Moving Forward in Reverse (38 page)

43

Time, as it would turn out, was in shorter supply than I had
imagined. Or at least Dr. Brandacher seemed to think so. With my being a
bilateral amputee, the team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
(UPMC) –Dr. Brandacher in particular – seemed quite eager to have me in their
program. By the following week, Ellen and I had already booked flights for our
second trip to Pittsburgh and my final round of tests. Far more extensive (and
invasive – ugh!) than round one, these tests would last three days and,
according to the detailed itinerary SaraBeth sent me, acquaint us with nearly
every department of the university’s medical center.

When we exited the Pittsburgh International Airport for the second
time, it was to a blue sky so clear it seemed to glow, causing us to blink and
wince as our eyes adjusted from the dimmed fluorescents of the arrivals
terminal. The allure of uninhibited sunlight proved deceptive, though, and
Ellen quickly found her way beneath my left arm as we picked up our pace to the
rental car parking lot on the lower level of the garage across the street. It
may have been a solid twenty degrees warmer than our last visit, but that
wasn’t saying much.

We hustled through the slow but steady stream of cars at the
beckoning of a yellow-vested official with enough facial hair to obscure any
recognizable features. I found myself fervently wishing we had gone back
upstairs after collecting our bags to use the moving walkway with its
insulating glass walls. The air held a distinctive bite to it which I was
bitterly coming to associate with Pittsburgh. I could only hope summer would
prove more agreeable seeing as Ellen and I had chosen June 1
^st
as
our ‘green light date’ when I could be officially placed on the transplant
list.

Knowing my luck, it probably rains here in June,
I mused sourly as we strode
through the entrance to the parking garage, following signs for ‘CAR RENTALS’
to the shadowy, back corner of the ground floor.

Summer seemed the logical time for the real fun to begin; not just
because it would mean warmer weather in Pittsburgh (hopefully), but also
because the kids would be out of school and it would give us a couple more
months to solidify the arrangements for my rehabilitation.

‘This is it!’ Ellen practically whooped with relief, making a dash
for the passenger’s side door of the red Nissan Sentra we had just rented. I
smiled at her while I hung back, waiting for her to pop the car’s trunk so I
could load our bags.

Over the past couple weeks I’d begun emailing our family and
friends who lived the closest to the Pittsburgh area, trying to gauge their
interest in staying with me during the three months after surgery. While the
response had been nothing but positive, I couldn’t shake the haunting images of
me as dependent and helpless as when I’d come out of the coma, requiring their
nearly constant care. I knew it wouldn’t be the case – a twelve hour surgery
couldn’t possibly wreak the havoc of a month-long coma – but the thought of
being a burden to those whom I loved; to the very people who had been forced to
sit by my side while I slowly withered away at the hands of the flesh-eating
disease and then stayed there through my four months of rehab, was too painful
to be ignored. They had already suffered so much because of my illness, could I
really force them to confront its harsh realities all over again?

I grimaced and slammed the trunk. It was the same dour circle I’d
been talking myself in for the past month, and so far I’d gotten nowhere.
Pushing the thoughts aside for the time being, I climbed into the driver’s seat
beside Ellen. She had already started the engine and stale, lukewarm air was
wafting from the vents. Looking at me with each hand held aloft before a vent,
she smiled.

‘Shall we?’

I nodded and turned to my left to visually locate the seatbelt so
I could strap myself in. ‘We shall.’

~~~

I was vaguely aware of the doctor across the table still speaking
to me, educating me on what to expect after the transplants. She was saying
something about shock and fear being perfectly normal but I was having a hard
time focusing on her words long enough to comprehend them all.

What happened to it?
I thought, rifling through my mind like digging through a junk
drawer.
It has to be here somewhere.

‘You may feel upbeat, or you could drift into a state of
depression,’ I heard Dr. DiMartini saying, her voice seeming to echo back to me
from somewhere far ahead. She was an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and
Surgery at UPMC who had worked with transplant teams for almost twenty years
now. She and I had been working together for nearly an hour; sitting across a
small, wooden table from each other; long enough for her to ruffle strands of
her fine, mousy brown hair out of the loose pony-tail she wore so that a few
strands poufed up over her head and another trailed from just above her ear to
down the front of her neck where it caught in a button below the white collar
of her shirt.

What had begun as a supervised questionnaire-taking session during
which I answered general questions about my anger management issues (some), my
anxiety level (some), if I feel guilty when I drink (no), and if I like to stay
active (yes – with five kids how could I not?) among other mundane things,
later turned into a structured interview during which she asked various
questions to gauge my ability to cope with having the transplanted limbs of a
dead man attached to my arms. I had answered truthfully and simply, knowing
this to be a routine procedure and thus unfazed by her wanting to know if I cut
myself intentionally, used narcotics, or felt overwhelmed by my home life. It
wasn’t until the end that my answers suddenly caught up with me and I realized
what was missing.

‘It’s important that the donor’s arms become incorporated into
your own sense of self, Scott,’ she told me, peering steadily across the empty,
square table at me. Round, wire-rimmed spectacles were perched on her button
nose, somehow giving her the appearance of a kindly, cartoon mouse (likely the
result of too much time spent watching TV with my kids in the early years).

I nodded along, hoping she couldn’t see the distant look in my
eyes or the confusion in my expression.
Is it really gone?
I wondered,
trying to remember the last time I had felt the drag of The Fog on my
conscious. It had been my constant companion for so long, always lurking
somewhere in the background of my awareness, that I had grown accustomed to its
debilitating presence as if it were simply another scar to bear.
Could it
really have just disappeared? After all these years?

‘To accept the new hands as your own will require a great deal of
psychological resilience,’ Dr. DiMartini said, holding the folder of her notes
in front of her chest with both hands. ‘I want you to be aware of this and take
some time to prepare emotionally for what having transplanted hands may mean to
your psyche and sense of self.’

I swallowed and tried to nod again. The part of my brain still
paying attention to the good doctor wanted to point out it couldn’t be much
worse than what waking up to no hands did to my psyche, but my mouth was too
dry to form words.

‘That said,’ she went on, drawing a breath as she shifted the
folder to one hand, laying the other palm-down on the table, ‘after your
previous experience with necrotizing fasciitis, I see no reason not to encourage
you to pursue this program.’

I cleared my throat with the rasping sound of dry twigs cracking
and managed to croak, ‘So I pass?’

Dr. DiMartini smiled knowingly at me, her lips curving into a grin
in such a way that her small nose became even more button-like – a rather
endearing expression, I found. ‘You pass,’ she said and used her empty hand to
help push herself to her feet. ‘Now, do you know where you’re supposed to be
next?’

In the past day I had been through radiology, neurology, the
magnetic resonance research department for a functional MRI, and now was
somewhere in between the three. I tried to bring up my mental itinerary,
thinking back on what SaraBeth had said about each stop along the way.
Ah,
yes,
I thought and focused my vision on Dr. DiMartini.

‘Actually, I believe it’s my lunch hour.’

‘Oh, well in that case, I’ll accompany you to the waiting room,’
she declared with a close-lipped smile.

‘That’d be great.’ I followed her to the door of the small,
sparsely furnished room. It had been a bit of a maze getting back here and in
my current distracted state, I was more than likely to get lost if left to find
my own way out.

We strolled along the polished-wood hallway, drifting past the
doors lining its walls in such neatly spaced intervals it almost felt as if you
were a hamster in a wheel, moving forward but going nowhere. As she guided me
along the corridor back to the waiting room, I shook my head softly in
disbelief.

I had been anticipating an epic battle; a monumental showdown of
me versus The Fog when I would finally banish it from my conscious. For so long
it had been a virulent force over my emotional wellbeing that it had taken on a
menacing life of its own in my perception, like the Devil on your shoulder or
self-deprecating voice in your mind. At its strongest, it was as real to me as
anything else in my life, its roots stretching so deep I daren’t follow them to
their end. Surely something so potent and pernicious would require an active
force of will to drive it out.

But no such clash had occurred. And yet, The Fog had slid away,
dissipating, unnoticed, as fog is apt to do. I couldn’t remember the last time
I had felt it holding me back from experiencing life. Had it been there when
the Romanian courts continued to mercilessly hold our children just out of
reach, prolonging the torturous waiting period for over a year and a half? When
I waded into the Black Sea with my wife and children, boldly standing in public
arm-free for the first time? Or when I had watched my children play a ballgame
in the local park and realized I could never be the “normal” father they
deserved because I was exiled to the sidelines by my illness?

Thinking back, I found each of those experiences residing in my
memory with vibrant clarity. I could still feel the pangs of grief and longing
that hulked around me during those seventeen months of the adoption process.
The contrast of the icy waters of the Black Sea lapping at my legs and Nadia
and Danny’s tubby warmth clinging to my upper body was as striking as it had
been eight years ago. And the remorse I felt for my handicap making me unable
to be the father and husband my family deserved; that was as raw and
unforgiving as ever.

No, The Fog was absent then, and The Fog was absent now. But what
it had left in its place was scarcely any better: Guilt, pungent and
devastating, twisted its gnarled fingers in the stagnant waters of my decimated
self-image, fueled by the knowledge that the ones hurt most by my illness were
those who were closest to me. I couldn’t be the father, husband, brother, or
friend they deserved because I was an incomplete man. But there was a way to
change that, now – at least to a degree. I didn’t have to be handless forever.
This program would bring me one step closer to being the man my family deserved
me to be. The Fog was gone and my self-deprecating guilt needed to go with it.

~~~

Ellen and I were walking into the final meeting of the final day
of my final trip to Pittsburgh before
the
trip. My steps faltered for a
second as I realized that those premises led to the conclusion that this was
the last step before my business in Pittsburgh was finalized. After today, I
had until the Green Light Date to get the rest of my affairs in order.
Ugh,
don’t make it sound like you’re dying,
I chided myself as I followed Ellen
through the open doorway of the conference room.

‘Scott, Ellen,’ Dr. Brandacher greeted us with a smile,
straightening from where he’d been leaning over a sheet of paper on the
elongated table. ‘Thanks for meeting me here again. I’m sure you’re eager to be
heading home by now.’

‘More or less,’ I replied evasively. It was definitely more – very
much more. Three days of tests had felt like a month of drudgery. Even if it
couldn’t compare to rehab after the coma, colonoscopies and two-hour MRI
sessions never failed to be abhorrent.

‘Yes, well, thankfully the preparations are over. Er, that is,
they will be as soon as we get your measurements,’ he said with a one-shoulder
shrug and flash of a smile. ‘Please, you can take a seat.’ He gestured towards
the black leather chairs in front of us. Ellen and I each slid into their
encompassing embraces while Dr. Brandacher unrolled a long, flexible measuring
tape of the type always draped around tailors’ necks in movies.

‘And, Scott, if you would remove the prosthetics, please.’ He
flipped a manila folder open as he spoke, glancing through the pages stapled
within it until he found the one he was looking for. I scooted my chair back so
I could trap each wrist against my thigh with the opposite arm and slide my
forearms out of the myos one at a time, depositing the heavy prosthetics on the
table between Ellen and me.

This could be one of the last times I’ll be doing this,
I realized, the thought
striking with such potency I nearly doubled over.
My days with the myos are
numbered.