Leggy Blonde: A Memoir

by Aviva Drescher

  “Ingrid, something terrible has happened,” says Dad.

  She learns in an instant that her only daughter had suffered a horrific accident. The phone drops in slow motion, hitting the floor with a sonic boom. Our world has blown up. My mother’s anguished screams carried across the hills as she collapsed.

  When she recovered, Mom drove to Albany and my grandmother stayed behind with my brother.

  In that white emergency room, she did her best to calm me down, but I was still hysterical. A nurse or doctor came in. Another needle . . . Another cold steel table. This time, I was naked under a blue surgical blanket and could feel the wheels turning as we rolled down a white corridor.

  Surgery Number One: Attempt to Reattach Severed Left Foot

  When I next woke up, I immediately vomited. My postop puking soon became a tradition. Every time I woke from surgery, look out. Technicolor yawn.

  I felt woozy and was seeing double. The intensive care room vibrated white and bright. It took an hour before the queasiness stopped and I could focus.

  My parents were in chairs next to my bed. Dad said, “The doctors reattached your foot.” He explained that my foot was fastened to my ankle with sutures and a pigskin wrap. It wasn’t a graft. The pigskin served as organic surgical tape, holding it all together. The surgery took fourteen hours, apparently, and was deemed a success, yet I was not out of danger. My foot was bandaged like a mummy, except for my toes sticking out the top.

  Every hour, doctors and nurses in white coats came into the room to look at them. The toes were lacking oxygen and blood, dark purple. The doctors pricked them with needles. “Do you feel that? How about this? Do you feel it?” they asked. I didn’t feel a thing. My toes were numb. The rest of my leg throbbed and burned unrelentingly.

  I stayed in intensive care for a day or two, and then I was wheeled across the hall into another room. I had a roommate, a boy a few years older than me. I had no idea what was wrong with him, and only caught one glimpse before the nurses closed the curtain between our beds. In the middle of the night, I woke up when several doctors entered our room and surrounded the boy’s bed. I could see the shadow on the curtain of the doctors holding him down, of his struggling against them. Then I heard the boy’s frantic choking and gurgling. They were trying to ram something down his throat. For all I know, the doctors were saving his life, but it sounded like torture. He begged, “Stop!” over and over, his pleas cut off by wet gagging. The doctors weren’t swayed by his protest. Whatever they were doing seemed barbaric. I was scared out of my mind that when they finished with the boy, they’d push back the curtain to do the same thing to me.

  My parents told me the next day we were leaving Albany and going to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, for “more serious medical help,” as Dad said. After the night I’d had, quaking in terror about what had happened to the boy, I was ready to get out of there. I would have sprinted to the door, except for my pigskin-wrapped, black Frankenfoot.

  • • •

  My mom and I rode in an ambulance for four hours from Albany to Manhattan. Mount Sinai Hospital was on Madison Avenue and Ninety-ninth Street, not far from our apartment. I barely knew where I was. City, country, good hospital, bad hospital—I just wanted the hell to end. The ambulance pulled up to the hospital entrance, and my mother’s best friend, Sarah, was there to greet us. She was like a godmother to me, and remains a close friend. (Incidentally, Sarah and her sister, along with their husbands, were the cool hippies who created Hotsox, those rainbow toesies tube socks. Remember them?)

  My mom beamed at her. “Hi, Sarah!” she said, like it was any other day. Of course, Mom cried and agonized about the accident—for years. But she did it in private. She never let me see her upset. The doctors had been telling my parents all the potential outcomes, including deadly infections and amputation. Mom always managed to keep it light around me. She smiled and tried to raise my spirits. As a mother myself, I marvel at her strength and find myself wondering if she used up her lifetime supply of it that summer, and had nothing left for later on.

  Within minutes of settling me into my room at Mount Sinai, the nurses set up an oxygen tent around me, and paid very close attention to my vital signs. Dad demanded it. He took control of the situation and was issuing orders to everyone. His inner Brooklyn tough guy really came out when it came to saving his little girl. As a hotshot accountant, Dad worked with some huge names in entertainment and on Wall Street, including Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, Woody Allen, Michael Milken, and the Morgan Stanley banker John Mack, who was also my father’s best friend in those days. Dad was the no-bullshit money magician known for saving his clients a ton of cash. By contrast, Mom was gentle and kind, a magnificent shiksa goddess. Together, they were a prominent couple in New York society. When they walked into a room, even a hospital room, they were a force to be reckoned with.

  Dad was so well connected he got consultations with every vascular specialist in America and called in the best doctors. Just about everyone he knew tried to figure out how to preserve my leg. He brought in alternative therapists, including a woman who applied fresh aloe sap to my leg to draw out bacteria every hour for a couple of days. A friend of his at the Museum of Natural History unlocked an exhibit to access an ancient sample of some miracle regenerative mineral. Along with the oxygen tent, which was supposed to help blood flow to my foot, I spent hours in a hyperbaric chamber. It looked like a submarine, and mimicked the pressure of descending deep under the sea. My mom went in it with me. It was dark and noisy. A nurse told me that if we ascended too quickly, our skulls would cave in. Naturally, I was terrified of the metal contraption after that.

  The traditional doctors were dismissive about the alternative therapy at first, and openly hostile later on. Dad started referring to the doctors as “egotistical moneygrubbing schmucks.” This was the beginning of his lifelong loathing and distrust for Western medicine. His frustration with them was a rippling undercurrent of tension throughout my hospital stay.

  While Dad tallied up grievances, I collected stuffed animals. Whenever people came for a visit, they brought one for me. I had a hundred piled up behind my bed, and at least five tucked in with me at all times. Letters rolled in from my parents’ friends, from rock stars and politicians, who offered to do whatever they could to help. Each new doctor was the great white (and usually Jewish) hope. Dad pulled every string, tried every “cure.”

  Mom was a loving presence in the chair next to my bed, always smiling and optimistic. They were both desperate to keep me whole and intact. I’ve since been told that had the accident happened in 2012 and not 1977, reattachment would have worked. The seventies were the infancy of vascular surgery. The chances of saving my foot were none to none.

  • • •

  Cow shit—why in the world did I, or anyone, think playing in manure was fun? Why was that a good idea? Becky suggested we jump around in excrement and I’d said, “Cool!” What the hell was I thinking?

  Because of the cow manure infecting my wound, gangrene was running rampant throughout my system. I was put on IV broad spectrum antibiotics. The catheter stayed in my arm for another three weeks.

  My toes, meanwhile, went from navy blue to midnight black. The blackness crept from my toes up my foot. It was a week or more before my parents could accept that it would have to go.

  They brought in a doctor named Leon Root. (Small world aside: Years later, I went on a blind date with his son, Matt Root. We were having dinner and he mentioned his father was a doctor. I said, “Your father is Leon Root?” Matt nodded. “He consulted on my amputation when I was six!” I announced, a little too enthusiastically . . . probably not ideal small talk on a first date.) Dr. Root had an amazing reputation. He was like a god among mortals. He examined me, then told my parents in the hallway, “The infection is bad. We have to amputate. It’s a question of whether we amputate at the knee or the ankle. I recommend the ankle.”

  That was what my parents wanted to hear. The mor
e leg I had, the more normal my life would be, they thought. They hoped I’d be able to get a screw-on foot of some sort to attach to my leg. Technology advanced every day. Anything was possible in the future, they thought. My father sat down on my bed and told me, “You’re going to have another operation. The doctors are going to remove two or three of your toes. You’re going to be like the Bionic Woman,” he said. I pictured Lindsay Wagner from the hit TV show with her cyber limbs that were ten times stronger and faster than human ones, but was unmoved. I didn’t care about having super strength or bionic toes. I didn’t care if they chopped off my head at that point. I just wanted the pain to stop. I welcomed surgery. I thought it would be the end of the nightmare.

  Surgery Number Two: Amputation of the Left Foot at the Ankle

  Another long surgery, another rocky reentry into consciousness. I vomited and waited for my vision to adjust. I knew the operation was to remove my toes, but I could still feel them. I thought, Guess they didn’t take ’em. The phantom effect—believing you were intact after an amputation—was common. This subconscious trick of the mind brought solace to some, but no one had warned me about it in advance. So when I could see clearly again in my postop haze, I lifted my blanket and looked down at my legs and was genuinely surprised to see that my whole foot was gone. Just leg, and then . . . nothing.

  I felt disappointed. I wasn’t worried about my ability to walk in that moment. I wasn’t picturing myself in a wheelchair, or with a wooden leg like a pirate, or hobbling around with a cane. And I certainly wasn’t considering the future and wondering whether or not I’d adapt, fall in love, have children, or lead a relatively “normal” life. My father had looked me in the eye and told me the doctors were taking a few toes. They took the entire foot. I felt lied to.

  To this day, Dad and I haven’t discussed that day, or that conversation. He was winging it. My parents were in pain in an extraordinary situation that no one could possibly prepare for. They were doing their very best. (Interestingly, they did have some experience in this area. My brother Andre had had a surgery, too. He was born with twelve fingers, and had his extra digits removed surgically at birth. Granted, losing vestigial pinkies was less tense for them than my losing a foot.)

  Okay, I thought, It’s really gone. Bummer. I lowered the blanket and felt a little bit relieved. That surgery marked the end of the wacky treatments. It turned down the dial on my pain. But my hospital stay was only just getting started.

  As unsettling as the black desiccated toes had been, they were preferable to a raw stump. Because of the gangrene infection and for other reasons, the surgeons didn’t immediately cover my amputation wound with a skin graft. It looked like a science textbook cross section of a leg with the white bone in the middle, surrounded by muscle and ligament.

  The wound had to be bandaged tightly and cleaned three times a day. Nurses came into my room to change the gauze and tape. The flesh was raw, and the bandages would stick to the wound and meld into a crust. Every time—and I mean every single time—the nurses ripped the bandages off by force, tearing the healing wound open. It hurt more than the teeth of the barn cleaner. As soon as I saw the nurses come into my room with scissors and bandage trays, I would go into hysterics. They had to hold me down. I flailed against them while they unraveled the bandages. It was mayhem.

  I didn’t—and still don’t—understand the wisdom of ripping the flesh open and raw three times a day. Clearly they had their reasons, but as a six-year-old, it struck me as cruel and unusual punishment. My mom used her charm, begging the nurses to come an hour earlier, to mix up their schedule so I didn’t fret for an hour in anticipatory dread. She eventually figured out that if she wet the bandages by using a large syringe filled with water, they wouldn’t be as sticky. It helped a little. She also tried to distract me by biting my thigh really hard when the nurses changed the bandages.

  Once my infection was under control, I was cleared for a skin graft. My parents brought in Victor Rosenberg, a plastic surgeon (renowned for his boob and nose jobs), to talk about how a skin graft could be done. Just as with each surgery and treatment I’d had thus far, my parents and doctors told me that this was the one that would end the misery. The graft was going to make it all okay.

  Dr. Rosenberg examined me at the hospital. He was a very lovely, kind man. First, he looked at my stump. Then he turned me over, lifted my gown, and pinched my tush to see if it was fat enough to take skin for the graft.

  I was absolutely mortified. A strange man was touching my butt. It was the most embarrassing moment of the entire hospitalization so far. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people had lifted my gown to look at my foot and I didn’t care one bit. I’d mentally—and then literally—detached from it. My foot, and then the stump, had become public property in a way. But my butt was still private. Or, it had been. Now even that was under scrutiny.

  In the end, as it were, Dr. Rosenberg decided to take skin from my thighs.

  Surgery Number Three: Skin Graft to Cover the Base of My Stump

  He cut the thigh skin into strips, and arranged it across my stump in a crisscross pattern, like woven dough on top of a pie. The skin graft quickly healed, and the torturous bandage-changing sessions with the Nurses Ratched ended. My pain lessened. For the first time in nearly two months, I wasn’t on drugs or in agony. There was a savior, and he came in the form of Dr. Rosenberg.

  The pain was reduced so much, I could think about other things. Like love.

  While my hospital stay turned my father against medical doctors for the rest of his life, it had the opposite effect on me. I developed a doctor fetish. My first crush was on a resident at Mount Sinai. Whenever he came into my room, my heart would start pounding. I remember him looking a lot like Disney princes, dark wavy hair and piercing blue eyes, bright white smile. He joked around with me, and touched my shoulders to be reassuring. I was almost unbearably excited to see him.

  One morning he walked in, happy to see me. I acted like a wise ass, as usual, trying to make him laugh. I was lying on the bed, eating something. Suddenly, he yelled, “Don’t eat when you are lying down! Get up! Sit up!” He looked angry and irritated, like I’d broken a rule and proven myself to be a stupid kid.

  Obviously, he just didn’t want me to choke on my food. The tone was no different than a parent yelling at a child for putting a dry-cleaning bag over her head. I got that. But I’d put all my emotional hunger on him, and when he snapped at me, I felt like I didn’t have a friend in the world. As the saying goes, there’s a reason it’s called a crush.

  I had Mom, though. She hardly left my side for the entire two months I spent in the hospital. When she went to the bathroom, she left the door open so I could see her. If not, I would freak. She slept with me, changed my clothes, and gave me sponge baths. When she had to go—to pick up my brother or for whatever reason—her best friends, Sarah and Irena, also a German former Pan Am stewardess, took turns staying with me. They brought me Chinese food from my favorite restaurant, Bruce Ho’s Four Seas on Fifty-seventh Street between Park and Lexington (now a Starbucks). Although I loved Sarah and Irena, I cried when they came into my room. Their arrival meant Mom was going to go away. I needed Mom desperately. I couldn’t stand to be separated from her. That attachment, and the panic of losing it, I believe, was the basis for the anxiety disorder I later developed.

  My dad had to go to work during the day. My two-year-old brother, Andre, was being cared for by my grandmother and baby-sitters. Grandma came to the hospital a few times. My half brother, Billy, Dad’s son from a former marriage, came once. A haunted soul, he was sixteen then and already deeply involved with drugs. In the not-too-distant future, he would become a crack addict. That day, though, he was wonderful. He gave me an enormous red panda and told me funny stories for hours. In my experience, the most troubled people are often the sweetest. They carry a certain sensitivity to life’s pains and turn to drugs to numb themselves.

  • • •

  At the beginning o
f August, a team of doctors and nurses crowded into my room. The head nurse cleared her throat to make the announcement. “Aviva is ready to go home,” she said. “Congratulations. We’ll miss you!”

  I appreciated all they’d done for me. My parents had me write thank-you letters to every rescue worker, doctor, and nurse who treated me. But I wouldn’t miss any of them for a minute: I was so happy to leave. We didn’t have a lot of clothes to pack. I’d been living in hospital gowns for two months. But we did need a second taxi for all of my stuffed animals.

  Unbeknownst to me, the original reason we’d moved to the country for the entire summer was so we could renovate, decorate, and move into a new apartment in the city. While I was in the hospital, my dad oversaw the move from our old place into the Kenilworth at 151 Central Park West. The new building was a thirteen-story landmark built in 1903 with a dry moat around the perimeter and a russet brick facade. Along with the historic Dakota, Beresford, and San Remo, the Kenilworth was a perennial on the lists of the most prestigious buildings on the Upper West Side. Our four-thousand-square-foot apartment was on the tenth floor with spectacular views of Central Park from each window.

  My dad had grown up on the edge of poverty in Brooklyn, sharing a bed with his grandfather like in Willy Wonka. He went from having nothing to wanting for nothing. Now that he had money, he liked to spend it and enjoy it. Our lifestyle was opulent. And this apartment was a major step up from our smaller place on West Fifty-eighth Street. My parents bought it for a mere sixty thousand dollars—even in 1977, that wasn’t a lot—because the West Side was considered dangerous compared to the snooty and expensive East Side. In reality, Central Park West was about as dangerous as a pillow fight, but whatever. We felt more at home among the artists and bohemians on the West Side anyway. Our neighbors were Michael Douglas and Bill Moyers. Everyone in the building seemed to have interesting jobs and lifestyles: museum directors, designers, artists, and mavericks.