Leggy Blonde: A Memoir (2 page)

I didn’t feel pain at first. I just felt stuck and confused about what was happening. There was pressure. I instinctively tried to free myself, but my leg was being pulled down farther into the gap. The pulling and pressure forced me to sit. Then I felt overwhelmed and had to lie back.

The teeth had chewed my leg up to my knee. Becky started to run out of the barn. Dawn, clearly the most intelligent among us, screamed, “Turn it off! Becky, turn it off!” The switch was two hundred feet away. Becky raced down the length of the barn and hit it. The belt ground to a stop and the barn was suddenly quiet—except for, you know, the screaming.

If Dawn hadn’t yelled, and if Becky hadn’t turned off the belt, I would be dead. The moving steel planks would have chopped my leg off, and I would have bled to death. Even at six, I was aware that I was half an inch away from never seeing my mother again.

Becky and Dawn charged out of there, leaving me alone with the cows. I remember turning my head and noticing a swishing tail and the shape of a hoof. The barn smelled like manure and something new, something metallic, but not metal. It was the iron-rich smell of blood.

Running flat out in a desperate panic, Becky and Dawn reached the Morgans’ house in a minute or two. I could hear them screeching for help, their voices shrill and piercing while they ran.

I thought,
Something is really wrong.

Becky’s mother, Linda, rushed through the barn door. I’d always liked her. She was a very nice woman, and the sight of her made me feel better. The sight of me, however, sent her into a wild panic. Whatever Becky told her had not prepared Linda for seeing me ground up to my knee, seeping blood. She tried to pry the steel planks apart, using all her might as she pulled, but they wouldn’t budge. Even with the adrenaline strength of the archetypical woman who lifts a car to save an infant trapped underneath, she couldn’t move it an inch. I registered how hard she was working, and how important it was for her. Her frustration mounted by the second. She broke out in a sweat and kept talking to me as she worked to free my
leg, a rambling commentary that I can’t remember a word of. I knew she was doing her best, but I really wanted my mom. I heard a commotion outside the barn. Excited voices, shouts, a siren, and flashing lights—a rescue squad had come.

I passed out.

When I came to, there was a pillow under my head and my father was next to me. He’d been retrieved from his office down the hill. I was glad he was there. I was on my back, and looked up at him as he rubbed my head. Down by my leg, rescue workers were taking apart the barn cleaner piece by piece using blowtorches. I wondered if the blowtorches would burn me. Dark, sticky red was everywhere, on the planks, all over me. Someone had cut off my jeans up to my mid-thigh and put a tight rubber strap around my thigh. The smell of blood was tinny and heavy. People moved in and out of my vision both at frantic speed and in slow motion.

I screamed, loudly and continuously, because I knew what was happening was terrifying. So many adults were freaking out. The pain was, oddly enough, not so bad. It was non-pain. I later learned that I was numb with shock, or had broken through a pain threshold. My brain shut it off. Fear, though, didn’t have a threshold.

A man came toward me with a loaded syringe. They were going to give me a shot. From the very first vaccine I can remember getting, like most kids, I’d had a fear of needles. The sight of it then was even more frightening than the blood. I screamed riotously.

“Stop screaming! Stop screaming! Shut up!”
The man with the needle, sweaty and angry, yelled at me to be quiet. He got right in my face. I was unnerving him, a man trained to keep his cool under the most grisly circumstances.

My father leaned over me and whispered in my ear, “You just keep on screaming, Aviva.”

I felt a sting on my arm, and everything went black.

When I woke up the second time, I was still in the barn, on the barn cleaner. Three hours had gone by. It took that long to dismantle the machine. They were only then lifting me out of it. I looked down. My left foot looked like ground meat with bits of shoestring and canvas from my chewed-up Mickey Mouse sneaker mixed in. The pulpy mess hung onto my ankle by a thread and the skin along my shin had been ripped from the bone up to my knee. The bone was denuded, bright white, like a French-cut lamb chop.

A stone wall bordered the property, a common feature of the country farms in that area. As the fields were cleared, the farmer stacked the plowed-up rocks into a wall. That wall was probably older than the house. As I was carried from the barn to the ambulance on a stretcher, I saw people sitting on the wall, dozens of them. The whole town had gathered
Little House on the Prairie
style to wait for the injured child to be rescued. They didn’t react when I was taken out; they just silently stared. Years later, I remember watching “Baby Jessica” brought out of the well, and the people cheered and applauded. The Delaware County crowd was somber and subdued. I must have looked pretty bad.

“We’re going to the hospital in Albany, Aviva. The doctors will take care of you,” said Dad. He was next to my bed in the ambulance. We sped off. The siren blared loudly. I had an IV in my arm and before long, the meds knocked me out.

When I came to for the third time, I was on a steel table in a white room. I was alone, still dressed in my T-shirt and cut-up jeans, no blanket covering me. I looked down and saw the Mickey Mouse sneaker on my right foot. The familiar sight was made grotesque in comparison to my mangled left leg. Grass, hay, and bits of manure
stuck to a clump of skin and blood and bone. I burst into tears. My reaction was visceral, a sudden onslaught of hysteria. My foot was destroyed. It was real.

I’d had bumps and bruises before. The sight of blood on a scrape was enough to rattle any six-year-old. This was the same feeling times a million. I was afraid without even understanding what would happen a day, an hour, or a year down the road. I didn’t know anything—where I was, where my parents were, what would happen to my leg. All I knew was fear and pain. I screamed wordlessly like a wounded animal.

And then my angel came in.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” I cried and reached for her.

Mom was my everything. I worshipped her. She was truly exquisite. People always said she looked like a Germanic Elizabeth Montgomery from
Bewitched
. She
was
bewitching. When my mom walked into a room, she brought beauty and grace with her. She always smelled wonderful, too. I’d been lying there in that cold, sterile room, wishing for her to appear. And she did. She hugged me and her touch was warm, gentle, and tender.

“Aviva,” she said into my hair. It sounded like “Aveeeva” with her accent.

As she held me and said my name, I thought,
Everything is going to be okay
. That’s the power of unconditional love. No one else could have comforted me like her, and all it took was one word.

Before leaving the office and arriving at the accident scene, my father called her back at our house. I imagined it like a movie scene: Mom putting flowers in a vase, my baby brother, Andre, then two, playing happily in his wooden high chair, the summer sun streaming in through the kitchen windows. I pictured my German grandmother
standing next to Mom at the counter, fixing something sweet and delicious, when the phone on the wall rang. Mom grabs it, untwisting the long cord, and says, “Hello?”

“Ingrid, something terrible has happened,” says Dad.

She learns in an instant that her only daughter had suffered a horrific accident. The phone drops in slow motion, hitting the floor with a sonic boom. Our world has blown up. My mother’s anguished screams carried across the hills as she collapsed.

When she recovered, Mom drove to Albany and my grandmother stayed behind with my brother.

In that white emergency room, she did her best to calm me down, but I was still hysterical. A nurse or doctor came in. Another needle . . . Another cold steel table. This time, I was naked under a blue surgical blanket and could feel the wheels turning as we rolled down a white corridor.

Surgery Number One: Attempt to Reattach Severed Left Foot

When I next woke up, I immediately vomited. My postop puking soon became a tradition. Every time I woke from surgery, look out. Technicolor yawn.

I felt woozy and was seeing double. The intensive care room vibrated white and bright. It took an hour before the queasiness stopped and I could focus.

My parents were in chairs next to my bed. Dad said, “The doctors reattached your foot.” He explained that my foot was fastened to my ankle with sutures and a pigskin wrap. It wasn’t a graft. The pigskin served as organic surgical tape, holding it all together. The surgery took fourteen hours, apparently, and was deemed a success, yet I was
not out of danger. My foot was bandaged like a mummy, except for my toes sticking out the top.

Every hour, doctors and nurses in white coats came into the room to look at them. The toes were lacking oxygen and blood, dark purple. The doctors pricked them with needles. “Do you feel that? How about this? Do you feel it?” they asked. I didn’t feel a thing. My toes were numb. The rest of my leg throbbed and burned unrelentingly.

I stayed in intensive care for a day or two, and then I was wheeled across the hall into another room. I had a roommate, a boy a few years older than me. I had no idea what was wrong with him, and only caught one glimpse before the nurses closed the curtain between our beds. In the middle of the night, I woke up when several doctors entered our room and surrounded the boy’s bed. I could see the shadow on the curtain of the doctors holding him down, of his struggling against them. Then I heard the boy’s frantic choking and gurgling. They were trying to ram something down his throat. For all I know, the doctors were saving his life, but it sounded like torture. He begged, “Stop!” over and over, his pleas cut off by wet gagging. The doctors weren’t swayed by his protest. Whatever they were doing seemed barbaric. I was scared out of my mind that when they finished with the boy, they’d push back the curtain to do the same thing to me.

My parents told me the next day we were leaving Albany and going to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, for “more serious medical help,” as Dad said. After the night I’d had, quaking in terror about what had happened to the boy, I was ready to get out of there. I would have sprinted to the door, except for my pigskin-wrapped, black Frankenfoot.

•  •  •

My mom and I rode in an ambulance for four hours from Albany to Manhattan. Mount Sinai Hospital was on Madison Avenue and
Ninety-ninth Street, not far from our apartment. I barely knew where I was. City, country, good hospital, bad hospital—I just wanted the hell to end. The ambulance pulled up to the hospital entrance, and my mother’s best friend, Sarah, was there to greet us. She was like a godmother to me, and remains a close friend. (Incidentally, Sarah and her sister, along with their husbands, were the cool hippies who created Hotsox, those rainbow toesies tube socks. Remember them?)

My mom beamed at her. “Hi, Sarah!” she said, like it was any other day. Of course, Mom cried and agonized about the accident—for years. But she did it in private. She never let me see her upset. The doctors had been telling my parents all the potential outcomes, including deadly infections and amputation. Mom always managed to keep it light around me. She smiled and tried to raise my spirits. As a mother myself, I marvel at her strength and find myself wondering if she used up her lifetime supply of it that summer, and had nothing left for later on.

Within minutes of settling me into my room at Mount Sinai, the nurses set up an oxygen tent around me, and paid very close attention to my vital signs. Dad demanded it. He took control of the situation and was issuing orders to everyone. His inner Brooklyn tough guy
really
came out when it came to saving his little girl. As a hotshot accountant, Dad worked with some huge names in entertainment and on Wall Street, including Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, Woody Allen, Michael Milken, and the Morgan Stanley banker John Mack, who was also my father’s best friend in those days. Dad was the no-bullshit money magician known for saving his clients a ton of cash. By contrast, Mom was gentle and kind, a magnificent shiksa goddess. Together, they were a prominent couple in New York society. When they walked into a room, even a hospital room, they were a force to be reckoned with.

Dad was so well connected he got consultations with every vascular
specialist in America and called in the best doctors. Just about everyone he knew tried to figure out how to preserve my leg. He brought in alternative therapists, including a woman who applied fresh aloe sap to my leg to draw out bacteria every hour for a couple of days. A friend of his at the Museum of Natural History unlocked an exhibit to access an ancient sample of some miracle regenerative mineral. Along with the oxygen tent, which was supposed to help blood flow to my foot, I spent hours in a hyperbaric chamber. It looked like a submarine, and mimicked the pressure of descending deep under the sea. My mom went in it with me. It was dark and noisy. A nurse told me that if we ascended too quickly, our skulls would cave in. Naturally, I was terrified of the metal contraption after that.

The traditional doctors were dismissive about the alternative therapy at first, and openly hostile later on. Dad started referring to the doctors as “egotistical moneygrubbing schmucks.” This was the beginning of his lifelong loathing and distrust for Western medicine. His frustration with them was a rippling undercurrent of tension throughout my hospital stay.

While Dad tallied up grievances, I collected stuffed animals. Whenever people came for a visit, they brought one for me. I had a hundred piled up behind my bed, and at least five tucked in with me at all times. Letters rolled in from my parents’ friends, from rock stars and politicians, who offered to do whatever they could to help. Each new doctor was the great white (and usually Jewish) hope. Dad pulled every string, tried every “cure.”