Slipping Away

Saturday morning at eleven o’clock a van from Key West will be here to pick me up and take me back to the city where an apartment without steps is available for me for the next month. I will be in the city where if I need help my friends will be answering 911. I have been discussing all eventualities with my therapists and feel reasonably confident I can cope with showering and dressing and strengthening my legs by walking.

I have my tools to get dressed, I have my tools to go to the toilet and I have my tools for propulsion. I know how to use them.  All that is left is to get stronger then I cast them off. It’s time to go. 

I am healthy and ready and I know the good things to come, being with Layne and hopefully being able to help not hinder. To have Rusty alongside daily. To be in the world and yet I have a heavy heart. These people gave me back my life. They never gave up on me. They took me when I couldn’t sit up in bed and made me whole.  Along the way I have cracked jokes and devoted myself to completing the exercises. I am sorry to be going. I know it sounds odd but going home fills me with fear.  

Loren is away on vacation and we struggled to hold back tears as we said goodbye. Eddy is off tomorrow so he and I won’t work together again. He got my legs working against the odds and against my natural absence of coordination.  He too will be gone forever as soon as I write this. 

Natalie and her Bucci will be no more, perfectly sweet strong Cuban coffee to start each afternoon session. Soon I will be among the able bodied stumping to keep up.  Going home? They say. Lucky you! I suppose so I say. It must be good because I am getting better.  That doesn’t ease the heartbreak.

At Sunset

I fear I am become institutionalized inside the walls of rehab. I have three or four days left until I have to face the outside world this weekend. This is my 54th day learning to cope with half a body and already in the gym a gulf exists between myself and the other patients. Not only are they all new faces but they also cannot relate to me as they see me, no longer visibly broken, lifting weights and climbing stairs. I am alien in my own gym! 

I am far removed from the lump barely able to sit up in a wheelchair unable to propel myself or bend my braced leg. Today Eddy banished my wheelchair after watching me push my walker from my room to the gym, at least a ten minute walk at my slow lumbering pace through the endless corridors. 

He looked at me did Eddy as though challenging me and said no more wheelchair. I must have looked horrified as he said I’m serious. And left me standing in the middle of the gym with only the walker. I did some leg exercisess and walked back to my room. My right leg aches as I stepped ever more clumsily down the corridor, the endless corridor. 

And so my wheels are put away. I sat in a regular armchair wondering how hard it would be to get up ( a little hard). Now I no longer have the rolling chair I miss the comfort of rolling, the ease of sitting, the security of being able to stop anywhere and rest. Now I have to walk. May I have many walks left in me. 

I enjoy listening from time to time to Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs the lyrics to the last of which are as follows. Actually a German poem Im Abendrot by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. The elderly composer was in exile in Switzerland to escape the Nazis looking back over a long and fruitful life preparing to walk into his final sunset with his beloved. 

At Sunset (Im Abendrot)

We've walked, hand in hand,

through hardship and joy.

Now we both rest

from walking across the silent countryside.

 

All around us the valleys are fading,

it has already become dark.

Just two larks are still rising,

dreamlike, into the heavens.

 

Stand here, and let them fly about,

it will soon be time to sleep,

lest we go astray

in this loneliness.

 

Oh further, silent peace!

So profound at sunset.

How tired we are of traveling:

Is this perhaps death?

El Dia de Los Muertos

Denise went to Mexico City for a long weekend to enjoy the Day of the Dead celebrations. Her pictures were exactly what I wanted, an opportunity to step outside my room and see color and beauty from the world outside. First she sent me some murals and amongst them we see under the bowler hat, the shiny forehead of José Martí the Cuban revolutionary standing next to Frieda Kahlo the artist:

Denise is my oldest friend in the United States. I met her at Long Key State Park in June 1981 when I was traveling across the US on a Vespa 200 I had bought brand new for $1500 in Brooklyn. Those were the days! Seen here in Mexico later that summer: 

Denise was doing a tourist survey and she invited me to stay at her place in Delray Beach after I visited Key West. And we have kept in touch ever since. Pretty amazing. 

So here are the pictures as sent to me. I hope you enjoy them.  I did! 

“¿This is how you protect me?”

Atrophy

Atrophy sets in when muscles haven’t been used for three days. The longer they lie idle the more they atrophy. Atrophy is defined more or less as wasting away or more primly as declining in effectiveness or use. Fascinating eh?  Like you, I never ever considered atrophy in my body parts before I landed on my back, broken, on Highway 1 after flying across the hood of the car that stopped in my path. These days I can hardly stop thinking about it. 

My sister-in-law the doctor was surprised when I described atrophy in my right leg as a stiffening of the muscle. She has only ever read about it I guess because she viewed atrophy as wasting away. In fact my right leg is swollen and for a long while was impossible to bend at  the knee. I had it in a brace to protect the two fractures in my thigh and also my broken kneecap. That was the good leg as my uninjured left was attached to the most broken part of my pelvis.  I am a mess. 

God I hated that scratchy itchy brace.  I described it as a dead sheep strapped to my leg. When I moved in the Hoyer Lift one person was dedicated to supporting my leg.  Dropping it even a little off level or twisting it caused me screaming pain. Burning pain across the thigh rendered me incoherent in agony. I was terrified of moving it incorrectly or knocking it. I lived in immobility with the dead sheep for weeks. Exercising the leg was exhausting. Once liberated you now understand, the bastard leg was completely atrophied. It’s still not ideal but I can bend it and stand on it without screaming in agony. Progress. 

Elias my Occupational Therapist has done more to cure the atrophy than anyone. He massages my leg using painful deep techniques that break up the muscle and the fibers surrounding the muscle. The best way I can describe the feeling of atrophy is as though my leg were encased in dried glue. The surface feels numb and against the glue you have a totally ineffectual muscle trying to move the leg. It’s not exactly painful but it is a sensation that produces a deep seated ache in the knee joint as I force the leg to bend. It is bizarre I tell you. I hope you never have to undergo atrophy.

The ever brilliant Elias deployed my gait belt usually used to support me while standing and stumbling to force my leg to stretch the knee joint. He pulled it up till I gasped in pain and then bent the leg back gently under my wheelchair while he sat on a stool and pulled gently but insistently to bend my atrophied leg back under the chair. The effect was immediate and my leg suddenly felt lighter and looser. Amazing. Painfully astonishing. 

I start my afternoon physical therapy sessions on the bicycle. It has a motor and in the early days I’d let the motor pedal my feet around loosening up the muscles and joints. Nowadays I pedal for twenty minutes as warm up to walking and climbing stairs. My right leg is still heavy and doesn’t move as easily or as fast as my left which is uninjured. But I can lift it till the right leg is straight and I can bend it and I am walking on both legs, only 50% weight bearing on my left as the pelvis above it is still healing from major fractures. But I am walking not hopping, even if my clumsy gait most closely resembles Frankenstein’s monster. Note no hands on my gait belt. 

It is a strange slow road to recovery and I probably have four to eight more months of work to regain my lost mobility they say.  I am aiming more at four months thanks as I need to get back to walking Rusty and exercising at Broga. I am planning on taking Rusty to empty back streets and letting him loose to walk the road even if I can’t keep up.  I want to see him out with me once again. 

Meanwhile I am working my legs here with Tahina practicing going up with my good (right) leg and going down with my bad leg:

I used to envy people I saw walking up and down those three steps.  Now at last, 48 days into rehab it’s my turn.  Now I climb and descend clutching the rails like my life depends on it, which it does. Three trips and I’m spent.  If you want a whole man I am not he but unlike a spinal chord break or an amputee I will get back to walking. To those who struggle with far less chance of that reward than myself, my hat is off to you. Whatever comes next in my life this tussle with atrophy I  shall never forget.  Never. 

Another Weekend

Another weekend this time cut short by a service at B’nai Zion synagogue in Key West. My wife had planned to leave in the evening but cut short her visit to attend the gathering. It was the right thing to do considering the unprecedented levels of terrorism breaking out across the country at places where people gather. 

Still I had a couple of nights to enjoy the company of my family. So I collected a few more Rusty pictures! 

Despite the brevity not a bad weekend. 

Bags of Time

Among the books given to me is a slim volume of poetry I can dip into as the mood strikes, The Rain in Portugal by Billy Collins. I enjoy poetry by an eclectic bunch of writers from Robert Browning to Wilfred Owen to Billy Collins and then I get sideswiped by a completely different voice like Wendell Berry, and my sister turned me on to Seamus Heaney. Anyway I was wandering through Google wondering and I came across another of Collins’ shaggy dog stories which struck a chord. The first dog poem of his I read was called Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In The House and it made me laugh out loud in a bookstore so I felt obliged to buy the book.  I like to think that all the irritants listed here by the poet are spared my boy, seen here being walked by my wife on a visit to my rehab in the background. 

Anyway here’s Collins’ dog poem: 

The Revenant

I am the dog you put to sleep,

as you like to call the needle of oblivion,

come back to tell you this simple thing:

I never like you -- not even one bit.

When I licked your face,

I thought of biting off your nose.

When I watched you toweling yourself dry,

I wanted to leap up and unman you with one snap.

I resented the way you moved,

your lack of animal grace,

the way you would sit in a chair to eat,

a napkin in your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,

but I was too weak, a trick you taught me

while I was learning to sit and heel,

and -- greatest of insults -- shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash

would excite me

but only because it meant I was about

to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,

but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,

disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.

You always scratched me in the wrong place.

All I ever wanted from you

was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe

as the moon rose in the sky.

It took all of my strength

not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,

the yellow raincoat, the monogrammed sweater,

the absurdity of your lawn,

and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed

and are glad it did not happen sooner --

that everyone here can read and write,

the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose.

I would then thank you all for listening so politely and patiently. And I would profusely thank Billy Collins for the poems I love, but could not possibly have written.