Moving Forward in Reverse (5 page)

‘That was such a good start; I’m just thinking what other
exercises we could add to keep you progressing as fast as possible.’ I grinned.
I had been thinking the same thing for a week now.

‘Go to the foot of my bed.’ She looked at me, her eyes narrowed
under furrowed brows, and opened her mouth to respond. I silenced her with a
pointed nod in the direction of my feet. Shrugging, she turned and walked to
where I had indicated.

‘Now hold down my ankles.’ At this her face opened up, the dimple
between her brows disappearing as they arched high over her eyes.

‘You want to try a sit-up?’ I could see the head-shaking about to
commence. ‘You can’t do that…Can you?’

‘Shut up and get to work.’ She blinked owlishly then laughed and
took hold of each of my ankles with a broad grin on her face. A confidence was
growing between us; I knew it would only get stronger from here.

With her hands wrapped securely around my ankles, I reeled off ten
sit ups at a forty-five degree angle. On each upward heave, I pushed a gust of
air out of my lungs. If my abdomen had been in agony before, it was beyond
words now. By the third sit-up I wanted nothing more than to collapse back into
a blissful sleep. By six I would have let them move me back into the ICU and
happily relinquished my arm for the morphine drip. By nine I wasn’t sure I had
legs anymore because I could feel nothing below my stomach. By ten I was
satisfied.

I collapsed back against the mattress, breathing so loud I
wouldn’t have been surprised if the person in the room next door could hear me.
I closed my eyes and focused on the burn in my abdominals. Never in my life had
an exercise rendered me this excruciatingly exhausted. When I opened my eyes,
Kathy was still standing at the foot of my bed. She had released my ankles and
was smiling at me in her usual, vibrant way.
There’s nothing usual about
that smile
, I thought and tried to return it with my own. Unfortunately,
only half of my mouth seemed functional.

‘I’m impressed,’ Kathy said. ‘I think this is the beginning of a
beautiful friendship.’ I wanted to chuckle when I realized she was quoting one
of my favorite actors, Humphrey Bogart, in
Casablanca
, but it came out
as more of a snorting gush of air.

‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she
walks into mine.’ I quoted in return.

She snickered and tapped my feet. ‘Well done. I’ll be back after
lunch so get ready for more pain at my unyielding command.’

She skipped towards the door of my room. Before she had made her
dainty, dancing exit, a thought struck and I called out to her.

‘Hey, Kathy? What’s up with Dr. Molin and bagels?’

A grin lit up her face. ‘He has them flown in overnight from New
York for the Rehab staff. A New Yorker, through and through, our Dr. Molin.’

‘Ah…’ Still didn’t explain why he asked me about them, unless–

‘If he mentioned bagels to you, he must like you.’ She jiggled her
eyebrows and winked at me as if we were a couple girlfriends sharing a secret.
I laughed and jerked my chin towards the door.

‘Funny. Now get the heck out of my room. I need my beauty rest.’

Her laughter flitted across the room, cascading over the things in
her wake like a blessing of fairy dust. With a sigh I leaned back to bask in my
new accomplishment of sitting up for five nonconsecutive minutes, and ten whole
sit-ups. Yup, I was on the road to physical recovery. And with a staff like
this, it might turn out to be a fun journey after all.

‘Bagels.’ I snorted and shook my head. Who
were
these
people?

No more than fifteen minutes after Kathy had left, Helen strolled
into my room. As usual, she was rather parsimonious and took the liberty of
turning off the TV without comment. It had been on VH1 and the Peter Gabriel
video for Kiss That Frog was playing. The fact that I loved that song and she
hadn’t even asked permission to cut it off didn’t exactly start us on the best
foot. No pun intended.

She came bearing two sets of ankle weights, which she plopped onto
the end of my bed before coming around to my right side. As Kathy had done, she
took over the bed controls, but I found myself fighting the urge to resent this
act with her whereas I had been happy to oblige with Kathy.
This is your
physical therapist, Scott. The person who is going to play the largest role in
getting you back on your feet and out of this hospital. You don’t have to be
chummy with her to recognize her skill and succeed under her care.

I took a couple deep breaths as I convinced myself to behave and
be reasonable. She returned to the foot of my bed where the weights were and
selected the two smallest ones wrapped in green neoprene. As she walked back to
my right side and lowered the bed rails, she addressed me for the first time
that day.

‘I’m going to start you off with these two-and-a-half pound
weights, Scott. They’ll be strapped to your biceps and I want you to lift your
arms like this.’ She demonstrated by holding both arms out to the side forming
a T with her body then raising them over her head to form an I with her fingers
pointing towards the ceiling before bringing her arms back to her sides. ‘We’ll
start with five repetitions.’ I nodded as she strapped one of the weights to
each of my arms.

I had been prepared for agonizing pain after going through the
sitting exercises with Kathy, but lifting my arms with the small weights on was
surprisingly easy. I felt a surge of pride as I raised my arms through five
effortless repetitions. When I brought them back to my sides after the fifth lift,
she asked, ‘Could you do seven?’

‘Let’s find out.’

During the next two reps I was again able to squeeze out a sixth
and then a seventh repetition. When my arms were back to a resting position she
reached over and unstrapped the weights.

‘That was a good start, Scott.’ She set her weights on the edge of
my bed and walked over to the television. ‘Rest for a moment before we do
another set.’

‘VH1 sounds good,’ I remarked as the screen flickered to life.
This time a Genesis video was playing and I leaned back against my raised bed
with a content curve to my lips. Helen may not have had the vibrant personality
of Kathy, but I enjoyed the way she challenged me. I could tell there would be
no slacking off under her supervision. Not that I anticipated wanting to slack
off.

When the video ended Helen was back at my side, strapping the
weights onto my biceps once more. She had me do three sets of double arm raises
and this time I barely made five reps in each set. When the third set was over,
she removed the weights again and traded them for their heavier, red counter
parts. A part of me cringed at the thought of adding even more weight to my
arms, but I was determined to rise to any challenge Helen issued.

‘That’s enough work for your arms for today.’ I nodded, holding in
the sigh of relief that wanted to escape. ‘I’m going to have you do leg raises
with these on.’ She raised the red weights as she spoke then lifted each of my
ankles to wrap the weights around my bony legs. ‘I want you to raise each leg,
one at a time, up to here.’ I eyed her spindly hand hovering about a foot above
my bed.

‘Let’s start with ten repetitions and go from there.’
Start
with ten,
I repeated to myself, a hint of a smirk creasing my eyes. She was
catching on quickly, making it clear that she anticipated more without directly
asking for it.
Clever.

I started with my left leg, lifting it to meet her right hand
again and again as I propelled myself through ten, then twenty-five, then fifty
raises. By the fiftieth lift with my right leg, my thighs were screaming for
release. My legs and abdomen trembled as I struggled to lift my emaciated limb
those last couple inches, pushing through the tearing burn with gritted teeth
and wild eyes.

When my right leg had fallen back to the bed for the final time,
Helen nodded approvingly at my panting form. I could sense that I had earned
her respect already and enjoyed a quiet, vainglorious moment as she unstrapped
the weights from my legs. My entire body was exhausted and it felt so good!
Even in my spent state, I longed for the next round of exercises these two
women would thrust upon me. Halfway through day one and I was already feeling
livelier than I had at any point in the past week.

On her way out, I asked Helen to put the Breezin’ album by George
Benson in. It took her a moment to sort through my tapes, but eventually she
found the album I had requested and put it in the cassette player. I was asleep
before the final song had ended.

~~~

Things quickly fell into a routine in rehab. I was visited by both
Kathy and Helen twice a day and reveled in the rapid signs of improvement I saw
under their diligent care. For the next two weeks, Kathy continued to push me
through longer and longer periods of sitting, Helen brought bigger and bigger
weights, and I instituted crunches into the private training regimen I had
begun in my free time. My strength was increasing even faster than my
amputations were healing. Barely three weeks into Rehab, I moved from using the
small weights strapped to my arms and legs to the Nautilus weight training
machine down the hall.

My familiarity among the staff also grew in leaps and bounds. Dr.
Molin had Kathy wheel me down to the staff room the next time bagels were flown
in. It may not have been a very long distance to go – the staff room was
located around the corner from my room – but, as with every excursion from the
confines of my stifling room, it felt like a taste of freedom to me.

While I watched from my wheelchair, Kathy prepared a poppy seed
bagel with plain cream cheese. I wondered idly if cream-cheese smearing would
ever be listed among my skills again. Since waking from the coma, I’d been fed
like an infant, my food cut to bite-sized portions then transferred into my
waiting mouth. I’d forced myself to accept this as a temporary evil, but
temporary had never felt so long-term. My strength was clearly returning. I had
mastered the art of scooting myself to one side of the bed to jab at the TV
controls with the end of my right forearm and call for a nurse when needed. But
I still couldn’t feed myself. The dependency of it aggravated me to no end.

With my bagel balanced in one palm and the other wrapped around
the back of my chair, Kathy pushed me over to one of the round tables so she
could sit while feeding me.

‘Kathy,’ I said when she had situated herself across from me, ‘can
I feed myself?’

She paused with two fingers from each hand delicately pinching the
bagel, poised to tear. ‘Feed yourself?’ she asked as if the concept were a
novel idea.

‘Yeah. If you could just place the bagel between my st–’ I paused,
reconsidered. ‘Stumps’ sounded so negative and derogatory. I couldn’t spend the
rest of my life referring to my arms as ‘my stumps’. I cleared my throat and
amended, ‘between the ends of my arms, I can do the rest.’

I held my amputated forearms out together, demonstrating how I
could pinch the bagel between their two bandaged ends. She studied me for a
minute. I mimed lifting an imaginary bagel to my mouth, biting off a bit, and
chewing happily.

With a smile and a shrug, she conceded. ‘All right, but if you
drop it I’m not picking it up for you.’ I grinned at the twinkle in her eye and
held out my arms for the bagel. She slid it into position and waited for me to
pinch it carefully.

I tried to grip it tenderly, but being delicate was much more
challenging when working with bandaged forearms as opposed to hands. The bagel
began to compress under the pressure. With pursed lips I quickly remedied my
mistake and focused on gentle movements.

Once satisfied that I had the bagel in my grasp, Kathy lowered her
hands and watched as I raised it inch by inch towards my mouth. It was
painfully slow going, agonizing in the care required, but eventually I managed
to bring the cream cheese sandwich to my mouth and take my first bite.

Spread oozed from the middle and smeared across my lips and chin,
but my mouth was full. I grinned dopily as I chewed my bagel. Kathy looked
away, biting her lips around a smile of her own.

It took me the better part of half an hour to finish, but at long
last I brought the final bite to my mouth and dropped it in.

I looked down at my arms. I had done it! I’d fed myself for the
first time in a month and a half. There was cream cheese smeared all over my
bandages and face, but the bagel was where it belonged: in my belly.

Kathy was watching me, a smile playing about the edges of her
mouth. She met my eyes and the smile grew to a grin almost as proud and boisterous
as my own. Her eyes dropped to my mouth and she reached for one of the napkins
on the table.

‘Well done,’ she said softly as she wiped cream cheese from the
edges of my lips and parts of my chin, dabbing at a spot on the side of my nose
I hadn’t realized I’d hit with smear.

One small step towards recovery, one giant leap in independence,
I thought gleefully as Kathy
wheeled me back to my room. I would never again allow someone else to feed me a
meal which didn’t require silverware.