my ankles couldn’t keep still, always ready to do a little dance, shake a leg, drop to the ground.
The line moved forward and I moved with it. I don’t know if anyone was looking at me. At Lyndhurst, I had perfected the art of looking straight ahead. Once at the front of the line, I pushed my permit renewal toward the woman behind the counter.
“We’ll send the new permit in the mail,” she said.
“Okay.”
I waited for her to say something else, to ask me if I was okay so I could barf out my entire story to her, too, but she had already gestured toward the next person in line.
As I walked back to my car, I searched for the huge obstacle that had obviously tripped me. There was none, only flat pavement. My body had betrayed me.
I called Rich from the car, sobbing.
“I broke my face and now no one will look at me! I carry myself like I’m luggage too difficult to lift. And listen to me, listen to what I’ve become! My response to everything is to cry first, process later. And the kids are going to come home from school and take one look at my face and think, ‘That lady’s damaged goods.’ And I’m scared, Rich. I’m scared you’re going to die. I miss my old life. I want to live long enough to grow old.” I stopped at a red light and looked at the driver in the car next to me. He was looking straight ahead and singing with gusto to the radio. “I feel so old, Rich.”
He listened to me for the entire drive home.
“Go inside and rest,” he said.
“Okay.”
I went straight upstairs, took a bath, then got into bed and pulled the covers over my head. I closed my eyes and wished I was more religious. I wished I could conjure a psalm or a biblical verse to console myself. The only one I knew by heart was the middle section of the twenty-third psalm—Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. It helped. It also made me think of a stranger I had met at the bookstore just a few days earlier. He looked like what I imagined God to look like. He had a fuzzy gray beard and matching fuzzy gray hair and round wire-rimmed glasses. His teeth leaned this way and that, but still, he had a whiff of the regal about him.
“That is a really beautiful cane you’re holding,” I told him.
It was my first week leaving the house without my stick. I felt vulnerable without it.
“Since I’ve had this old piece of driftwood,” he said, tapping it lovingly, like it was his pet, “I get stopped by about two women a day. Do you know where Picton is?”
“I think so,” I said.
“I have a place out there. If you walk along the shoreline you’ll find lots of these.”
“May I touch it?”
I was wearing my heavy winter boots that laced halfway up my calves and sported some serious treads. They held my feet in pretty well but they weighed a ton and standing too long in one spot made me wobble like a Weeble. I touched his cane. It was beautifully shaped and sanded down. It even had a handle and a nice flat bottom.
“Thank you,” I said.
He smiled a wide, knowing smile and winked at me.
Thinking about that Godly man, I felt calmer. The kids would be home from school soon. I needed to get out of bed, wash my face, and pull myself together. When they saw me, I knew exactly what I would say: “Who wants pizza for dinner?”
19
Something Old, Something New
One morning, I woke up and turned on my computer. My picture was finally back up on my IMDb page—just the sign I’d been waiting for. I called my agent.
“I’m back!” I told her.
Within days, I got a TV audition. I settled into my chair by the fireplace and highlighted my lines. The role was a nurse trying to subdue a patient; patient grabs nurse, nurse fights back, someone runs for help and the scene is over. Only two pages, probably only one day’s work, totally doable.
“Just one minor thing,” I told my agent. “A stupid thing. It probably won’t even matter, but does this patient really grab me? If so, I’ll go down like a house of cards. I’m not kidding. I won’t be able to stay up straight.”
“Hmmm. Let me call the casting director.”
Twenty minutes later, she called back.
“I think we’ll take a pass on this audition.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
“No problem at all. We’ll get you next time.”
“Sure.”
Next time came fairly quickly. The audition was for the part of a lawyer and called for her to chase down a client in a corridor.
I called my agent.
“Err, Jennifer? I’m not quite at the running-down-a-hall stage yet.”
“No problem. We’ll take a pass on this one, too. Something else will come up.”
“Sure, sure.”
I started to dread the phone ringing. Every audition, no matter how innocuous it seemed on a first reading, was laced with traps. But then Degrassi, my long-time employer, came calling. The storyline was a variation on a theme: Daughter in trouble, Daughter needs Mother (me). But this time the story hit alarmingly close to home: Daughter finds a lump on her back. Mom delivers the news that it’s cancer, Mom tells Daughter she’ll be with her every day in hospital, Daughter has another MRI, Mom delivers the amazing results that the cancer is gone.
I am a terrible TV crier. Something inside me seizes up, refusing to unleash the tears. It would have been hard for any of my former nurses to believe this considering I cried at the opening of a Kleenex box. But this time, in this scene, the floodgates gave way. Tears pinged my eyes. I didn’t even have to yawn first—the only old trick in my bag. All I had to do was think about my own MRI results and how devastating the news had been for my parents and tears rolled down my face.
I nailed the scene. It was a thrill. But the thrill of that moment was quickly replaced by an unassailable set of concerns. I needed to rest my legs but was too shy to ask for a chair. I needed my gabapentin, but there was no time for me to take it before blocking the next scene. My shoes kept slipping off my feet when I wasn’t looking. My back was starting to ping and pop, a warning that things were only going to get worse. The buzzing in my legs was reaching a fever pitch. And worst of all/best of all, no one noticed my distress.
We had one shot left in the day. It was a close-up of my daughter, which meant that I was needed for her eyeline but wouldn’t be seen in the frame. An apple box was set up right behind the camera for me to sit on. I was so relieved not to have to stand . . . until I saw the seat of the apple box. It was tiny—not too tiny for a regular-size bum, which is more or less what I have—but my bum now felt three times bigger. How was I going to sit on that box without rolling off it? I stared at it long enough for the first assistant director to clue in.
“Hold on!” he yelled, before running off to get me a pillow.
He put it on the apple box. “Will that be more comfortable for you, Ruth?”
I started sweating. Using a pillow would only make things worse—it was too puffy. My bum would register its texture as bubble wrap. All eyes were on me; everyone wanted to get the shot over with so we could all go home.
“That’s perfect! Thank you so much.”
The first AD held his hand out so I could step over the cables and lower myself down onto the box. My stress level was so high throughout my TV daughter’s close-up, it was
a breeze to cry again, take after take, just to release some tension, even though the camera wasn’t even on me. When they called “That’s a wrap!” I put my head in my hands and blew out all my held-in breath.
I came home and sat quietly in my chair by the fireplace, still in full-on TV makeup, still coiffed with my TV hair. I thought about the last few months and about how much had changed, and I asked myself the same question that Dr. Zimcik had been required to ask me every few days: What are your goals? Although I couldn’t say for sure what my next goal was, I now knew what it wasn’t.
I picked up the phone and called my agent. “Jennifer?” I said. “I’m all done.”
•
I needed to see a doctor before I went to Las Vegas, but Dr. Bright was on vacation. Nothing was terribly wrong, but I’d been a month without seeing a professional and that left me alone for too long with my imagination and the Internet to aid in my unraveling.
“You can see Dr. Calum,” I was told by the receptionist.
“What’s Dr. Calum’s first name?” I asked, fishing for the good doctor’s gender.
“John.”
Ah. So I would be discussing my bowel movements with a man. Fine. I sat in the waiting room and pulled out my food journal so I could refer to it in our appointment. For months, I had been keeping diligent track of what went in and out of my body—both food-wise and medication-wise.
Dr. Calum was tall and polished. He wore glasses and a light pink button-down shirt with an official white lab coat. We sat down in Dr. Bright’s office.
I heaved a big sigh and asked, “Are you prepared to talk about poop for a while?”
“I’m fine with that.” He opened up a grainy brown folder.
I gave him the Cliffs Notes version of my surgery. I spoke respectfully of my tumor, using its proper name—meningioma. My friend Sheryl preferred it when I called it that. She said it sounded like a nice pasta.
I finished my story. Dr. Calum’s face was serious. He jotted some notes in his file.
“I’m here today largely because of the bloating,” I said. “I can’t take it anymore. I look—I feel—three months pregnant.”
“I want to say something, but my mind is drawing a complete blank,” he said.
I waited while he rolled his chair over to the computer. He typed in some words and then said okay and rolled his chair back.
“I’m guessing you want to do things naturally, is that right?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ve had enough with the drugs already.”
He suggested peppermint oil that he could only find on UK websites. “Colpermin. That’s the name I was trying to remember—the name of that peppermint oil.”
“I thought doctors weren’t allowed to have lapses like that,” I said, thinking he was one of those jokey-type of doctors, but he wasn’t. What he was, was a good listener.
We talked for a while about the pluses of adding peppermint oil to my regimen. I told him how I ate three pieces of natural black licorice every night. I asked him if this could be problematic for my digestive system. He assured me that there was no documented medical fallout from eating black licorice. I told him about Rich’s and my upcoming trip to Las Vegas and how I was nervous about disrupting my eating routine and if he had any suggestions for me and if I should take a laxative while I was there and what did he think about the continued use of stool softeners and if he thought I was eating enough fiber or maybe I was eating too much fiber and did he think I could develop a dependency on all that over-the-counter poop stuff and should I take my homemade granola with me and would my belly ever go down and was it normal to feel so happy when I tooted even when it was entirely inappropriate and would I ever feel normalish again?
“May I say something?” he asked.
I said nothing.
“You’ve obviously been through a lot. Let me ask you this: Have things gotten better?”
“You mean down there?” I pointed to my bum.
“Yes,” he said.
I mentally zipped through my progress and then to my surprise, I said, “Yes.” Things had improved, were continuing to improve.
“Okay. I think you should put your food journal away and enjoy yourself. Going to Las Vegas is supposed to be fun. You need to put your worries aside.”
I shook my head and stared into my lap.
“You don’t even know,” I said. “I’ve gone from worrying about why my feet tingle to wondering if I’ll die on the operating table to wondering if I’ll ever walk again to worrying about my kids to wondering if I’ll ever be able to figure out where the edges of a fucking chair are again with my stupid tingling bum—” I stopped for a second to get my train of thought back. “This current worry of mine is like a gift compared to everything else that came before it.”
And then the tears came rolling down the river of my cheeks. It wasn’t Dr. Calum or Dr. Zimcik or Dr. Bright or even the doctor’s office that unleashed them. It was living. As long as I was living, I was going to cry.
“I hear you, Ruth. I hear you,” Dr. Calum said. And I believe he really did.
I barely picked up my food journal after that.
•
My greatest concern when anticipating our trip to Las Vegas was also my silliest: that I wouldn’t be able to hoist myself up onto the stools around the card tables. But thinking about the stools distracted me from my even bigger concern, which was the endless walking I would have to do to get from our room to the casino to the pool to the restaurant. Even in my assortment of sensible footwear, I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t either tire or trip or roll over on my ankles. I worried about maintaining my strict routine of drinking lemon water before bed and first thing in the morning, careful to leave exactly half an hour before drinking my first cup of coffee in the hopes of kick-starting my digestive system. Even with Dr. Calum’s sage words in my head, I worried about not having exactly the right granola with exactly the right yogurt for breakfast. I hated in advance the terrible choice I might have to make between having a second martini and being able to walk away from a table without veering sharply into another drunk guest.
I also worried that my worrying might ruin our trip.
In the end, my worries disappeared upon arrival. It was thrilling to be with Rich in a big, fancy hotel for the first time since all the tsurris had begun. But then I remembered Rich had been to a hotel without me, under less joyful circumstances.
While I was in surgery, he had slipped out of the waiting room and walked over to The King Eddy. That was the moment my story spun away from me and sliced sharply into his. I could only guess what his ordeal—as a result of mine—must have been like. I wondered: Did people remember to ask him how he was doing? Did I?
I pictured Rich trying to remember which room we had had our wedding reception in and then, with a jolt of memory, climbing the staircase with the gleaming gold banister. Or maybe it wasn’t gleaming anymore. Maybe he was thinking the same thing about us—that our once glossy life had lost its patina, giving way to a lesser shine, one that gleamed faintly under a series of fresh dings and scratches. Many times, over the last several months, I had wanted to ask Rich what he was thinking when he went back there. Was it: What if her toes don’t move? What if she never walks again? What if our relationship is never the same? How could he not have wondered, while looking around the same ballroom where we had been tossed in the air clinging to our chairs: Did the tumor start growing here before our lives together had even begun?
Up until a few months earlier, it was unimaginable that we would ever be in Vegas at a gorgeous hotel again, the weekend stretching out luxuriously in front of us. In typical Vegas fashion, the dream actually matched the reality.
Near the end of our weekend, I sat at a three-card poker table next to Jersey Girl. She had outstanding arms and I told her so.
“Do you work out a lot?” I asked. Her arms were not just muscular, but smooth and long and brown.
“I used to work out all the t
ime, every day, actually, but I don’t really anymore.”
“How come?”
Rich joined us at the table. The weekend might have been winding down but we certainly weren’t.
“I’m disabled.”
Rich and I turned to her. I could feel us both thinking the same word: Where?
“I have braces on my legs.”
I pulled back from my stool and looked under the table, about as subtle as Las Vegas itself. There were her legs, two plastic braces from her knees to her ankles, holding them upright.
“The worst part is I can’t wear heels anymore,” she said.
“Neither can I!” I said.
“Tell her,” Rich prodded me. “Tell her!”
I summed up my saga in record time; I was far more interested in hearing hers. But as I spoke, she nodded her head as if this was familiar to her. She had discovered after the birth of her second son (she also had two boys, the exact ages of ours) that she had drop foot. She was on the treadmill at her gym when a fellow runner on the treadmill behind her pointed it out. Like me, she knew something was wrong but was too scared to address it right away. It turned out she had a diagnosis with such a long name she didn’t even bother telling me, using the five-letter acronym instead. It wasn’t terminal bad, just terrible-bad-luck bad.
We swapped stories about gabapentin and our respective dosages.
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