Dwarf: A Memoir (17 page)

My dad said nothing. There was more silence. Then I heard him stomp across the hardwood
floor in the master bedroom.

“You’re not going to live forever, Gerry!” Mom called out after him.

“Yes, I am!” he shouted back. It was an absurd retort, but his frustration had gotten
the best of him.

Dad rushed down the stairs and flung the front door wide open, and seconds later the
sound of it slamming shut echoed throughout the house.

I watched out the front window as Dad picked up the leaf blower. Our lawn wasn’t cluttered
with leaves. It wasn’t speckled with any remains of the season, in fact, because he
had cleaned it all up the day before. Yet he still turned on the obnoxiously loud
machine.

Dad moved it quickly side to side, aiming at anything in sight— pebbles, grass clippings,
freshly dropped acorn tops. His frustration and anger blew everything in the yard
away. But he couldn’t do anything about the pain. He gripped the leaf blower as if
he were strangling the very life out of it, and I studied his face. He was beet red,
with his bottom lip tucked under his upper lip.

I was no longer the only one in my family going through this surgery. I wasn’t the
only one fighting.

I heard my mom coming down the stairs and I turned away from the window and faced
her when she came into view. She didn’t have to say anything. I knew what needed to
be done.

There would no longer be the comfort of a bedpan or the
security of having Mom to help me make it to the toilet in time. There would no longer
be yelling for help or waiting until the last minute to go. From that point on, there
was just me, and the distance I had to travel to the bathroom.

Taking it easy was officially over.

“You should try now,” she said as if reading my mind— or assuming I’d heard her fighting
with my dad.

I glanced at my juice cup. There was just enough left to swallow a Percocet. The pain
would be impossible to ignore. I hated taking pills, but they would be my modest level
of protection against the wires barbed through my feet.

I didn’t know how long it was going to take me to reach the bathroom or what it would
feel like to walk. I had taken just a few little steps from the bed to the recliner
and that had been pure hell.

It’s hard to explain the difficulty of forcing yourself to do something that you know
will cause you pain. Somehow I allowed myself to let Mom grab the metal rungs around
my legs, lift them, and then place them over the side of the bed. She did it very
slowly. Then she stepped away and waited. I struggled to balance just sitting on the
edge of my bed. My back muscles were so weak from constantly lying down.

When I lowered myself to the floor, the pain in my legs was immediate. It was sharp,
like a million jagged pieces of glass slicing through my muscles. I felt the blood
rush down to my legs and swirl inside my feet. I felt like they were going to explode
from the inside out. Part of me wanted them to explode so they wouldn’t be there anymore.

I closed my eyes and accepted the pain. I swallowed hard and took one quick glance
at the distance to the hallway. It seemed like a mile away. Every bit of it was going
to hurt.

I gripped the walker my mom handed me so tightly that my knuckles turned white. With
one quick pull, I yanked myself up onto my feet. What I felt next made me wish for
something I never expected.

I wanted to die.

I wanted the out-of-body experience people talk about on TV, the floating sensation.
I wanted the weightlessness, because everything was too heavy to bear. I wanted out
of my body. But I was stuck, yet again, inside of it. I had no choice but to force
myself to accept that, too.

“Use your arms as much as you can,” Mom said.

She sounded awfully far away for being right at my side.

“Breathe, honey.”

I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.

My first steps were hardly steps at all. They were more like swings. I saw my mom
tense up as I took my first one. She relaxed a little when she saw me do it successfully.

I released the air I was holding in. It came out like I had a hundred flaming birthday
candles in front of me. Then I pushed the walker forward a bit. I lifted myself again
and swung my legs forward.

I didn’t want to cry out in pain for my dad to hear.

My mom had calculated that the bathroom was about fourteen steps away. The toilet,
my goal, was twenty steps away. I had only done two steps, and already the sweat was
gathering all over my body. I wanted to quit.

I had eighteen more steps to go and eighteen more reasons to hate my life and regret
my choice to have surgery.

But I lifted and swung again.

Again.

And again.

Then I had to sit.

Mom hurried over with the small black desk chair where I used to do my homework. When
I sat, I looked back at the couch and at the distance I had just created. Through
the hot tears burning my eyes, I saw that my undertaking was nothing more than baby
steps. But I also felt like I’d taken a massive leap away from weakness, and that
made me smile. Suddenly, those horrible remaining fourteen steps became fourteen reasons
why I needed to keep going.

“I’m going to the toilet,” I said without hesitation.

“All right,” my mom responded. “We’re going to the toilet.”

I grabbed the walker once more, pulled myself up, and stood. The shock of pain returned.

New things began to hurt. My back muscles seared. My shoulders pinched, and the palms
of my hands felt raw from holding the walker so tightly. More frustrating than all
the pain, though, was the tingling in my bladder.

More tears gathered in my eyes and fell down my face. They blended with the beads
of sweat sliding down my cheeks. But I never cried out loud. I pushed the walker forward.
Then swung through. Over and over I did this, creating a rhythm.

I inhaled, leaned on my hands, lifted my body, and swung forward. Then I lowered myself
down onto the ground, exhaled, and pushed the walker.

I inhaled and started all over again. All the while, my mom remained silent. There
was only the sound of my struggle. Each time I placed a foot on the floor, the wires
pulled at my flesh. I glanced down and saw the skin rise up the wires when I put weight
on my feet, then slide back down as I lifted. It stung and burned with every inch.

I swung, lowered myself back to the floor, and exhaled.

My skin tore and rose in little shreds back up the wires
and my bladder felt like it was filling up with rocks as my gut extended outward.

“I
really
have to go!”

“Squeeze!” Mom replied.

I couldn’t squeeze my legs together with the metal halos in the way, so I sucked in
my belly and pressed on. Somewhere between the pain and the hatred for my body, I
had entered the hallway and stood in the bathroom doorway. I was almost there.

I picked up the pace as best I could. I could feel my heart racing with anticipation
and hope. Happiness, too: I could finally see the toilet! There it was, ready for
me: sweet relief, a goal, and a huge accomplishment. That toilet was my proof that
I could win any personal battle.

I somehow managed to move even faster. My adrenaline kicked in as drainage leaked
out of the wounds around the pins. I could feel it seeping out and spiraling down
the backs of my legs. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to acknowledge anything— not even
the tiny bloody footprints I was making on the tile.

“Am I supposed to leak this much?” I asked my mom while looking straight ahead. I
felt more warm fluid come down my inner thighs. A lot more.

She didn’t respond. She just placed a hand on my shoulder, as if telling me to stop.

Puzzled, I looked down.

I had peed all over myself.

My mind kept telling me I could hold it a few minutes longer, but my bladder had given
up. My shins were too numb to feel it, but my heart certainly did when I looked down
to see my light pink boxer shorts turning a deep shade of purple. I was so close.
I could lean forward and touch the rim of the toilet seat. I could kick it if I had
the strength to raise my leg. I was that damn close.

The feeling of stones in my gut dissolved as I stood in my own urine. The puddle collected
around my bare feet and in between each toe. I was almost sixteen years old and I
had just gone to the bathroom all over the floor.

“It’s sterile,” my mom said reassuringly as she rushed to grab some towels. “What
goes in must come out, honey!”

I didn’t care. I was mortified, and so angry with myself. How the hell was I unable
to make it to the toilet on time? I was almost sixteen! A sixteen-year-old who
wet her pants
. What was wrong with me? The surgery, the pain, the pins— there was no justification
for what went down. I simply should have made it.

That was when I let myself cry. My tears fell to the floor and my grip on the walker
loosened. My feet began to slide out from under me and my courage and will felt like
they were slipping away, too.

I screamed as I started to fall. The tile was so slippery and I barely had the ability
to put weight on my feet to begin with. I struggled to pull my legs back under my
body. My feet dragged against the tile floor, pulling my skin even farther from the
wires. I looked down to see blood leaking into the mix. Little girls are supposed
to be made of sugar, spice, and everything nice. That day I saw what I was made of:
sweat, blood, tears, and urine. My days of innocently playing with my Barbie in her
frilly white wedding gown were over. It was nothing but piss and vinegar for me now,
and stained purple shorts.

“Lift up,” Mom said. She was so calm. She helped lift me as much as she could.

“Use your arms and lift up your body so I can get the towel under you. Just stand
on it, honey; you won’t slip.”

I closed my eyes as she used another towel to dry my legs, gently patting in between
the wires. She pulled down my soaked
shorts and I lifted myself up again, barely, as she slid another towel under my feet.
I kept crying and tried to turn back around and head toward my bed.

“Where are you going?” Mom asked.

“I . . . already . . . went,” I gasped, crying harder now.

“No. You said you were going to go to the bathroom, and you’re going to do it.”

“I want to go lie down.”

“Are you crying?” my mom asked me. She was on her knees wiping up the mess, but she
lifted her shoulders to face me. “Are those tears?”

“I already went!” I shouted, hysterical and uncooperative.

“You do
not
cry!” Her voice deepened like those of the drill instructors we’d admired on base
years before. “Get angry!”

“What? Stop screaming at me,” I whimpered.

“Stop your crying! You said you were going to walk to that toilet and you’re going
to walk to that toilet. You have two steps left!”

“It’s all over the floor!”

“You have two steps left, God damn it! Take them!” She screamed louder than I did.
“Take them! I know my daughter. I know you can do it!”

I didn’t know what to say.

“It’s only urine,” she shouted. “Do you hear me? Get angry and take those steps!”

You can take the officer out of the military, but you can’t take the military out
of my mom.

Just then, I heard the front door close and my father walking back into the house.
He’d obviously heard all the yelling.

“What’s going on?” he shouted, and I heard him walking toward the bathroom.

My mother reacted without missing a beat.

“Nothing! Mind your own business!” she shouted, and she slammed the bathroom door
shut. I may have been in a seriously embarrassing predicament, but I still deserved
to keep my dignity, and my mother saw to it that I kept it.

She was trying to distract me from the scene. She was trying to make me tough, to
thicken my skin. She was building me up from the pit into which I wanted to fall.
It worked. I cannot thank her enough for that.

So I stopped crying. I gripped my walker again, and with every ounce of strength I
had left, I took the remaining two steps to the toilet. Then I sat down on it. I’d
finally made it— more or less.

When my mom finished cleaning up my legs and feet, I reached back my hand and flushed
the toilet anyway. It was my victory siren. I flushed away the entire ordeal. I actually
smiled as I let the whole experience swirl away down into the sewer. Somehow, it sucked
away all the embarrassment and left me with a sense of accomplishment, pride, and
total relief that it was all over with, and I could go back to my bed on the couch
and relax. Until the next time I had to use the bathroom.

“Gerry!” my mom called. “Come help her, please!” She opened the door and stuck her
head out to make sure my dad was on his way.

He’d never left the other side of the door.

“You did enough for now, Tiffie,” Mom said.

I happily let my father reach under my arms with one of his, tuck the other underneath
my thighs, and carry me back to the couch. It never felt better.

Everything finally became weightless.

I napped until two thirty that afternoon and woke up to the phone ringing. It was
Mike, and he could tell right away that I had been through an ordeal.

“What’s up?” he asked in that caring, wonderful voice.

I told him. I told him
everything
.

“But you did it, right?” he asked.

“Um, no. I went on the floor,” I replied simply.

“Don’t care about that. You did it, right? You made it?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

Mike interrupted me. “So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t think you heard me. I said I peed all over myself. I peed on the
floor
, Michael.” I didn’t expect him to dismiss it all so easily. But Mike just didn’t
care. Part of me wanted his sympathy.

But Mike wouldn’t be the one to give that to me. By not showering me with sympathy,
he was refusing to acknowledge what made us different.