Moving Forward in Reverse (9 page)

10

Entering the Rehabilitation Unit at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire
was far less dramatic than leaving Mercy Hospital had been. By that point in my
recovery, I had spent so much time in the parts and parcels of a hospital that
this Rehab Unit felt like just another element of just another hospital. It had
all the standard hospital qualities: clean, organized, full of bustling people,
glassy-eyed patients, and smiling nurses. Besides the people, the only real
difference between Sacred Heart and Mercy was the shape of the Rehab Unit: at
Sacred Heart it occupied one long hallway whereas at Mercy it had been in a
square set-up with a centrally-located nurses’ station. Oh, and the fact that
here I had access to my team. That was a pretty big difference.

Cindy Koperski, my assistant, was serving as the acting head coach
in my stead. We had determined that I would focus on tactics with our senior
goalkeeper, Diane Kelsch, who didn’t have any afternoon classes. Each weekday
Diane came by my room around two in the afternoon, signed out a wheelchair, and
loaded me into the seat of her little, yellow Toyota pickup. She’d drive me to
the soccer field, retrieve the wheelchair from where it had been tossed in the
bed of the truck, and spend the duration of the afternoon listening to me prod
her from my seat on the edge of the field.

Sticking with my credo: “My mission is not to teach you, but to
put you in a position to learn,” I peppered Diane with questions based on where
she was on the field or the situation at hand, coaxing her into making her own
realizations.

Being back out on the field and directly involved in the team’s
training was the greatest reward I could receive. I felt more alive and
clear-headed than I had in a long, long time. On the field, the emotional fog
which accompanied much of my recovery and left me feeling detached and distant
receded as if banished by the sun’s rays. In those precious moments, I felt
whole again.

The other highlight of my days – second only to my time on the
field – was getting to meet with prospective new players. To maintain our Top
20 ranking, Cindy and I also had to put a great deal of time into recruitment.
While she and the admissions office gave potential student-athletes and their
parents tours of the university campus, I played my part from within the walls
of Sacred Heart.

The rehab staff set aside their conference room for my meetings
with new recruits and even allowed me to juggle my rehabilitation schedule
around my work. My days were packed with activity and I couldn’t have been
happier.

That season, Diane earned First Team All-American honors and Cindy
was named the conference Coach of the Year. The program was moving forward as
planned.

~~~

Zenon Wojcik was a lanky man standing a couple inches over six
feet with long, grey-streaked brown hair that brushed the top of his collar. I
first met him a week after my transfer to Sacred Heart when he came striding
into my room unannounced.

‘Hello there!’ he called as he sped through the door. He had a
knack for moving at great speeds without appearing to do so – a skill I
attributed to his long limbs. ‘Scott?’ he asked, making a sudden stop at the
foot of my bed.

‘Ye-ah,’ I slowly replied, trying to orient myself around this
unexpected and somewhat bizarre man.

‘I’m Zenon – Zenon Woj-ik from Winkley Prosthetics of Eau Claire.
And if it’s all right with you, I’m going to take you on as a patient.’ He
beamed at me and I blinked in return.
Wha-?
I thought and tried to
replay what he had just said. I was pretty sure he was waiting for me to say or
do something, but my mind was still in the get-a-grip-and-focus stage.

That was the other odd thing about Zenon: when he moved, he moved
with strong purpose and at breakneck speeds, as if he were always in a hurry
and yet never looked flustered. When he stood still, though, he could be the
most patient person you ever met. It was as if whatever he did, he did it to
the fullest – be it hustling from patient to patient or sitting by your side to
discuss prosthetics.

Wojcik from Winkley Prosthetics … take you on as a patient,
echoed across my mind in slow
motion.
Patient? Me, a patient for – Oh!
Understanding finally dawning,
I nodded my consent. I was already so many people’s patient, why not add one
more?

‘Great! Now, I’m here to cast your arms so we can build you a pair
of myoelecric hands.’

Myoelectric hands… The myos – the myos!
A flutter of excitement
danced in my chest. I was finally getting the myos? No more hooks? I grinned
unabashedly.  
Looks like I might get to have that bonfire after all.

‘I’m sure you’ve been told about the myos by now,’ he continued as
he set up his casting station. ‘A lot more sophisticated than those things.’ He
gestured towards the hooks where they sat discarded on a bedside table with a
clear look of disdain on his face. I laughed, a tad giddy at the prospect of my
new arms and to have found a fellow hook-loather. As he went about his work, he
told me about the myos, re-iterating what Dr. Molin had said and filling in
gaps in my knowledge I hadn’t even been aware existed.

Talking with Zenon was like picking the brain of a top soccer
coach over pints of beer. The man was nothing short of brilliant. The fact that
he loved his work was apparent in his every word. His enthusiasm lent him an
almost child-like excitement while his knowledge and wisdom compelled you to
revere him.

To Zenon, being a prosthetist was an art. Although he had never
seen anyone use two myos – he had primarily encountered unilateral amputees –
he never told me I couldn’t do something. I think it was the innate
problem-solver in him which prevented him from ever viewing a challenge as
unconquerable. By the time the casting session was over, I could tell that as
his patient great things were going to happen.

~~~

Almost before I could come down from my Zenon-induced high, he
paid me a second visit the next day. This time he came bearing an even greater
gift than his wealth of knowledge about the myos. It was a mechanism of his
contrivance: a machine specifically designed to help patients prepare to use
myoelectric prosthetics.

‘This little beauty should help you get a head start on learning
to manipulate the muscle action needed to control the myos,’ he said as he
began unpacking a meter the shape of an odometer with two wires and an
electrical cable coming out of it. The wires each split partway down to form
four total branches. At the end of each branch was a small white circle.

‘These are receptors,’ he said, holding up two of the four
circles. ‘Two for each arm. We’ll tape one to the muscle group used for opening
the hand –’ he touched the muscles on the outside of my forearm – ‘and the
other to the muscle group used for closing the hand.’ He moved his finger to
the inside of my forearm. ‘They connect to this meter, which then reads the
voltage you generate. And that voltage correlates to the degree of which the
myos will open or close. I’ll set you up and show you how it works.’

I readily held my arms out for the sensors, feeling like a
technology fiend at Best Buy. All I wanted to do was play, play, play!

When I was strapped in, he instructed me to simply think of
opening and closing my hands, one hand at a time. With my eyes on the meter, I
focused on an action I had long since stopped using.

Whoa! The
needle shot to the far right of the scale. I relaxed and watched
it collapse back to its resting point on the left.

‘Cool, huh?’ Zenon said, smiling, I assume, at my expression. ‘So
the key here is getting the finesse down. Try to focus on moving the meter in
as small of increments as possible. That’s how you’ll learn more finite
manipulation of the hands. Think of the different levels of force used in
stroking a cat versus pulling a weed. You want to be able to approach both
tasks confidently.’

I took a deep breath and tried again, thinking, C
at
,
thinking, G
entle
. . The needle rocketed to the right.

‘That’s okay,’ Zenon assured me hastily. ‘Now try to lower it back
to the starting point as slowly as possible.’

I concentrated, and imagined easing my hand shut. The needle
plummeted to the left. Before it could hit home, I thought
Open!
and it
flew back to the right.

This was going to be a lot harder than I’d anticipated.

‘Good! Good,’ Zenon said, clearly pleased at my fumbles. ‘It’s
going to take time, but you’re doing the right thing. You’ll get better and
better – trust me. I’ll leave this here with you and ask the nurses to set you
up – mmm, three times a day. Does that sound good?’

I imagined my hectic schedule, thought about all the things I was
already doing and how little time I had left in the day, then smiled broadly.

‘Sounds excellent.’

‘Super! Then I’ll leave you to it. Practice, practice, practice,’
he sang as he left. ‘Enjoy!’

Enjoy I did. The more I toyed with Zeonon’s little device, the
more I found it similar to working with a soccer ball. The control and
manipulation required to control the upper end of the meter was reminiscent of
bending a ball around a wall of opponents. I loved it!

Working that meter became my artistic diversion – the sort of
thing handling a soccer ball used to be.  In the face of such a
detail-oriented task, little room was left for thoughts of self-pity or the
harsh realities of rehabilitation. Distractions became my morphine, and as far
as distractions went, this one was right up there under soccer-related
activities in terms of potency.

11

As always, the recovery of my feet seemed to lag behind that of my
arms. In the week following my introduction to Zenon’s gizmo, my primary
physical therapist, a student assistant named Amy whose soft heart often
disguised a rough and tough young woman, introduced me to a far less enjoyable
apparatus: something I came to refer to simply as ‘The Vertical Table’ or ‘The
Table of Pain,’ depending on my mood and the distance I was from it.

The Table was located in the Physical Therapy Room. Nestled among
the treadmills and stationary bicycles, it seemed innocuous enough. It stood
maybe four feet tall and had a brown padded leather top. A strap was buckled
across its middle and at one end a metal plate protruded like a footboard.
Hardly the type of thing you would expect to find among exercise equipment, but
then, neither was the mini kitchen in the corner  – although, I would
undoubtedly need to relearn the nuances of preparing my own meals at some
point.

Amy wheeled me alongside the table and walked around my chair to
face me. ‘So this is the table,’ she said, one hand resting on the brown
leather cushion. ‘We’re going to start using it twice a day to help you adapt
to standing.’

‘Okay. . .’ I said, eyeing the contraption with wary curiosity.

‘It’s not as bad as it might seem. Promise. All you have to do is
lie down with your feet against the plate. I’ll strap you in – just a security
measure – then slowly rotate the table ninety degrees until you’re vertical and
standing on the plate.’

‘Okay. . .’ How hard could it be? I grinned at her. ‘Let’s get
this over with.’

As benign as she may have promised The Table to be, the thing
still looked like a medieval torture table. Being near a mock-kitchen full of
cooking knives didn’t help matters much. Despite my skepticism, I allowed her
to help me onto The Table and lay still as I was strapped in. If I had had even
the slightest inkling of the pain I was about to endure, I never would have
been caught within an arm’s reach of that table.

Neither of us had known the excruciation in store for me, though,
and as the table was slowly rotated to vertical, I lay placidly calm, about to
unwittingly face the worst pain I had yet to undergo. As it crept to forty-five
degrees past horizontal, my weight began to settle in my feet. The closer to
vertical the table turned the more intensely aware of my mutilated feet I
became. It began like the hyper-awareness you get of freshly scraped skin;
crept into sizzling discomfort causing my instincts to shout, ‘Get away!’ as if
I were standing on hot coals; then excelled into shooting pain so severe both
of my calves seized up in revolt.

‘Ugh!’ I said as we approached seventy degrees.

‘Is something wrong, Scott?’ Amy asked, her voice high-pitched
with concern.

‘Mmm…’ I moaned through gritted teeth. ‘Man, that hurts!’

‘It hurts? You might feel some discomfort, but it shouldn’t be
unbearable.’ I didn’t want to tell her unbearable had already come and gone. I
was soaring off the Wong-Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale and we hadn’t even
reached vertical yet.

‘Should I stop?’

A breath hissed through my clenched teeth. I closed my eyes
against the pain.
Should she stop? Hell, yes, stop! Give me another central
line; make me lift more weights – anything but this!

‘Uugghh!’ I groaned and pressed my head against the leather. ‘No.’
The word crept out of the side of my mouth as if hoping to avoid detection.

‘What? Scott? Scott, do you need me to stop?’ she asked, her voice
creeping up another octave. I cringed and tried to breathe while suffocating
amidst the agony.

‘No. Just. Keep. Going.’

‘Okay. . .’ she sounded about as convinced as I had earlier.

A moment later the table began rotating once more. With each
degree adjustment, I was forced to bear more weight on my unhealed feet.

‘Shit!’ I hissed softly when the rotation finally ceased.

‘Scott?’.

I shook my head, still squeezing my eyes shut.

‘Mmmm – I’m okay,’ I lied and tried not to let the tears seep
through my clamped lids. If this was what it took to get back to any semblance
of my former life, I would do it. But I’d be damned if it wasn’t going to kill
me first.

‘All right. . . We’re supposed to hold this for ten minutes, but
we can start with five, if you’d prefer.’

Ten minutes?! Ten times sixty seconds of
this
??
I had to fight
hard against the desperate tears and pleas for release bubbling up inside of
me. After a few futile moments trying to regain my composure, I shook my head a
fraction to the left then a fraction to the right.

‘Ten. . . Minutes. . . ‘s. . . f-fine.’
I can do this,
I
added to myself, but there was little vehemence behind the words. I could do a
lot of things – survive the flesh-eating disease; recover from forty pounds of
atrophy as a quadruple amputee; live through nearly bleeding to death; learn to
eat with hooks - but this? This was a culmination of everything I had thus
endured. This was the sum of each moment of discomfort and torture I had
undergone in all of my thirty-five years. Nothing came close to this.

Bile rose in my throat and fire ignited itself beneath my feet. It
felt as if they had amputated my feet only yesterday and I was standing on the
raw, gaping wounds. Or as if they were slowly, gratingly severing my feet that
very instant, the blade slicing through flesh and bone one gradual swipe at a
time. I was aware of nothing beyond the excruciating pain in the soles of my
body.

For ten torturous minutes I stood in that monotonous onslaught of
apocalyptic pain. It seemed as if the clock had stopped rotating the moment I
did. I didn’t dare ask Amy how long it had been for fear that only seconds had
passed when I felt as if I had just dragged my bare feet through the Sahara and
back.

When the time had at last drug by Amy rushed to the side of the
table to lower me back to horizontal. As gravity gradually shifted its pull on
me, I could feel sweat pouring off the sides of my face. My chest heaved and
clothes clung to my body as if I had just finished playing a soccer match that
went into extra time. Ten minutes of merely standing on my own two feet had
become the equivalent of more than two hours of running.

Amy unstrapped me from The Table and helped roll me into my
wheelchair. I tried to forget the torment, but the echo of anguish it left
behind kept the memory fresh in my mind. I didn’t want to contemplate how far
I’d fallen behind my old self, nor the glaring truth of my new limitations. My
hands were only half the story, and after today, I was beginning to think they
were the brighter half.

Amy brought me back to my room and helped me into bed. Wanting to
be anywhere but alone with my thoughts, I closed my eyes in the hopes of
falling into slumber. But doing so only opened the door for more remembering.
Phantom pain made me hiss and bend my knees as if to jerk my feet away from the
metal plate. How was I going to do that all again? I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

Well, you’re going to have to because she’s coming to get you for
round two in no time,
I thought with bitter contempt.

My eyes shot open in panic. What had Amy said? ‘
We’re going to
start using it twice a day to help you adapt to standing.’
Twice a day.
Twice today.

A part of me went numb at the thought. My mind began blockading
itself behind brick walls; shutting itself off from the impending torture. I
stared at the ceiling and felt my thoughts become laggard as if they were being
blindly pulled through a dense fog. I would muster the will to return to the
table again and again, but each time a larger part of me was left behind in the
room.

~~~

After seven long days of using The Vertical Table twice a day, Amy
deemed it too easy (where the hell she got that idea is beyond me) and coerced
me into trying to walk with her assistance. I had told myself it was all or
nothing for the duration of my recovery: If I didn’t give it everything I had
there was no point in doing it at all. So despite my reservations and deep,
deep, deep desire to spend no more time than necessary on my feet, by my own
resolution I had to follow through.

After another grueling session on The Table, Amy propped her right
shoulder under my left arm and, with her arm wrapped around my waist, hauled me
from the sanctuary of my wheelchair. The pain was instant and unrelenting. From
the moment my weight settled in my feet to my eventual cry for mercy and
not-so-hasty retreat to the wheelchair, it was excruciating. Three waddling
steps and I was ready to fall to my knees.

Like the pain, though, Amy was unrelenting. My pride and
determination forced me to meet her step for step in my recovery. After I
managed to work my way up to walking one lap around the exercise mats, she
brought me to the stairwell.

‘Up one level and back down,’ she said as we sat, momentarily at
rest, on the landing for the Rehab floor. ‘What do you say?’

I stared up the single flight of stairs to the top floor, trying
not to count how many steps it would take. I looked down and my eyes fell eight
stories to the ground floor below. Everything sounded hollow inside the
stairwell, even my thoughts. If only the pain would be so hollow.

All or nothing, man. All or nothing.

I looked up, stared at the first step before me and said, ‘I’ll
walk up to the top. Then I’m walking all the way down to the bottom and back up
to here.’

‘Um,’ Amy murmured behind me. I could almost feel her wanting to
question me, but she was good at her job and knew better than to caution me
against something. She said instead, ‘Let’s do it.’

With her shoulder for support, I embarked on the second most
difficult thing I’d ever done in my life. First and foremost was – and I hoped
always would be – the bike ride around Lake Winnebago. As a cocky undergrad at
UW-Oshkosh I had spouted off that soccer players were in similar condition to
professional cyclists amongst the wrong crowd. They challenged me to prove it
by riding alongside said professional cyclists during a ninety mile training
ride around the lake.

I finished the course with those guys. Ninety miles in less than
four hours. Subsequently, my sport gained some respect, as did I for cycling.
We shook hands afterwards then went to a bar near campus called Kelly’s for a
few of their famous chili dogs and frosty mugs of beer. If only I had a tall,
frothy beer waiting for me now.

As I trudged upwards one step at a time, Amy remained a silent
bulwark against surrender. She helped me only as much as necessary and said nothing,
not even when I groaned, moaned, or swore. At the start of our relationship as
patient and therapist she had promised to never feed me a hyped ‘You can do
it!’; as those stairs threatened to break me, I found myself surprisingly
grateful for her silence. If she were to start cheering for me openly, I
couldn’t be sure of my ability to maintain my resolve. Letting yourself down
may be the worst part of defeat, but letting those who care about you down was
definitely a close second.

As my gripes and grunts echoed off the concrete walls around us, I
gritted my teeth and trudged on, descending into purgatory. This was a battle,
I told myself. Me versus my handicap. Accomplishing these eighteen floors of
stairs may not win the war, but at least for that brief moment, I would come
out victorious. I needed all the victories I could get.

By the time we reached the ground floor, I realized fatigue may
prove my greatest enemy in this feat. Not that the pain was a picnic – it was
sheer, uninterrupted, excruciating agony every step of the way – but without
the energy to fight through it, I was hopeless.

With soccer, my mind was constantly analyzing play so there was
little opportunity for exhaustion to gain a foothold in my resolve. The stairs,
however, like the bike ride around Lake Winnebago, were a combination of
fatigue, pain, and mental endurance. There was nothing to distract me from what
I was undergoing; no love for the game or thrill of play, only the dull,
monotonous walls of the stairwell and the next step before me.

Failure is not an option,
I told myself step after step. I would not
relent. I would not let my handicap take this from me. Not now, not ever.

I beat back the pain and fended off the weaker part of me that
wanted to quit. My life was on the line and I was in no mood to let anybody
down.

When my right foot hit the landing of the eighth floor, followed
sluggishly by my left, I nearly collapsed against Amy with relief. I was
sweating raindrops, panting with the force of a pack of sled dogs, and exquisitely,
unequivocally exhausted. My whole body was shaking, my thighs twitching
spasmodically, calves shaking with such force it seemed to vibrate up the
length of my spine.

‘All right! All right,’ Amy said as I leaned into her. ‘You did
it, Scott! You actually did it.’ She helped me fall into the wheelchair and
made quick work of getting me back to my room. After helping me crash into bed,
she ran off to retrieve a pitcher of ice water. I drank like a man just
returned from Hell, trying to drown his memories.