One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir (2 page)

A man’s voice buzzed from speakers which seemed to be placed inside the machine. An odd mixture of tones played through his speech: wan sympathy, boredom, an air of command.
Be still
, he said.
Be still
.

I held my breath. The scanner began its clatter, dowsing me in a magnetic field which would reveal an image of what I’d broken, the unseen wounds.

An endless, watchful stream of nurses marked my first night: vital statistics were measured, my temperature taken, sleep always interrupted. I wanted sleep, I’d said, the blinding occlusion of dreams, a world in which I was still tethered to my life. My old life. I wanted my room at home and the bed which was ancient and looked it: bent nails in the battered wood were hammered back in. How old it was, where it came from, to whom it had belonged a long time ago, are details in stories I can’t remember, or was never told. Now it had passed out of my life forever. Now I slept, or tried to, in an intensive care electric hospital bed, which would raise and lower and had chrome rails along its whole length; the mattress was dense, sealed in vinyl to protect against incontinence. I wore a child’s diaper.

The following nine days fade into the blur of trauma: much of the time, I was sick, unable to eat or keep water down. I sucked ice chips from a paper cup, a few at a time: nurses rationed them, afraid too much would stir up the nausea
which sloshed in my stomach all the time. I still felt nothing below my neck, less than nothing. I felt hot, burning up, yet I couldn’t feel temperature at all. The rest of me had become a blankness, a screen upon which my nervous system attempted to project a self which no longer existed and with every insensate day grew more remote.

My parents took turns sleeping in the room, waking up wild-haired and bleary-eyed. My father was thirty-one, my mother thirty, both of them younger than I am now.

Relatives orbited during visitation hours, full of scattershot encouragement, half understanding my diagnosis. I stayed in bed, miserable, bored, scared, waiting for something to happen, to change. I could hardly sit up in bed without the room spinning, my blood thudding through my head, vertigo swamping me. The television anchored to the wall bleated all day.

By degrees I could sit upright again after a few days had passed, though I felt little better. Doctors came and went, and their demeanor became a kind of running commentary: one seemed kind and one arrogant, abrasive, indifferent; others were good-humored, encouraging. All spoke to me mostly of the present and recent past: this had happened to me, and this was now happening to me. Their words deftly dodged the impending future, speaking to my parents the hard words, the final ones, that I wouldn’t walk again.

Soon I could be pushed around the hospital floor in a wheelchair. I was grateful, even for this little change in sur
roundings. The hallway walls were painted with aggressive cheer. Animals gamboled about in primary colors. A boy pedaled a bicycle made of paint. Pushed for short walks around the floor, I would dread the turn that revealed him, all his danger.

It seemed like a long time had passed, that this was my life and always had been. The days settled into peculiar rhythms, the space between catastrophe and convalescence, which hadn’t even begun. Inside my body still were two fractured vertebrae, a bruised and swollen spinal cord, and in each arm a bone knitting crookedly. I couldn’t exist this way forever, without decisive treatment, rehabilitation, and my parents knew this, investigating as best they could available options, but keeping their efforts largely secret from me. I could scarcely imagine what one day would be like, let alone the prospect of leaving, transferring to another hospital in another city. I had become more stable now and though I didn’t speak of it, I knew this waiting could not last long.

And it didn’t. I can’t remember a single distinguishable thing about the man, but when a doctor entered my room the morning of the fifth day, carefully, looking first to each of my stricken parents, I knew that whatever he had to say could not be good. Lying on my left side, facing the door, I wanted to shrink away, to vanish.

The doctor pulled a chair close to the bed, sat down. He spoke.

“Paul, it’s time that we talked about some things. Hard things. I’ll come right out and say it: you bruised your spinal cord severely. That much you already know. It’s not what we call a complete injury. The cord wasn’t severed. You’re lucky. But, even so, the chances are great, they are overwhelming, that you won’t be able to walk again. You might regain some function. Your arms, maybe, your fingers. A leg. You might not. We don’t know. In a few days, you and your parents will make some important choices about how and where you’ll begin therapy. But you will be in a wheelchair the rest of your life.”

My parents, listening, stricken, seemed to bristle. The air felt like the prelude to thunder.

I made a bad joke: “Would I still be able to play the piano?” I knew that it was a clichéd trope of rehabilitation narratives, or a joke my father might make, but it was the only thing I could think of. I didn’t feel like laughing. Or crying. I felt flattened. Drained. Acutely aware of my parents’ anguish. Their grief was worse than mine, more immediate, crushing and unbearable, and through them I could better see, more deeply understand how radically changed the rest of my life would be.

I was twelve years old. A quadriplegic. I barely knew the word’s meaning.

My neck was always a misery. Not because of pain from the injury. The collar was oppressively hot, designed to immobilize the neck: made of two stiff halves, each wrapped in a bandage-like sleeve, they locked together at each side. Beneath the chin was a hard shelf, shaped generally like the lines of one’s jaw. When snapped together, both pieces held the neck and head still. They also held in the body’s heat, like an infernal scarf, one which could not be removed. My skin there broke out in rashes, itched, and there was no relief that was not dangerous. I loved the lenient nurses who knew pity and would open the collar at night, for just a brief while, the air an ambient balm. They’d dust the inflamed
skin with baby powder and let me sleep that way, if only for a few hours.

My broken arms were splinted; more decisive treatment like casts would wait until we knew more about my prognosis. Whatever irritation they must have caused the skin of my arms was lost, unfelt. But I could feel, heavy across my chest, a weight which would never move: that of my left arm, rising and falling with each breath. And, yet, my left arm rested at my side, motionless like a dead thing, and nothing which truly touched the bare skin of my chest, no stethoscope or cold pearl of water, cut through the implacable numbness. It was maddening, the certainty that my arm was right there, as if I were resting, when it was plainly elsewhere. I think I had heard of the neurological phenomenon of phantom pain, or read of it in one of the sodden encyclopedias I thumbed through at night, but I was too young then to be calm, to wait on the trauma within me to draw back, even a little. I fretted over that imaginary limb, simultaneously wanting it to go away and hoping, ever so faintly, that it was my arm, in spite of what I could see. To feel a thing then, when so much of my body had vanished from perception, to feel anything at all was a hope, a dangerous, illogical one, but hope all the same.

For the first nine days, marked by dread and not time, I can remember this much. I had been plagued by nausea the whole time: everything was heat, too much of it—temperature regulation, digestion, everything was affected,
directly or otherwise, by the accident. Time would calm it all, but until then, when the newness of the trauma faded, I could only boil and suffer. It was strange to feel so little yet still be affected by it all: if my body below the level of the bruised spinal cord was in no way apparent to me, it was still there, unharmed, untouched, subject to every stimulus it had always known. And so I was, in a way, two parts of one whole, divided but inextricably linked, no matter the numbness.

My stomach still roiled and it was hard to keep anything down. Late one night, a doctor came to my bedside, leaning over me, his hands knotted together. He seemed vexed, not quite ready to say anything. Used to the look, I waited. Then he began.

“The acids in your stomach, Paul, because of everything you’re going through, it’s like your body, everything about it, is upset. That’s why you feel so nauseous all the time. We’re going to treat that by putting a tube into your nose and down into your stomach, so we can give you medicine, OK?”

When he walked away, I felt something begin to give way inside me. Up until then, I’d faced more misery and indignity than I would have thought possible. I lay there, numb and sick in a diaper, helpless. It was too much to bear, too frightening, a last invasion I could experience and not break, utterly. When he returned with nurses, I was already sobbing.

Anyone so limited could hardly fight, but I tried. I tried. The neck collar prevented much movement, and any was dangerous, but I turned my head side to side, just slightly, a pitiful, unacceptable range. Fat tears rolled down my face like marbles. I begged them all,
no, no, no, please, no
.

“Hold him, hold him still,” the doctor said. Nurses gripped my head on either side.

From a sterile pack, the doctor fished out a long transparent tube and dabbed its head in a clear lubricant. He paused almost as if to warn me but then said nothing.

Then the tube entered one nostril, its gauge slight enough to pass through, down my throat and into my stomach. I couldn’t thrash or resist. I could only relent. To the pain, the discomfort, but most distressingly the feeling of powerlessness, of violation. It was in that moment, I think, the weight of everything which had happened fell upon me, undeniably, and the knowledge of it crushed me.

When the phone rang I was sick. Fevered. A bladder infection, the nurse said. Nothing serious but it frightened me. I wanted to speak to whoever had called. It was Billy Stevens, a brash kid, smart-mouthed, poor. He sat beside me in math, pelting others with spitballs, expert at disdain. I said hello. They were laughing, whoever was with him, giggling in the background. Whatever was so funny, neither let on, snickering between their attempts to show concern for me.
The call ended, and I had no idea what had been so riotous, but in my bed the mystery was funny, was more than that: a momentary touch of the strangeness of childhood. I barely knew them and would never see them again, but that they called was a kindness greater than many of my closer friends ever managed.

I was ill but for a moment I was not in critical condition.

Those first ten days were not all misery, not quite. I was cheerful, optimistic, though scared. I was often uncomfortable, hot, weak, unable to sleep well or much at all, but I was in no great amount of pain for the most part. I could still feel nothing below my neck; my body, all its muscles, seemed to have fallen into a deep, deep sleep.

One evening my uncle Randy, my mother’s oldest brother, came to visit. He ran the family business, the junkyard their father had begun. He was short, with a bristled little mustache, and hair that had turned gray before he’d left high school far behind. We had been close, even though he was eccentric, with a wild temper, given to chewing the collars of his shirts in his just barely sublimated rages. Anything could set him off, but his fits, and their profane squalls, were so frequent, so repressed, he was nothing to fear, an impotent oddball who spent his days covered in grease, pulling odd parts from the rusted husks of wreckage which piled up beneath tall pines.

“Little buddy,” he said, his voice full of his usual bluster, his pithy down-home inanities, but now rang hollow, more like a question, what you might say to a dimly recalled, half-recognized relative. This wasn’t lost on me, lying there in a diaper, immobilized, watching the ceiling’s changeless face.

“Little buddy, you need to close your eyes a second, we brought you something. A surprise.”

I felt like I knew what it would be, and my heart caved in a little bit further. I smiled, my eyes drawn shut.

“Pistol,” he said. It was the way he talked, faux cornpone punctuating gaps between apoplectic bouts of cursing.

When I opened my eyes, Randy stood at the foot of the bed with a new bicycle, gleaming chrome even in the hospital’s wan, institutional light. He’d lifted it up into the bed, holding it upright. It was expensive, the kind of bike I had lingered over a long, long time in bicycle shops and in the glossy magazines I used to thumb through in grocery stores. Long before my accident, and long before this moment, I had loved that bike. For all its iridescent unattainability. For its perfection. And I loved it then. I loved it then as I loved my old life, and mourned them both. In the small hospital room there was no room for a bike. No room for a useless reminder. My parents carried it home, hung it in a closet on hooks, its fate not so different from Jody’s ten-speed, to be forgotten in the dust.

A week had passed since the accident. Nothing in my body had moved. No twitch of toe or flex of knee. Except for when I slept, the television was constant motion and babble, its fuzzy picture rolling pablum. Visitors brought videocassettes for me to watch: bad comedies, bad action flicks. Everything was cheap, shoddy. I nodded off, in and out, sometimes absorbed, and other times, pressed by boredom, anxiety. I was not particularly transported by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
Commando
, none of its slapdash gore, when my leg moved, drawing up almost to my chest, the muscles beneath the white hospital sheets trembling, then extending back to where it had been, motionless, for so much time.

I had not been able to move in days. Or felt anything but the ghost of my arm fading away, now hardly noticeable. My mother, reading beside the bed, looked over, shocked. Whatever hope I’d nursed, it had been small and inconstant, not crumbling but receding. To see my leg move again, after everything, was frightening. Why was this happening? And how, in its inexplicability, could it be good?

Her books slid from her lap onto the floor. Her face composed itself like rapid questions, and tears welled in her tired eyes. “That will show them,” she said. “They don’t know everything.”

Later in the day, a doctor on his rounds explained the spasm was not all that surprising, common, even, in injuries like mine, since the swelling of the spinal cord would
eventually subside. He cautioned that the movement was no indication that my injury might be less severe than initially thought. Much of the nervous system, the spinal cord, the nerves which threaded out from it, the sentinel brain atop it all, was still a mystery, not subject to reliable predictions. Still, with every conversation I held with neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, urologists, nurses, and more, I came to a secondhand knowledge of the body’s workings which had been before only abstract, the stuff of textbook diagrams and lesson plans. Now, I was the lesson, I was the studied body, and even in that terrible state, I couldn’t help but be queasily fascinated, the way one looks over the edge of a high building, the world plummeting away.

By the end of my stay, I had been diagnosed and stabilized, no longer gripped in the whirl of vertigo if I tried to sit upright. I could drink and eat without my digestive system rejecting everything. One leg had even moved. My doctors in concert with my parents began preparing me for the decisions to come, when I’d be transferred to an adequate rehabilitation center. The thought of flying off to Denver, where the venerable Craig Hospital was located, was equally terrifying and thrilling: I had never traveled farther from home than Florida. At night, with my mother and father, we talked about what it might be like and how they’d visit. But Denver was not our only, or perhaps even best, option.
In Atlanta, less than two hours away, a city I knew, where relatives lived on streets crowded with magnolias and dogwoods, was Shepherd Spinal Center, a newer rehabilitation hospital, one exclusively focused on treating spinal cord injuries.

Unknown to me, my father had toured its three small patient floors and its gymnasiums where physical therapists stretched limbs and tried to strengthen flagging muscles. He was holding a packet of information given to him during his visit. Inside were the standard narratives, the smiling faces, plausibly vague assurances. He showed some of it to me.

“This is where you’ll be going,” he said. “Your mother and I decided this was best. That we’d be close enough to visit. Every weekend. It’s not even two hours away.”

I can’t say that I chose to be transferred to Atlanta, to Shepherd; the decision was too large, too crucial, for a child to make. When my parents told me I’d be going there, it was the night before I would have to leave by medical transport, an ambulance, and though I felt small, too small to even cry or feel much fear, unexpected relief opened up inside me. Ten days had passed since my accident, during which I’d slept little, was often unable to eat. I’d been forced to consider a changed life before I even knew what a life could fully become.