She shook her head. “Nope.”
Midday was always lunch with my parents, who nodded with bright, optimistic faces as I recounted inspirational stories I’d found online about people like me.
And then followed PT with Ian, who continued to bring his not-talking-at-all A-game. We worked our way through the therapy gym, using the bike and mat almost every day, and rotating through other things like the parallel bars and the monkey rings. He even put me on the standing frame a couple of times, which meant getting buckled into a body harness and hanging from a metal frame above a treadmill. I would bring my thighs forward, and Ian would help position my feet and move them through the motions of walking.
The idea was that the spinal cord, and even the muscles themselves, had their own sense of memory. Walking, in theory, was such a fundamental human activity that it might not need the brain to direct it. So, like a reflex, the neurological signals for walking could reroute themselves and leave out the brain altogether, if they just had enough inspiration.
There was improvement, for sure. My knee joint was significantly stronger, and I could lock it now. My whole upper body was stronger now, in fact, and muscle mass I’d lost was coming back.
But the truth is, though everything above the knee was making progress, everything below was not.
Even with all my reading, and charts, and highlighting, and goals. Even with dreams almost every night of walking through the woods, or along the beach, or even just across an empty parking lot—dreams so convincing that I sometimes wondered if my dreaming life was actually my real one and vice versa—improvements were slim.
Below the knee, at least.
One day I thought I wiggled a toe, but nobody else could see it. Another day, on the bike, I felt like I’d pushed off with the ball of my foot, but when I tried to repeat it, it just dragged.
My mother brought in some literature that said plateaus were normal as the body adjusted to previous improvements—and so “plateaus are normal” became my internal mantra.
Ian became quite the subject of discussion during my evenings with Kitty. She always wanted the Grouch Report, and I was under strict instructions to chronicle all hidden smiles, uttered words, and human moments. We spent so many hours trying to psychoanalyze Ian that we finally came up with a broader theory that we must somehow be doing deep psychological work. Maybe, we decided, women talked about men as a coping mechanism. A distraction from the real troubles in their lives.
No doubt, it was more fun to fret over Ian than to fret over myself.
Maybe we should have wanted to talk about Chip instead. But there wasn’t much about him that appealed to me right then.
Despite promises to the contrary, since his re-proposal, he’d managed only three short visits in three long days, standing the entire time for them, as if waiting to be dismissed. His timing was uncanny for the worst possible moments: just as an orderly was arriving for my sponge bath, or as Priya was forcing me to practice taking my sweatpants on and off, or as I was wheeling toward the bathroom. He’d stay for an obligatory thirty minutes or so, checking his texts over and over, and then give me a stiff kiss and head out. I half-waited to see him all day, kept my peripheral vision on the door in hopes he’d show up, but then, when he did come, I found myself wishing almost as fast that he’d leave.
I was muddled, to say the least.
Ian was a much juicier topic. He was almost a mysterious fictional character. Chip and his shortcomings were all too real.
After much discussion, Kitty developed a detailed theory about Ian, that there was a fun person trapped inside him, clawing against his ribs to get out. She labeled it her Beauty and the Beast theory and insisted that something terrible had happened to him in the past. But I disagreed. My theory was that he’d been left unattended too long as a baby in some remote Scottish orphanage and had missed a critical window for developing social skills and human empathy.
“Is he an orphan?” Kitty asked.
I shrugged. “No idea.”
Whatever Ian’s deal was, as strange as it sounds, he turned out to be good for me.
I really didn’t talk much during the rest of the day or with many of the other hospital personnel, but when Ian showed up, I unleashed every thought, theory, observation, dream, or opinion I’d held in since the day before. Partly this was my fear of conversational silence, but partly, I came to notice more and more, it was just fun to mess with him. It was like trying to provoke a guard at Buckingham Palace. The fact that Ian didn’t respond made me want to make him. I tried shock. I tried surprise. I tried every joke I knew. His blank face became more and more irresistible. He didn’t react, but he listened, and as the days went on, I found myself Googling crazy things in anticipation of seeing him, just so I’d have good material.
“Did you know,” I’d say, “that octopuses have three hearts?” And when that got no response, I’d move on to “Did you know there’s an underwater postal box in Japan?” And when that got silence, I’d plunge ahead with “Did you hear about the guy who had to be fed intravenously for a year, and he lost all of his taste buds after going so long without using them? They disappeared. His tongue just got all smooth, like a porpoise.”
It was the only time all day when I felt anything like my old self. It was the only time when the fog lifted. The game of it was so engaging that I’d forget myself—to the extent anyone ever could when trying, and failing, to walk the parallel bars from one end to the other.
It should have been my worst time of day, as I fell short on challenge after challenge. But somehow it was my best.
That same week, I got my bandages off the donor sites under my collarbones, and now I had two meaty red scabs like fat strips of bacon adding to the horror show that was my body. But my face was better, at least. A few penny-sized blisters on my jaw had scabbed over. Scabs are far more noticeable than blisters, but I was moving in the right direction, certainly, and the rest of my face barely looked burned anymore. It did, as the doc had promised, itch like hell—but I never scratched it.
Kitty continued to show up at night with a wide array of meals from both our favorite restaurants and ones I’d never heard of, leaving no cuisine undigested: Indian, Thai, Tex-Mex, Italian, Cajun, Japanese, Vietnamese. She made it a goal to surprise and delight me.
She’d also jumped on Priya’s knitting bandwagon, insisting I knit a scarf while we watched all her favorite musicals: South Pacific, Singin’ in the Rain, Meet Me in St. Louis. I didn’t even fight her on the singing anymore. I jumped into every song without protest, quietly at first, but going full Judy Garland by the end.
The scarf they were making me knit was terrible. I thought I’d picked a stormy-sky blue, but it turned out to be just plain gray. It looked like a mutant slug with tumors.
“We’ll make some pom-poms for it,” Kit said. “No problem.”
The truth is, some parts of my personality came back to me fairly quickly. I still found human beings—and conversation—to be the best possible distraction. When I had somebody to talk to, I focused on the talking, and compulsively joked around, bantered, and chatted. Those moments felt—if not good, at least better than usual.
But there were lots and lots of quiet, lost, nebulous moments when I felt the opposite of good. I don’t want to leave them out. Most were like that, in fact. Everything that happened—every PT session, or sponge bath, or viewing of Auntie Mame—was set against a background of just trying to keep my head up. The minute I was alone, or the second I saw something on TV that reminded me of the life I’d left behind, or the moment I came awake each morning and remembered where I was, the grayness would rush back in. The rule, not the exception.