Small Town Living

Yesterday saw me in another van traveling to the doctors office for a critical set of x rays to determine how much healing has taken place and whether or not I can stand at all on my legs.  It was a day of self centered anxiety seeing me unable to concentrate and nervously chasing Facebook and Adventure Rider my preferred motorcycle forum (!). Thank God for the mindless nonsense of short entries on Facebook in my current state of isolation! I decided to write a thank you note to the life savers at Trauma Star. I got 200 likes in 12 hours which blew me away and makes me glad our air ambulance is  so popular. 

The other thing that blew me away was how many people had participated in some way.  Two people were at Square Grouper and saw the wreck and checked in. One woman about whom I remembered nothing actually did hold my hand and talk to me. 

Nikki also told me she was surprised when I started laughing saying I figured I’d really have to call out sick that night.  I don’t think you’re expected to crack a funny in extremis. I have no memory. Weird. But in the big picture this is less about me and more about the community in which I live. Can you immagine so much outpouring of decency for a complete stranger?  I really do feel blessed to live in the Keys.  This incident has brought that home most vividly.

By two o’clock I was on my way to Doctor Quinnans office.  They took x rays only after the office strong man picked me up under my armpits and raised me vertically out of my chair and plonked me on the x ray table. Utterly astonishing when it is done as easily as you or I putting grocery bags on the counter. Dr Quinnan studied the before and after pictures.

I know nothing about surgery except I do know that man is a bloody genius. He said my wounds were bad. I was split open like a chicken and where my pelvis was supposed to join there was a two inch gap as my legs cartwheeling pulled the two sides apart. Check out the ironmongery inside me knitting me together: 

That pin at the top limits the amount of weight I can bear on my wholly uninjured left leg - irony!  My injured right is supported by numerous pins and screws and plates and can thus support weight as tolerated by me. Excellent! We have reason now for the insurance company to let me stay to continue and expand my excellent physical therapy. That discussion happens today so expect tomorrow to hear about that in excruciatingly boring detail. I apologize for all this stuff about me but unfortunately this is my life at the moment. 

I am looking forward to the next phase hopefully still in this first rate rehab in Cutler Bay. I hope you will stick along for the ride even though this isn’t Key West content. I shall be happy to get back to that whenever I can believe me. I am more grateful than you know for your words of support and general kindness. 

In regards to my wife Layne she is a private person and prefers not to be grist for my mill here but she knows I love and appreciate her kindness to me in this time. It may be worth noting over the 24 years of marriage arthritis has put her in the hospital numerous times so at the moment our rôles are reversed. Plus yesterday the passenger window in the the car stopped cooperating. The Ford dealer couldn’t help but they inspected the window and gave Layne the part numbers required to get it to go up and down again. She passed them on to Oily’s on Stock Island and the window motor should be fixed by Friday. How about that? No husband necessary!

Onward and upward! 

Decision Day

Folks, I need a favor today and I know this isn’t much of a post especially considering how little Key West content this Diary has had lately...Forgive me but my mind is much taken by an appointment I have this afternoon with Dr Quinnan. He’s the surgeon who rather expertly repaired my ravaged pelvis and who will decide today if I can put weight on my legs.

If he says I can chances are the insurance will let me stay here to continue getting first rate therapy. If my pelvis still can’t support my weight in any measurable degree I go home for in home care which as lovely as it would be to see the Keys is not so great as a treatment plan. 

You have been so kind and thoughtful in your comments I am embarrassed to ask for more but continuing on in rehab means a lot so I thought to ask any of you who feel like it to invoke any practice you believe in, prayer, thoughts, visualization or warm fuzzies to side with my best outcome and a positive report from the surgeon. I thank you in advance.

If I get an unfavorable report and have to go home it will simply be a new challenge. Friends stand ready to come and spend time supervising me and the Key West Police Department is being amazing supporting me in my difficulties. Best employers ever. It makes me emotional to see how they are helping me with post rehab accommodations. Volunteers have installed a donated chair lift at my house and the department donation fund for just such cases as this is standing by in case I do go home to put me up in a wheelchair accessible apartment in the city. Thus if I need help I call my friends at 911...Stress relief is uncanny knowing volunteers have my back.

I have learned so much in this medical process about myself, my online friends, my physical friends and the community in which I live. I know now not to be afraid of hospitals or sickness and to appreciate the caregivers in an uncaring insurance driven medical system. This whole ghastly experience showed me I have more resilience than I imagined and also how lucky my family is to live in the Keys where there is more support than I ever realized. I also know the value of joy, and sharing it and being open and authentic. Lessons hard learned for a shy introvert like me. 

Bless you all and thank you for making this lonely expedition to the outer reaches easier. 

Michael Makes His Mark

Every weekday morning around 10:30 I take a short flight out of bed in the Hoyer Lift and into my wheelchair. Then the sweet and lovely Natalie pushes me to Occupational Therapy where I exercise my upper body. Natalie is pretty no doubt but so much more than that.  She is so kind and gentle she guards my injured foot like it matters to her as I swing round the Hoyer Lift. She is planning a career in therapy as she supports her boyfriend through chiropractor school so healthcare is all in the family as it were. If I had a daughter I’d be proud of one like Natalie. 

Once at the gym Elias takes over and sets me weights and tasks to build upper body strength. Then he brings me a chocolate espresso from the machine, a huge incentive! My tasks are to curl weights in my hands, lift and stretch in various ways. Yesterday a little old lady was sitting next to me at the table in her wheelchair. She looked a wreck with purple mottled skin and a thick head of unkempt hair she was bent double and holding a hand exerciser, one of those plastic gates with elastic bands intended to make your hand stronger. 

Elias and I posing for the inevitable selfie...

I’m not allowed to photograph patients and to avoid being able to identify her I’ll change her name but the conversation went like this. 

“Hi. I’m Michael. What’s your name.” That got me a grimace. “Do you speak English? Hablas Español?” That got me a grunted Yes.  No English speaker in Miami wants to be addressed in Spanish especially not my Italian accented pidgin Spanish with Italian thrown in when I forget the Spanish. I was encouraged by that one word. 

“Where are you from?”   - Here 

“Miami? Cool no one is from Miami” I said.  - I am

“Squeeze that elastic band. Imagine it’s all those people who moved to Miami and screwed up your home town.” The previously comatose patient started squeezing her hand tool. The therapists were in a juvenile huddle gossiping. 

“What’s your name? And keep squeezing...” -Rosie.  

“How do you do.” - I hate this place. 

“Squeeze the damned rubber band.” I said and Rosie started giggling hunched over in her chair. All it took was a little interest. Then before I could ask about her family or anything interesting (I’ll bet she was a spy in World War Two or something equally outlandish) her cold therapist wheeled her away. I’ll talk to anyone these days.  I was nearly dead a month ago. 

After lunch I go to physical therapy and work on my legs and core strength. Eddy lifts me out of the chair with another Hoyer Lift and stretches me out on a plastic pad that looks more like a four poster bed with bondage apparatus than an exercise platform but that is what it is. 

Yesterday we didn’t use the Redcord pulleys, we practiced rolling. Let’s face it rolling sounds as energy consuming as raising a six pound weight but let me tell you learning to roll to the left with a bum right leg and using no hands was quite something. I started by trying to raise my legs and while under control letting them back down to the mat. That set my incisions burning. Nothing like fire in your leg to focus your attention. Then Eddy had me sit up from side to side. Then the big kahuna, he made me position my legs, left under right and immobile right as far forward as possible and...roll!

Damn! I did it! And I didn’t grab those black carabiners in the upright post you can see in the picture above.  I couldn’t believe it!  I was so grateful I grabbed Eddy’s hand and pretended to kiss it. He laughed and that sealed my fate.  A complete stranger across the room shouted “Michael’s happy!”  General hilarity. I guess my noisy progress has been under observation. I laid back on the mat and laughed. Hell of a day.

The Edge Of The Unknown

I have managed for many years to drift along in what I can only call a very satisfactory way, dodging reality and getting bored from time to time. The trouble is this  near death experience has thrown into stark relief the cracks in my life. I write this essay with some trepidation as I don’t really know how to “make every day count” but I feel some obligation now to do just that.  Only boring people get bored, right?  How could I get bored?  Marking time till retirement...that rabbit hole I was so eager to start down in 2021. 

And in the midst of these musings I’ve had conversations that have illuminated my thoughts. In conversation with my oldest friend in the US whom I met on my Vespa voyage of exploration in 1982 we were talking last night (instead of writing this blog) and I mentioned Anthony Bourdain whom I admired and whose last shows illuminate my Sunday nights in rehab. For my friend the late chef was no more than a loud New Yorker and I wanted to correct that image but it soon came clear there would be none of that.  In her mind he was no more than that. This despite the fact both myself and another traveler friend both thought highly of him. Nope, no change no way no how. Her mind is closed no new opinions wanted. 

This brings me to Meg Cabot a well known author among youngsters and fans of her book and film The Princess Diaries. I knew of her thanks to the Key West Citizen but I was not drawn to descriptions of her books. I am not the demographic. So I’m lying in bed, as you do in my situation when Luis the handyman drops a package in my lap. And this author who has your average giant publishing empire to handle has taken the time to package some books and write the most personal and kind, dare I say flattering note to me and packaged it all up and figured my address and mailed it all off in good order. Bit of a head spinner really. So now I’m trying to write this damned page forgetting she actually reads it. The weirdest thing is I started into one of the books and I like it. How about that? Once again my closed mind is forced open. There is no end to it. I tried to say thank you by Facebook an uncertain medium so let me say it here untrammeled by gatekeepers and the vagaries of giant corporations. Thank you. 

I got chocolates puzzles and games from Internet friends and my wife’s cousin in Chicago Lyn whom we visit from time to time but never enough. Plus I got a rather fun read from a visitor who dropped in unhappily while I was at the doctors. Check this out:

I think all this ebullience and lust for life sits badly with some people.  I rather fear I have put one friend in the lost category in my pursuit of abundance. It’s not all good marching through daily life like a bull in a china shop and I don’t recommend it. The trouble is when you are in my position finesse gets lost at the wayside. Somewhere in this process I need to find the brakes I’m thinking, and I will need to slow down but right now I’m alive and I don’t want to waste a minute.  Fear or trepidation have no place in my life. Not helplessness neither.

I often think back to a morning driving to Big Pine when I saw a car stop in the highway and drop some trash on the ground. I reached the spot after they left and found a tortoise upside in the road condemned to die. I did the right thing but I knew not whence it came so all I could was put it in safety but not put it back home poor thing. I figured the car was loaded with future serial killers and hoped for the best for them too. Torturing animals doesn’t make me like you actually. Being a tortoise in bed unable to help myself much puts me in mind of that day. Yet I still want to live fully even here. 

And that brings me to Webb Chiles. I have come to terms with the idea that an icon of my youth can be a close friend in my later life as unlikely as that sounds. He has written some of the most personal and illuminating literature of sailing in small boats that you can find. https://www.amazon.com/Webb-Chiles/e/B001H6IYIQ   Webb is closing in on his sixth circumnavigation by boat and he has taken joy in not making it easy for himself. He has sailed most of the way round the planet in an open boat, he sailed Cape Horn in an unsuitable sailboat prone to failure, he has been jailed in Saudi Arabia for an accidental landing and he nearly drowned when his boat sank off Florida.  He describes his life as going to the edge of human experience and sending back reports. 

Webb and I keep up a lively correspondence and he brings the outside world daily into these four walls. Which is the greatest gift all these packages gifts letters and communications bring to me. I cherish them all.  Webb paid me the compliment of reversing the journey. He’s not a man given to flattery so I believe him and feel encouraged to keep on keeping on, adding his remarks to the heaps of notes encouraging me in this time of tedium and repetition. 

“You are going through experience beyond mine and you are doing what I have professed to do:  go to the edge of human experience and send back reports.  Your reports are excellent.  Whatever else you think you are, you are an artist.” 

All of you need to know my sense of myself is wobbly at the moment and if I have offended I am sorry and if I have encouraged I am glad. If I have taken you over the top and shown you worlds you don’t want to see I apologize for my nature often leads me to excess. Maybe I  am an artist. That’s a new one for me to think about. 

He doesn’t care.  I’m just his Dad and he flopped on me. Lovely. 

In Bed

The rest of the world loves the weekend as it offers valuable time off. I am a creature of shift work so weekends may or may not be work free for me. Whether I work or not weekends are just days in the week.  Right now the weekend is a royal pain in the posterior principally because there is no physical therapy and I end up spending most of it in bed.  However there is some other therapy. 

With my family present I get to have all sorts of love and attention in addition to that offered by the superb nursing staff. My wife is my booster when away and my bearer when here. She knows I hate my feet being uncovered, she brings me fruit and the outside meals recommended by my Miami buddy Miguel who knows every out of the way eatery in the metropolis. Last night it was Italian from Alaine’s Osteria in Cutler Bay. Today lunch should be something odd from a hole in the wall. Then on Sunday afternoon Rusty and Layne go home and prepare for work. The sandwich Miguel brought me looked odd but it was mahi mahi with onions and melted cheese with grilled onions called a Florida Philly, a homage to the cheese steak sandwich from Philadelphia. 

All that aside - and the sandwich really does look terrible even though it tasted excellent- my wife helps me to do the basic functions which are such a huge part of life in this room as we have discovered. Anyone reading this know how to put a diaper on a grown man stuck stretched out in bed?  Nope she didn’t either till Ketty took her under her wing. Now she orders me to roll back and forth across the bed like a professional nurse’s aide and I comply like a human rolling pin. Here she was a few weeks ago - a lifetime- with the daytime Vampire as they called Marcus in ICU as he went around drawing blood samples and telling me stories of picking up women on his motorcycle. 

She was a bystander. Now she unfolds diapers like a pro! She also rounded up a couple of aides and got me into my wheelchair with the Hoyer Lift. 

And out to the courtyard went my family and I.  

My wife’s determination fulfilled her plan! 

I was just a passenger...

Rusty had shrubs to explore. 

It was a lovely shady breezy spot.  Even after three weeks indoors I am used to the late September heat in South Florida and I was comfortable and not even sweating. I started playing with my iPhone camera. I miss my big LUMIX camera but I can’t use it here where photography is rightly limited by privacy laws.

And this black and white headshot put me in mind of Zardoz the absurd Sean Connery science fiction flick. 

What do you think? Am I the flying head? 

And so back to the room and an outside dinner as recommended by Miguel. We ordered pick up from from Alaine’s Osteria just up the road. Sausage and meatball appetizer. 

Fettuccine Alfredo 

A full happy day in rehab. 

Joy And Despair

I had a terrible day Thursday.  I was in physical therapy in my wheelchair and I needed to pee. Usually I get a bed pan an hour before therapy and deal with all that at once.  Doctors say being regular is important. Thursday somehow I got it wrong. Nothing daunted I asked Eddy for help and he pushed me into a closet gave me a bottle and left me to it. Trouble was I couldn’t sort out pointing in the neck of the urinal while holding the bottle and letting go of the flow at the right moment. I peed on myself, my clean shorts my wheelchair my thighs. I broke down in tears. 60 years old I wailed and I can’t fumbling pee without help. My outburst of self pity shocked my therapists. I am their star cheerful patient.  The scene of the crime:

I lost 45 minutes of therapy getting cleaned up as everything takes forever when you are on wheels. The next day being Friday, Ketty my nurse’s aide put two diapers on me and told me to just shut up and let ‘er rip when the time came. No messing with bottles were her orders.  The peeing problem  never came up at the gym. Friday therefore was a good day. I got an extra hour PT and I worked my body like I really do want to walk again. It’s easy for me to say as I have no neural damage to spine or brain and all I have to do is let my pelvis mend which it will and then my legs will carry my weight. Meanwhile I preserve the muscles I built during years of Broga and TRX. 

It is truly weird how life in a hospital setting changes your sense of self.  Everyone around you has a medical understanding of your condition so what to you or me is disgusting, to them is a barometer of your state of health. Any bodily function or lack thereof expresses a statement about how you are. A smelly bowel movement to you or me is absolutely nothing to write home about but to them it says your gut is working (hooray!) or a liter bottle full of pee is something to be tossed pronto if you found yourself holding it.  Not for them: they note it in the ledger of your life and measure the amount with satisfaction. Cenat another of my favorite aides croons with her Creole accent about my full bottles of pee like I’d just won a foot race.  She sees a strong bladder while I see gloop that needs to be flushed away as quickly as possible. 

While you are out living a full life, inside these walls we live by different rules.  So yesterday my Occupational Therapist Elias walks into my room (after knocking - they all knock) and finds me in a riot of laughter with Ketty my statuesque Haitian nurse’s aide. Cenat (pronounced: senn -at) and Ketty do a fabulous job of looking after me but Ketty has additionally a dry sense of humor that kills me. She recoiled one day as she walked into my room to empty my bed pan and started berating me for the smell. Then she collapsed laughing when she saw my look of horrified embarrassment. At the point Elias arrived yesterday to Hoyer Lift me he walked into a hailstorm of laughter as I realized that Ketty had fooled me. She was doubled up laughing at me and I was laughing at myself for getting embarrassed. I threatened to elope with her and she looked at me. It would be great I said a statuesque Haitian woman holding hands with a scrubby little homunculus. They’d all look at me wondering what I’ve got. That cracked her up again especially as she is rather fond of her husband. Elias didn’t stand a chance. That’s Ketty to the left delicately attending to my leg. 

As he pushed me to the Occupational (upper body) Therapy Gym Elias told me what a terrible morning he’d had working with unresponsive patients, people that fill you with pity but who don’t feed your desire for connection.  Then he said he came into Room 508 and there we all were laughing like idiots. He felt recharged. That’s Elias with the beard getting photobombed in Comedy Central- my room. 

The therapy is hard work no doubt but it is brilliantly building me back to who I was and every day I am grateful. I wriggle around in bed and pull myself up and feel my chest muscles rippling with effort. Every day here is a fresh start. We laugh to erase so much sadness. A patient down the hall lost consciousness and they called 911 to transport him to the ER. Life goes on.  I keep lifting weights.  It’s my job, be they ever so light those weights they make me sweat. 

I used to be fearful of ending up in the hospital but I’m here to tell you there is nothing to fear. It’s just a place and pretty soon you learn the rules and parameters and you find yourself absorbed in your oxygenation levels and all that abstruse stuff. Needle phobia vanishes and acceptance takes its place. And the nurses and aides prove their love for you, their unconditional non judgmental respect for you their patient and you feel you can get through anything together. It’s a powerful feeling. And joyful too.  Even if you feel the need to fart a lot.