Swimming in the Sink

by Lynne Cox

Now they thought my recovery would be complete.

  The result confirmed for me that the things I was doing were helping me get better. I was thrilled, but I wanted to figure out what more I could do to recover more quickly.

  23

  APRIL KISSES

  The sun was veiled by a thin layer of cloud, but the sky was bright gray, and tree branches were covered in red and green buds. I walked through Central Park past small gardens filled with yellow, white, and orange daffodils and grape hyacinths.

  Earth’s energy surged around me. I don’t remember spring ever being as beautiful. A flock of sparrows were singing in the trees, robins were pulling worms from vibrant green lawns, and blue jays were feasting on acorns. The earth smelled sweet.

  People were walking through the park smiling, riding bikes, jogging, pushing strollers, and walking their dogs. They felt the new energy of spring.

  Walking out of Central Park, around Columbus Circle, and onto Broadway, I felt the wind funneling between high buildings. It was blowing from the Hudson River and tiny snowflakes were moving in swirling waves, making the variation in the wind’s speed and direction visible.

  The clouds parted, and the sun burst through. Sunlight warmed the city and the snowflakes disappeared.

  I walked down Broadway, past Times Square, with giant neon signs aglow, to the West Village. Oliver Sacks was waiting to see me. He was celebrating his eightieth birthday and I couldn’t wait to give him some Baci, the Italian dark chocolates filled with a hazelnut center. Baci translated to English means “kisses.” Each kiss had a message about love written on a small piece of paper. The message was written in Italian, French, German, and English.

  Oliver loved chocolate and it surprised me that he had never tasted Baci. I opened one for him, and he popped it in his mouth and savored the creamy chocolate and crunchy hazelnut. I straightened out the message written on the paper and read it to him. It was a saying about the heart and endurance. He liked the message. I asked him if he wanted another so I could read him another message. He grinned and his brown eyes lit up.

  The message was about love, and I thought about how much I loved him and that we had been friends for a long time. I remembered the first time we met. I had read an article about him in a swimming magazine. I had read his books, but I didn’t know that he was a swimmer. His father, a physician, started teaching him to swim when he was just a week old. From that moment, he loved being in the water. As an adolescent, he swam with his family in the sea off the coast of England, and as an adult he swam in pools and oceans. He wrote about interesting people, many of whom were born with or acquired different afflictions, and he wrote about the lessons he learned from them. He seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about life. I was intrigued by him and wanted to meet him so I called his office and left a voice message. I told him that I had read an article about him and that I was coming to New York City to try to get my first book published.

  Oliver returned my call five minutes later and said that he had been following my career for years. He wanted to know if we could go for a swim, and to know more about the book I wanted to get published. He thought he might be able to help.

  We met at his office in Greenwich Village. He drove his sporty white Lexus through Manhattan to the swimming pool with the agility and anticipation of a race car driver. I commented on how well he drove and he smiled and said that he used to ride a motorcycle. It helped him hone his response time. He said that when he was working on a graduate degree at UCLA he rode his motorcycle on Mulholland Drive. He rode it a number of times, then decided to close his eyes and see if he could ride sections of it from memory. I didn’t think that was a good idea, but I liked the way he tested himself. He mentioned that he was also a champion weight lifter. He could bench-press nearly five hundred pounds.

  We shared a lane in the swimming pool. He swam backstroke and some breaststroke, but he loved backstroke, and his stroke was smooth, and strong, and beautiful. We watched each other swim and he admired my backstroke and asked if I had any suggestions. I told him to press his back into the water so his hips would lift and to bend his elbow more on the underwater pull, so that he would push more water. He was in tune with his body and its movement through the water and made an immediate change that let him swim faster.

  When we finished working out and climbed out of the pool, he wrote notes on a waterproof tablet with an erasable pen. I asked what he was doing. He said he got ideas about work, writing, and his patients while he was swimming and he wrote them down so he wouldn’t forget. I said I got some of my best ideas when I was swimming. He smiled and said that swimming was a time when we could meditate.

  When we returned to his office, Oliver invited me to have lunch with Michael, one of his patients. Michael had one of the most dramatic cases of Tourette’s syndrome Oliver had ever seen. He explained that Tourette’s was a neuropsychiatric disorder. Michael had physical and vocal tics. He made inappropriate and derogatory remarks and used offensive language. He couldn’t control these tics. If he tried, they only grew worse. Oliver wanted to make sure I felt comfortable having lunch with Michael. I felt honored that Oliver wanted to bring me into his world.

  We met Michael and walked across the street from Oliver’s office to a British restaurant and sat down at a table. Michael turned to a man sitting at a table beside ours and said that he was sorry, but he had Tourette’s and that he might slap or punch him or say something inappropriate. The man nodded that he understood.

  Oliver sat across from us, and we ordered lunch. Michael slapped me on the leg and called me inappropriate names. I made a joke of what he had said, and we laughed. Oliver said that Michael was a swimmer too. He discovered that if people who had Tourette’s did repetitive motions, they became calmer and had fewer outbursts. Swimming and gardening at the New York Botanical Garden helped Michael relax. So we talked about swimming and gardening, things I loved to do too. After we finished lunch and Michael left, Oliver said he was surprised that I was so at ease with Michael. I said it had to be difficult to live Michael’s life, not to be able to control his body movements and to say things he didn’t intend. Michael seemed like he had a good heart.

  Oliver nodded.

  After that lunch Oliver asked me to stay in touch with him and said he would help me in any way he could with my first book. Through the years we wrote to each other, and he introduced me to his friends and colleagues and we discussed their work and passions. When I flew to New York City, we swam and had a meal with friends and discussed the topics we were writing about, and when he traveled to California for a conference we met to do the same. We talked about his lectures, octopuses and cuttlefish, Auden’s poetry, neurological disorders, nature, Mexico, and our travels and discoveries.

  Oliver exposed me to worlds I would never have experienced.

  Now, many years later, he was sitting with his back to the window in a halo of light. He had his hands clasped behind his head. He said the ginkgo trees were leafing; they were one of his favorite trees because they could endure the extreme cold of New York City in winter and survive the heat of summer. He was happy it was finally spring.

  I wondered if he felt the increased oxygen in the air with the leafing of the trees and increased photosynthesis. I wondered if I should tell him that I was ill. He was one of my closest friends. I loved him, and I didn’t want to make him sad or worried about me.

  I asked him how he was.

  He said he was doing well but had lost vision in one eye to cancer, and he was almost blind in the other eye. It was challenging for him to see what he wrote, until he figured out how to enlarge the print and hold a magnifying glass above the page. It took both for him to read text. He was still swimming and hoped that next time we met, we could swim together.

  He asked me how my mom was doing.

  I told him she had passed away.

  He suddenly looked sad and said it was difficult to lose a parent.

  He asked me how I was doing. I dec
ided to tell him that I had been sick, and my doctor friends thought I had broken heart syndrome.

  As he listened to my story about what had happened, he looked sad and serious, but when I finished talking, he said that he knew I would recover fully. He understood how the heart and mind worked together, and he knew mine were very strong.

  “Oliver, maybe someday you will write about my broken heart,” I said softly.

  “Maybe someday you will,” he said, and smiled.

  He changed the subject and said he was working on an article about being tickled, and he asked me if I remembered being tickled, or tickling someone, and if I liked being tickled.

  I told him I was ticklish and shared some of my memories.

  He smiled and stored the stories somewhere in his mind.

  “You know you can’t tickle yourself,” he said.

  “Never thought of that,” I said and tried to tickle my arm. He was right.

  He glanced at his watch. I had to go and catch a flight but told him that the next time we met, we could go swimming.

  A couple of days later Oliver wrote and said that he was sorry to hear about my mother’s death, all the stress that had occurred around it, and its effect on me. He was sure I would regain my strength and health, that nothing was as good for me as writing. I hoped I could be as brave as he was.

  24

  THE SINK

  I put the black rubber stopper in the deep white kitchen sink and opened the faucet. The sound of the water reminded me of Song, my bright yellow canary. He loved to sing when I turned on the water, he loved to sing with the water’s song. He tweeted and trilled. His song was bright like the sound of rolling water. When I turned the faucet and increased the water flow, he sang his aria louder and hit higher notes. Happiness flowed from him, and his song filled the house.

  As he sang I would walk outside to the garden, snap tops off the basil plants, ones that were flowering and going to seed, and use a clothespin to hold them inside Song’s cage.

  When he smelled the basil, he leapt from rung to rung in the cage, pulled the soft white seeds from the tops, and crushed them in his beak. He ate for a few moments, then stopped, looked at me with his tiny dark eyes, and sang a song of thanks.

  When I returned to the sink, he sang with all his heart. The air was perfumed with sweet basil. I closed my eyes and listened to Song sing with the water.

  Now I placed my hands under the faucet, and the shimmering water splashed off my hands. It felt so good, but it was too warm. I needed to acclimate to cooler water to be able to swim in the ocean. Joe suggested adding ice cubes.

  Reaching into the freezer, I grabbed three handfuls of ice cubes and dunked my hands under the water. The ice floated to the surface and left a melting chill. I opened my hands, stretched them, and let them float with the ice cubes. The cold made me feel alive, and it stirred something deep within me.

  I moved my hands back and forth in a sculling motion. I sculled stronger and faster and watched my hand motions create bubbles. My heart beat faster, and I smiled, moved my hands faster, and felt my breathing increase. It felt so good to be in the cold water again. It felt like it was about 56 degrees Fahrenheit (13.3 degrees centigrade). I measured it with a pool thermometer. It was the same as the ocean. Perfect.

  I pulled the water toward me and reached out farther in front of me. My muscles remembered the feeling. I watched the water move and bounce off the sides of the sink. I listened to the sounds of the water change as I increased my speed.

  My body was moving with the flow of the water. I was dog-paddling. My head was high out of the water. My hands were below my chest. I was pulling and churning the water.

  My heart was beating more evenly in my chest and my breaths were deep and relaxed.

  Leaning forward, I extended my arms until my knuckles touched the far side of the sink and lengthened my pulls. My hands were moving from one side of the sink to the other. I took a deep breath and began counting: one two three, one two three. I was exhaling as I was counting. I didn’t realize I was turning my head to one side to take a breath, exhaling facedown toward the sink, and turning my head to the other side to take a breath. It was all happening automatically. I kept moving my arms and increased my stroke motion. I popped my elbow up, and reached to the far side of the sink, put my hand in the water, took three strokes, exhaled, turned my head to breathe, inhaled, turned my face back to the sink, and counted three more strokes. I closed my eyes. I forgot where I was. I felt my body rotating, my arms pulling, heard the sound of my breath, and felt the water moving. It felt wonderful.

  I laughed at myself. I once swam the English Channel and now was swimming in the sink. I had fallen so far, but I was trying to find my way back.

  I played with my pulls, pulled fast and slow, pulled deep and shallow, watched my hands move and let them float on the water. It was crazy to swim in the sink, but it had been a long time since I’d had so much fun.

  In the evening, I found my yellow swim cap and tinted goggles packed away in a closet. I filled the sink with water, added ice. My cap still smelled like the sea, and when I licked my goggles to clear them and keep them from fogging, I tasted salt.

  Again, I swam in the sink, I closed my eyes, and in my mind, I was back in the ocean, diving beneath the surf, swimming across the surface of the shimmering sea. I was listening to the breath of the wind and waves, the call of the seagulls, the music of the fog horn, the rumble of boat engines. I was swimming along the buoy line, watching the sailboats glide by, the kite surfers skimming across the water’s surface at breathtaking speeds. I was feeling strong, balanced in the water, my arm strokes were long and powerful, my heart was beating evenly, and my breaths were deep and easy.

  Soon I would be in the ocean again. I knew it in my heart.

  25

  MAY 7—NOT YET

  I continued my daily swims in the sink and did all the other things I had been doing to get well.

  Dr. Rawal met with me in the examination room. It was May and I was feeling stronger. He listened to my heart and lungs and said, “You’re doing fantastic. I don’t want you to have any restrictions, and I don’t think you should place any restrictions on yourself. Have you started swimming again?”

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  “I think you need to start swimming again. Your ejection fraction was fifteen, and now you’re at fifty. You’re at a low normal,” he said.

  Low normal is good, I thought, but it’s not sixty.

  “You said I don’t need to put any limits on myself. How far can I swim?” I asked.

  “I don’t think you should swim the Catalina Channel.” He paused and said under his breath, “Not yet.”

  I smiled to myself. He didn’t know that was a trigger for me. When I tried to swim the Bering Strait, the Soviets told me “nyet.” Nyet means no, but I translated the word to mean “not yet.”

  Not yet was good. I didn’t have any desire to swim the Catalina Channel. I had completed it twice, and I had broken all records for that swim. I didn’t need to repeat it. I told Dr. Rawal about Joe and the way I was reacclimating to the water, and of my concerns about overstimulating the vagus nerve by getting into cold water too fast and having that put stress on my heart. I explained that I was reintroducing my body very gradually to colder water so I could adapt gradually. Dr. Rawal listened intently; he agreed with what I was doing and advised me to continue working out in the gym and to keep my heart rate below 110.

  He was thrilled with my progress. His reactions were so different from when I first started seeing him when he had been not at all optimistic.

  I felt another hurdle had been cleared, an enormous achievement, but my goal was to have a normal ejection fraction and get off the medications. I needed to figure out what else I could do. I found inspiration in reconnecting with the Simonelli family. My fourth book had been published, and Liana’s mom dropped her off at my book signing in Del Mar, California. Pearl, her younger sister, wanted to jo
in us, but she was at a swim meet. Liana was an avid reader and was enthralled by the book writing process. We talked about the book signing after lunch at a nearby restaurant, and we discussed her swimming goals and school. She was thirteen years old, training hard for Junior Olympics, and studying many hours a day to gain admittance to a top-notch high school. She said she was doing very well and asked me how I was doing. I said that I had been very sick, but I was a lot better, partly due to the time I spent with her and her family. I told her I loved being with them, that they were a kind and loving family, and that I had learned that love could help me heal my heart. She nodded slowly like an adult. She said she knew something had been wrong with me, and she was very happy I was better. She asked me if I was swimming, and I told her I was, but that it had been a strange way back. I felt foolish, but I said, “I started back by swimming in the sink.”

  She said, “That’s so beautiful. You are taking baby steps to swim again and recover.”

  I nodded and thought, She knows so much for being so young. I told her I was thinking about using swimming in the sink as the title for my new book.

  Liana smiled and her brown eyes filled with light. “I love that title. You know, when my parents taught me and Pearl how to swim, they taught us in the sink. The tub was too big for us.”

  “I learned in the tub and had to revert to the sink,” I said, and we laughed.

  I was starting over at a smaller place than where I began, just like training for a channel swim. I had to think, train, learn from experts, piece the information together, and use it to help me succeed. But there was something holding me back.

  26

  JULY 2—FLOATING

  I stepped into Alamitos Bay, off the shores of Long Beach, California, and felt the cool salt water flow over my feet and up to my ankles, and the chill traveled through my blood to my heart. I was back in the water. I smiled and inhaled fast. This was my breakthrough. Even though the water only reached my ankles, I realized that I was on the path that would give me confidence and help me transform my life. The strength in my heart was returning and I felt ready to embrace life again.