Leggy Blonde: A Memoir (3 page)

Mom was a loving presence in the chair next to my bed, always smiling and optimistic. They were both desperate to keep me whole and intact. I’ve since been told that had the accident happened in 2012 and not 1977, reattachment would have worked. The seventies
were the infancy of vascular surgery. The chances of saving my foot were none to none.

•  •  •

Cow shit—why in the world did I, or anyone, think playing in manure was fun? Why was that a good idea? Becky suggested we jump around in excrement and I’d said, “Cool!” What the hell was I thinking?

Because of the cow manure infecting my wound, gangrene was running rampant throughout my system. I was put on IV broad spectrum antibiotics. The catheter stayed in my arm for another three weeks.

My toes, meanwhile, went from navy blue to midnight black. The blackness crept from my toes up my foot. It was a week or more before my parents could accept that it would have to go.

They brought in a doctor named Leon Root. (Small world aside: Years later, I went on a blind date with his son, Matt Root. We were having dinner and he mentioned his father was a doctor. I said, “Your father is Leon Root?” Matt nodded. “He consulted on my amputation when I was six!” I announced, a little too enthusiastically . . . probably not ideal small talk on a first date.) Dr. Root had an amazing reputation. He was like a god among mortals. He examined me, then told my parents in the hallway, “The infection is bad. We have to amputate. It’s a question of whether we amputate at the knee or the ankle. I recommend the ankle.”

That was what my parents wanted to hear. The more leg I had, the more normal my life would be, they thought. They hoped I’d be able to get a screw-on foot of some sort to attach to my leg. Technology advanced every day. Anything was possible in the future, they thought. My father sat down on my bed and told me, “You’re going to have another operation. The doctors are going to remove two or three
of your toes. You’re going to be like the Bionic Woman,” he said. I pictured Lindsay Wagner from the hit TV show with her cyber limbs that were ten times stronger and faster than human ones, but was unmoved. I didn’t care about having super strength or bionic toes. I didn’t care if they chopped off my head at that point. I just wanted the pain to stop. I welcomed surgery. I thought it would be the end of the nightmare.

Surgery Number Two: Amputation of the Left Foot at the Ankle

Another long surgery, another rocky reentry into consciousness. I vomited and waited for my vision to adjust. I knew the operation was to remove my toes, but I could still feel them. I thought,
Guess they didn’t take ’em
. The phantom effect—believing you were intact after an amputation—was common. This subconscious trick of the mind brought solace to some, but no one had warned me about it in advance. So when I could see clearly again in my postop haze, I lifted my blanket and looked down at my legs and was genuinely surprised to see that my whole foot was gone. Just leg, and then . . . nothing.

I felt disappointed. I wasn’t worried about my ability to walk in that moment. I wasn’t picturing myself in a wheelchair, or with a wooden leg like a pirate, or hobbling around with a cane. And I certainly wasn’t considering the future and wondering whether or not I’d adapt, fall in love, have children, or lead a relatively “normal” life. My father had looked me in the eye and told me the doctors were taking a few toes. They took the entire foot. I felt lied to.

To this day, Dad and I haven’t discussed that day, or that conversation. He was winging it. My parents were in pain in an extraordinary situation that no one could possibly prepare for. They were doing
their very best. (Interestingly, they did have some experience in this area. My brother Andre had had a surgery, too. He was born with twelve fingers, and had his extra digits removed surgically at birth. Granted, losing vestigial pinkies was less tense for them than my losing a foot.)

Okay,
I thought,
It’s really gone. Bummer
. I lowered the blanket and felt a little bit relieved. That surgery marked the end of the wacky treatments. It turned down the dial on my pain. But my hospital stay was only just getting started.

As unsettling as the black desiccated toes had been, they were preferable to a raw stump. Because of the gangrene infection and for other reasons, the surgeons didn’t immediately cover my amputation wound with a skin graft. It looked like a science textbook cross section of a leg with the white bone in the middle, surrounded by muscle and ligament.

The wound had to be bandaged tightly and cleaned three times a day. Nurses came into my room to change the gauze and tape. The flesh was raw, and the bandages would stick to the wound and meld into a crust. Every time—and I mean
every single time
—the nurses ripped the bandages off by force, tearing the healing wound open. It hurt more than the teeth of the barn cleaner. As soon as I saw the nurses come into my room with scissors and bandage trays, I would go into hysterics. They had to hold me down. I flailed against them while they unraveled the bandages. It was mayhem.

I didn’t—and still don’t—understand the wisdom of ripping the flesh open and raw three times a day. Clearly they had their reasons, but as a six-year-old, it struck me as cruel and unusual punishment. My mom used her charm, begging the nurses to come an hour earlier, to mix up their schedule so I didn’t fret for an hour in anticipatory dread. She eventually figured out that if she wet the bandages by
using a large syringe filled with water, they wouldn’t be as sticky. It helped a little. She also tried to distract me by biting my thigh really hard when the nurses changed the bandages.

Once my infection was under control, I was cleared for a skin graft. My parents brought in Victor Rosenberg, a plastic surgeon (renowned for his boob and nose jobs), to talk about how a skin graft could be done. Just as with each surgery and treatment I’d had thus far, my parents and doctors told me that this was the one that would end the misery. The graft was going to make it all okay.

Dr. Rosenberg examined me at the hospital. He was a very lovely, kind man. First, he looked at my stump. Then he turned me over, lifted my gown, and pinched my tush to see if it was fat enough to take skin for the graft.

I was absolutely mortified. A strange man was touching my butt. It was the most embarrassing moment of the entire hospitalization so far. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people had lifted my gown to look at my foot and I didn’t care one bit. I’d mentally—and then literally—detached from it. My foot, and then the stump, had become public property in a way. But my butt was still private. Or, it had been. Now even that was under scrutiny.

In the end, as it were, Dr. Rosenberg decided to take skin from my thighs.

Surgery Number Three: Skin Graft to Cover the Base of My Stump

He cut the thigh skin into strips, and arranged it across my stump in a crisscross pattern, like woven dough on top of a pie. The skin graft quickly healed, and the torturous bandage-changing sessions with the Nurses Ratched ended. My pain lessened. For the first time in nearly
two months, I wasn’t on drugs or in agony. There was a savior, and he came in the form of Dr. Rosenberg.

The pain was reduced so much, I could think about other things. Like love.

While my hospital stay turned my father against medical doctors for the rest of his life, it had the opposite effect on me. I developed a doctor fetish. My first crush was on a resident at Mount Sinai. Whenever he came into my room, my heart would start pounding. I remember him looking a lot like Disney princes, dark wavy hair and piercing blue eyes, bright white smile. He joked around with me, and touched my shoulders to be reassuring. I was almost unbearably excited to see him.

One morning he walked in, happy to see me. I acted like a wise ass, as usual, trying to make him laugh. I was lying on the bed, eating something. Suddenly, he yelled, “Don’t eat when you are lying down! Get up! Sit up!” He looked angry and irritated, like I’d broken a rule and proven myself to be a stupid kid.

Obviously, he just didn’t want me to choke on my food. The tone was no different than a parent yelling at a child for putting a dry-cleaning bag over her head. I got that. But I’d put all my emotional hunger on him, and when he snapped at me, I felt like I didn’t have a friend in the world. As the saying goes, there’s a reason it’s called a crush.

I had Mom, though. She hardly left my side for the entire two months I spent in the hospital. When she went to the bathroom, she left the door open so I could see her. If not, I would freak. She slept with me, changed my clothes, and gave me sponge baths. When she had to go—to pick up my brother or for whatever reason—her best friends, Sarah and Irena, also a German former Pan Am stewardess, took turns staying with me. They brought me Chinese food from my favorite restaurant, Bruce Ho’s Four Seas on Fifty-seventh Street
between Park and Lexington (now a Starbucks). Although I loved Sarah and Irena, I cried when they came into my room. Their arrival meant Mom was going to go away. I needed Mom desperately. I couldn’t stand to be separated from her. That attachment, and the panic of losing it, I believe, was the basis for the anxiety disorder I later developed.

My dad had to go to work during the day. My two-year-old brother, Andre, was being cared for by my grandmother and baby-sitters. Grandma came to the hospital a few times. My half brother, Billy, Dad’s son from a former marriage, came once. A haunted soul, he was sixteen then and already deeply involved with drugs. In the not-too-distant future, he would become a crack addict. That day, though, he was wonderful. He gave me an enormous red panda and told me funny stories for hours. In my experience, the most troubled people are often the sweetest. They carry a certain sensitivity to life’s pains and turn to drugs to numb themselves.

•  •  •

At the beginning of August, a team of doctors and nurses crowded into my room. The head nurse cleared her throat to make the announcement. “Aviva is ready to go home,” she said. “Congratulations. We’ll miss you!”

I appreciated all they’d done for me. My parents had me write thank-you letters to every rescue worker, doctor, and nurse who treated me. But I wouldn’t miss any of them for a minute: I was so happy to leave. We didn’t have a lot of clothes to pack. I’d been living in hospital gowns for two months. But we did need a second taxi for all of my stuffed animals.

Unbeknownst to me, the original reason we’d moved to the country for the entire summer was so we could renovate, decorate, and move into a new apartment in the city. While I was in the hospital, my
dad oversaw the move from our old place into the Kenilworth at 151 Central Park West. The new building was a thirteen-story landmark built in 1903 with a dry moat around the perimeter and a russet brick facade. Along with the historic Dakota, Beresford, and San Remo, the Kenilworth was a perennial on the lists of the most prestigious buildings on the Upper West Side. Our four-thousand-square-foot apartment was on the tenth floor with spectacular views of Central Park from each window.

My dad had grown up on the edge of poverty in Brooklyn, sharing a bed with his grandfather like in
Willy Wonka
. He went from having nothing to wanting for nothing. Now that he had money, he liked to spend it and enjoy it. Our lifestyle was opulent. And this apartment was a major step up from our smaller place on West Fifty-eighth Street. My parents bought it for a mere sixty thousand dollars—even in 1977, that wasn’t a lot—because the West Side was considered dangerous compared to the snooty and expensive East Side. In reality, Central Park West was about as dangerous as a pillow fight, but whatever. We felt more at home among the artists and bohemians on the West Side anyway. Our neighbors were Michael Douglas and Bill Moyers. Everyone in the building seemed to have interesting jobs and lifestyles: museum directors, designers, artists, and mavericks.

I rolled into the Kenilworth in a wheelchair for the first time that August. The lobby had high ceilings and marble floors, with architecture and moldings like a European museum. The elevator walls were covered in velvet, with bronze handles and a high, rounded ceiling. Having been cooped up in that small hospital room, it was like leaving a prison for a palace. We took the elevator to our apartment. Excited as I was to explore my lavish new surroundings, I was still too weak to check the place out and went straight to bed to rest.

A day or two later, I got to look around. I noticed that one of the park-facing windows had a big X in tape across it. “What happened here?” I asked.

No one answered me. I found out later that my father had punched the window and broken it. He’d been sleeping in the apartment all summer alone. And when reliving the accident one night, he got livid, had no one to talk him down, and lost control.

Fortunately, our apartment was right above a ledge, so all the broken glass landed on the ledge and not on the street below. But the big blue X remained—a reminder that not everything was perfect.

Otherwise, the place was beautiful. It was photographed for
Architectural Digest
and other magazines. Myron Goldfinger decorated the apartment with wall-to-wall oatmeal-colored carpet, white walls, and floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The dining room was raised on a platform with several steps leading up to a Knoll glass table that seated twelve. The living room was raised, too, with tan leather couches and chairs with chrome arms and legs. My parents’ bedroom was huge and their marble bathroom had a giant tub overlooking the park. The shelving throughout the house was custom-made Formica, which was very chic back then. There were also mirrored beams throughout.

The apartment was the ultimate status symbol. The poor German refugee and the Jewish kid from Brooklyn had arrived. I don’t know if my parents were analytical about our move coinciding with my accident. In hindsight, it was a fascinating coincidence. The universe gave and it took away, almost simultaneously. It was as if you couldn’t have happiness without an equal amount of sadness. We were surrounded by the rich, the beautiful, the famous, the talented—but money and status couldn’t protect you from accidents or pain. No one got through life scot-free. Consequently, I have always been skeptical of happy times. Whenever I’m exceeedingly happy, I’m
suspicious that dark times are around the corner. It’s a mental curse.