Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

by John Callahan

  “Yah, yah, it doesn’t sound like it’s going too well.”

  “It’s awful. I don’t know how I can go on. I just don’t know how I’m going to have a future at all. The doctors don’t tell me but it looks like I’m going to be like this for life.”

  “John, you’re a special person. I know you can make it. I feel it.”

  “I just don’t know. I just don’t know. I’m going crazy.”

  We would both cry. And how I loathed having all the goddamn slimeball nurses in this tiny little ICU all able to see this tender soap-opera thing between us. I couldn’t even have a moment alone to go crazy with my new friend.

  “I got you some flowers. I hope you like them.”

  “Yes. Just put them on the windowsill there.”

  “Would you like me to rub your back?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a lovely day out. It’s very hot. I drove here in my convertible.”

  I could just imagine this beautiful blonde with the sexy smile driving her convertible in the sun down the Hollywood Freeway from Santa Monica to visit me, to talk to me in her soft voice about nonsensical things I can barely remember.

  “Do you think I’m still good-looking?”

  “You are a very good-looking young man. That hasn’t changed. You have tremendous strength. I know it. You will go on.”

  I was comforted. From anybody else I would have thought this was total bullshit. I believed Annu. I knew that I was becoming dependent on her, that I was putting all my emotional eggs into her basket. It was that or go nuts.

  Tactfully, Annu never said much about herself. I gathered that her husband worked on an offshore oil rig and that they had no kids. When, after six weeks in the ICU, it was decided that I was stable enough to leave intensive care and move on to a rehabilitation center, she came to say good-bye. And that was that. I never saw her again and I wonder sometimes if she really wasn’t just a dream. She was an angel, anyway.

  RANCHO LOS AMIGOS Hospital, fifteen miles away in Downey, California, was one of the largest and most advanced rehabilitation centers in the world. Almost from the moment I regained consciousness after the accident, the aides, and especially Mrs. Hasson, were coaching me to “try for Rancho” in preference to Encino, where there was another, lesser facility. They made it sound like getting into Harvard. So I never failed to mention Rancho when talking to doctors or senior staff. After a while everyone simply assumed I was going to Rancho, and that’s the way it went down on my chart.

  By the end of my stay in intensive care I had become exceedingly restless. I knew by then that I was going to have to live in a wheelchair. I remembered movies I’d seen: it was perhaps cool to be in a wheelchair, had a certain dashing style. But, I saw no future as a ceiling tile expert. It would be a definite improvement to see the world in the vertical once more, to trade my belly-button perspective for life at areola level. So I was excited when they put on a gurney, strapped and braced into position, and loaded into an ambulance. But I wasn’t exactly headed toward a wheelchair—at least not yet.

  A week before I left, Wiles explained to me that I would have to have an operation to strengthen and stabilize my spine; there was no hope of improvement, but the operation would prevent further damage. One of the benefits of going to Rancho was that this procedure would be done by a world-famous expert, the hospital’s director, Dr. Emile Stahlmaster. Performed shortly after my arrival at Rancho Los Amigos, it was called a cervical anterior fusion. The smashed vertebrae were reinforced with bone taken from my hip. To bear the weight of my head, the transplanted bone had to be installed on the front side of the spine. Dr. Stahlmaster had to more or less disassemble my neck to get there. He had done the same thing, I was told, for George Wallace.

  On my third morning at Rancho they gave me a shot and I began to fade away. I remember feeling very cold. I fought the anesthesia, fought the feeling of control slipping away from me, screaming and floundering around. Finally I passed out.

  I woke up in stages, as if I were a swimmer rising from a deep dive into a deep lake. First was darkness. Then, ever so slowly, light above. Then shapes, perhaps the roots of trees at the water’s edge. And then breaking the thin membrane of the surface into a blind, bright world that was mostly made up of pain. I felt tremendous pain and thirst. I saw what looked like waves, waves of white linen passing across my vision. White curtains being drawn around me, white doctors.

  I couldn’t speak to tell anybody of the horrible thirst. A thick plastic tube—an airway—had been rammed down my throat to keep me from choking to death during the operation and I couldn’t communicate anything. That frightened me badly.

  I slept and woke and slept and woke. When I woke for good, I realized that I had been better off asleep. A nurse finally came by and pulled the airway out of my throat. Every couple of hours she explained that I was being turned on a turning sheet—“logrolled,” in hospital jargon—so that my neck, now caught in a stiff brace, would not move in relation to any part of my body. I yearned to kick my feet, to move any limb at all to distract myself from this torture in my neck. I couldn’t. I asked for water and was given nothing. I was getting water in an IV, they told me. I might choke. It was three days before I was allowed some ice chips.

  The pain reduced my sleep periods to short, nightmare-filled dozes. I dreamed about my friend Tad Jamison, a baseball prodigy on a Little League team, six feet four inches tall even at age twelve. He was a pitcher and he always hit a home run. At age thirteen he had hung himself from a water pipe in his father’s basement workshop, using a dog leash. In my dream I saw Tad’s swollen face, heard him scream, saw him kick. Every time I got another pain shot, and passed out again, I’d have this dream.

  I experienced the stretching of time all sufferers of truly intolerable pain report. During the worst of my six weeks in Harbor General I had never once contemplated suicide. Now I sincerely wanted to die.

  Even that passed.

  When, after several days, I managed to half emerge from my drugged state, a guy carrying a clipboard wearing a tweed jacket, a knit tie, and a goofy grin came by.

  “Hi, I’m Wally Green from Public Relations! As it happens, I actually witnessed your entire neck surgery. Yep, I actually saw your neck wide open. The whole damn thing! It was really interesting. Boy, I’ll tell you, what they can do nowadays. . . .”

  Chapter 4

  “The latest in adaptive equipment.”

  After a week they transferred me from bed to yet another gurney and wheeled me across the Rancho parking lot to Ward 6, Cervical Injuries.

  Rancho Los Amigos occupies a campus bigger than my hometown, huge building after huge building joined by palm-lined walks and formal gardens. Enormous wards catered to each category of maim: spinals, head injuries, amputees, deformed children, werewolf-bite victims. In my day, there was even an airplane hangar’s worth of iron-lungers, people too smashed up to do their own breathing.

  My room on Ward 6 looked like the set of The Men, except that Marlon Brando was nowhere in sight. The rest of the cast was perfect, though: two whites, two Hispanics, one black, one Japanese, and one American Indian. It was an ACLU attorney’s dream.

  For the first time, after eight weeks laid out alone on a marble slab, I witnessed animation again. People were vibrant, as quads and paraplegics often are on these wards. People with real wills rolled in and out at tremendous speeds. Running around with the sidebars of their chair seats casually left off. Slapping palms against the doorjamb to make the chairs cut sharp turns. Flying into the rooms on two wheels, grabbing stuff out of lockers and roaring back to wherever they were headed, laughing, swearing, and kidding one another. Even one guy driving an electric wheelchair with his mouth!

  The patients were buzzing the nurses, who were dressed in bright lime-green or champagne-pink blouses over their white slacks. The nurses were barking at the guys in ward vernacular. “Get the fuck down here, Willy. You know you got O.T. Hey, get back and clean this mess u
p. Get out of here and grab some P.T.—lookit, it’s sunny out there!”

  Holy shit, maybe I’ll be active like this, I thought.

  A dark-haired girl rolled up with an aggressively cheerful, “Hi! I’m Debbie!” She was dressed for success in a sharp navy outfit with tie, and was from the front office. In spite of the wheelchair, she looked plenty able. Maybe there was life after a broken back.

  If so, it was a ways off. In addition to my neck brace I had to wear a diaphragm across my stomach, support hose, and splints to stiffen my wrists. Once this exoskeleton was on, I could be attached to a Hoyer lift and hoisted into a chair for the first time. I think I lasted five or six minutes before passing out. It took two weeks to build up enough sitting tolerance to last the four to six hours necessary for the therapy program to begin. In that time my body literally relearned the habit of supplying my brain with blood.

  It was amazing to see the world from an upright position, to regain normal lateral vision after two months without so much as a pillow. I felt like a kid on the first day of high school, a total outsider. I had to make it into this clique.

  I am a C5-6 quadriplegic, which means that my spinal cord is severed between the fifth and sixth vertebrae counting down from the top. That’s about halfway between decathalon champion and rigor mortis. I can work my triceps, half of my deltoids, half of my diaphragm. If I don’t watch it, I can choke to death. I can extend my fingers, but not close them around a fork or a pen. Everything from my diaphragm down is without sensation and, naturally, beyond voluntary control.

  Paraplegics, by contrast, are people injured lower on the spine. They have the use of all or most of their upper bodies and can play, for example, wheelchair basketball. Any C5-6 would love to be a paraplegic and, at the same time, is grateful not to have been injured high enough to rate an iron lung. Yes, quads wish they were paras, paras wish they were able-bodied, and the able-bodied wish they were Jane Fonda.

  Quite a bit of the curriculum at Rancho involves getting the autonomic nervous system to take over bodily functions that were formerly controlled by the brain. Say, for example, you want to take a pee. If you are able-bodied, your bladder signals that it is full. Excusing yourself from your board meeting, you head for the toilet. Only when safely astride the porcelain throne, or before the marble magnificence of the urinal, does your brain permit the appropriate muscle to relax and the stream to issue forth.

  But the para or quadriplegic does not sense when his or her bladder is full. There is no mental command to loose or to bind, as convenience dictates. Each quad or paraplegic is at first fitted with an “indwelling” catheter to route urine that is being passed at random intervals. This device must be installed and removed by a trained person, so it is desirable to replace it with a Texas catheter: a condom with a tube attached. But that can’t happen until the bladder itself is trained to empty itself at predictable intervals. At Rancho that was the job of the Dick Police.

  I don’t know what the women with spinal injuries called them, but for me the urology technicians, mounted on speedy golf carts equipped with racks of pee bags and catheters, remained the Dick Police. Their mission: to seek out every quad and para according to his or her schedule, catheterize, unclamp, empty and reclamp each and every bladder until such time as it autonomously stayed shut until called upon to open.

  Naturally we tried to outwit the Police, but they were an elite corps, astoundingly efficient. Once, I parked my chair in a remote supply closet behind seven gurneys piled high with blankets. Hell, I thought, they’ll never get me. However, minutes later, they hit. The door flew open, the light snapped on. Zip, the dick came out. Zip, in went the catheter. And zip, they were gone. Cutting the tape, Nurse Robbie clicked his scissors at me mockingly. “It won’t be long now, Callahan!”

  Other simple human functions required special attention as well: at age twenty-one, I taught myself to eat.

  I was left alone in a wheelchair in the lunchroom one morning with a bowl of cereal on my lap. Maybe I was late, or maybe the therapists simply didn’t want to watch. My neck was rigidly braced, so I could see the bowl only as a blur on the edge of my peripheral vision. My wrists were in heavy plaster casts to stabilize the tendons until I regained some muscular strength. A spoon was stuck through a spring fastener on the right cast.

  When I thought I had some cereal in the spoon, I started to bring it up. But my arm was trembling so much as I tried to coordinate my muscles to bring it to my mouth that the cereal shook off the spoon.

  After several more attempts, I dropped the spoon into the cereal and a geyser of milk splattered up into my face. And as I let my arms fall, I could not feel them contact the armrests of the chair.

  I thought, This is the way it’s going to be for the rest of my life. I can’t even feed myself. I can’t shit or piss for myself. I can’t have a woman. I can’t get in or out of my wheelchair and I can’t even push it effectively.

  The wheelchair was, so far, a big disappointment. I thought I would be able to zip around and have some freedom. But I was so weak that it took me an exhausting half hour just to get down the hall, a distance of fifty yards. Much less negotiate the miles and miles of similar halls, each half a football field long that ran throughout the huge complex.

  There in the lunchroom, dripping with sticky milk, the utter strangeness of it swept over me as if it had all started five minutes before. I was a head stitched to a dead body. I was living my life in a hopeless situation, in a doorless six-bed room with a bunch of goons and nurses sweeping in and out as they pleased. I couldn’t go out and see my friends. I missed my friends. I missed my family.

  I felt the tears begin to run down my face. I thought, Jesus Christ in heaven, let a lightning bolt strike me fucking down.

  Julio Gomez, a ward mate who was a heroin addict and had been shot in the neck during an L.A. gang war, didn’t want to learn to feed himself. Julio put his face down in the bowl. “I’ll eat like a fucking dog, man.”

  When I was able to sit up in the chair long enough, I began two hours of physical therapy and two of occupational therapy daily. The latter included feeding, grooming, and dressing. I remember having my hands harnessed for long periods of time to a rolling-pin-like apparatus that sanded a piece of wood. A bright future as a finish sander stretched before me if I played my cards right.

  Physical therapy was more inspiring. Since my body would now have to be hauled around, dressed, maneuvered in and out of bed, made love to and so forth without voluntary control, it would need to be capable of extraordinary flexibility. I was strapped to a tilt table, a padded board about four feet off the ground, fitted with a footrest to keep me from sliding off. A leg would be splinted and attached to a rope coming down from a pulley on the ceiling. Then the rope would be tightened and the leg pulled up as, simultaneously, the table was tilted down. A few more inches every day. If I’d been able to feel it, I would have confessed to heresy or anything else after a few seconds; instead, after an hour of this daily for six months, my hamstrings were so abnormally stretched that I could have stuffed my toes in my ears. If I could have moved them.

  I couldn’t feel the pain of the actual stretching; but I could feel “dysreflexia,” a response that included sweating, chills, headaches and spasms in my back muscles.

  When not wondering when the therapist would actually succeed in pulling off my leg, I watched the scene in the huge gym, where paraplegics learned to transfer in and out of their chairs, quads practiced rolling on the forty-by-fifty-foot elevated mat, people in leg braces learned to walk, all under the supervision of a perfectly conditioned staff.

  My therapist, Chuck Wilson, commuted to Alabama, where he put Governor Wallace to similar torture. “Come on, tell me about Wallace,” I kept asking. No matter how I pleaded, though, he never let fall a single word on the subject. Either he was professionally discreet or he was afraid some of the governor’s supporters might burn a cross on his front lawn.

  My second therapist was a
n attractive woman named Mary Mills. I really looked forward to rolling around on the mat with Mary, whose years in the gym had given her the ideal California hardbody.

  Among many other things she taught me transfers, the art of getting from chair to bed, couch, car seat, and so on, unassisted. For this the quadriplegic uses a “transfer” board, not unlike a skateboard without the wheels and about the same size. I learned to shove one end under my ass and place the other on the destination surface, in this case the elevated wrestling mat. Then I would stiffen my elbows and use the heels of my hands to scoot myself across the board. Since this involved balance it was especially hard to do with my rigid neck brace, still on a month after my operation, which prevented me from shifting most of the weight that was still available to shift—my head.

  The final P.T. element was weight training, and, in keeping with the general theme of bondage, I pumped my iron via ropes, pulleys and a set of Velcroed handcuffs.

  A couple of times a week I wheeled down to the orthotics department where, at great expense, a set of custom-fitted wrist splints was being developed for me. These were spring-loaded to increase the force of my grip. I would have great silver claws! I wanted to take them out to the Mojave and try them out on a dead jackal. Later on, living in the real world, I would find these Bionic Man gadgets embarrassing; eventually I threw them away.

  Too bad most quads are broke. What a market for souped-up wheelchairs, electric beds, sixty-thousand-dollar adapted vans, remote-controlled lifts. . . . The very cushion my sensationless behind sits on is a three-hundred-dollar item. Bedsores can literally kill you. If unchecked, changes in the cells occur that lead to osteomyelitis, degenerative bone disease. The sores are a constant threat when the body can’t feel itself being abraded, can’t shift its position to get relief it can’t even appreciate anyway. “Death Row” at Rancho was a ward devoted to people with hopeless bedsores. Sometimes I went down to look at it when I had nothing better to do. It seemed aptly named.