Posted on 03/06/2006 10:00:42 AM PST by pabianice
What I Saw After the Crash -- REHAB -Part 2
© 2005 by ltn72@charter.net -- All Rights Reserved
(Previous: What I Saw After the Crash -- REHAB -Part 1)
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I am attached to two machines for several hours every day as I lie in bed. One encloses my right leg and slowly flexes, then, extends the leg to try and get what is left of my knee working again. The other machine is tight around my left arm and also moves slowly in, out, in, out, in an attempt to free up my elbow, which can flex only a few degrees. Both hurt a lot, so I get to lie for hours while I am tortured every day. It’s a deep pain – the pain of forcing frozen, atrophied, damaged bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles to twist and turn. It really sucks. I am also working my left foot and right elbow on my own. They provide the only mobility I enjoy. By pushing up with my left heel and right elbow at the same time, I can sort of scoonch myself up in bed after I have slid down a bit. Aside from the reciprocating wheezing of the two torture machines, the room is quiet. My roommates come and go and few seem interested in talking or watching TV. I am informed how lucky I am to have these marvelous machines, for they do the work that was until recently only available from an actual human therapist. I try to feel lucky. Nothing happens.
Every patient has a daily therapy schedule, delivered in writing once a week. I am expected to get to the Therapy Room on my own. This involves a long and painful process I am learning too well. First, I reach with my still pitifully weak right arm to beside my bed, where lives my Transfer Board. The Transfer Board looks like a four-foot-long surfboard and weighs perhaps ten pounds, a weight I can barely manage on my own. I struggle the board up until one end is on my bedside and the other is on the seat of my wheelchair. Then, using my left leg and my right elbow, I scoonch myself up onto the board and then slide-scoonch down the board until I am in the seat of the wheelchair. Winded and sweating by then, I grab the board and put it across my lap. Then, it’s time to “ankle” myself down to the Therapy Room, using my left foot and ankle to inch the wheelchair along the passageway. It’s like moving your car by sitting in the driver’s seat and using your left foot to make it roll. ‘Great exercise,’ I pant to myself.
After what seems like an hour I arrive in Therapy. The Therapy Room is large -- perhaps 60 feet square – and brightly lit, filled with raised mats, chairs, benches, various therapy devices, and the cries of people in pain. I have limited therapy still, as my left elbow is frozen and nerve damage has left my left hand numb, and I am not allowed to put any weight on my right leg (“It’s a horrible break”) with my tibia having been pretty much pulverized and rebuilt around a titanium rod and various remaining bony bits held together with a bunch of plates, wires, and screws, the latter whose heads poke out of my knee area like small islands in a sea of red, puckered flesh.
Once in Therapy, I get to reverse my Transfer Board Shuffle, arriving upon one of the raised mats more or less by myself. The therapy staff is skilled, motivated, and pitiless. Therapy hurts. Really, really hurts. Imagine spending a period every morning and another every afternoon having someone roll a motorcycle over, say, your foot and then your arm while you are encouraged to “push back a bit more” and you have the general picture. I am not great with pain, but I have decided that I am either going to regain the use of my body or die here, so I grit my teeth and plug along. After the Transfer Board Dance, I get a wide variety of therapies from which to choose for this session. In one a therapist pushes and pulls my right leg to exercise the knee while I yell in pain. In another, the therapist rotates and stretches my right wrist (shattered and put back together with pins) while I yell in pain. In yet another, a therapist makes me do abdominal crunches while keeping my legs straight while I yell in pain. In another, I have to squeeze a hand-strengthener while I wince in pain. In still another, I have to arrange blocks in their recesses or turn cranks or clock keys or lift small weights while I yell in pain. I sense a pattern here. Around me the other patients either work to regain their bodies or sit in abject, hopeless misery.
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Many of the patients at Rehab have had knees or hips replaced (“the rookies,” as I call them) and are supposed to be getting back on their feet. Most of these are elderly and some have just given up. There is one raised matt in the center of the room around which a curtain has been drawn. From inside the curtain I can hear a calm voice say, “You have to exercise your hip, Mrs. Jones, or you won’t be able to walk again.” This instruction is accompanied by a horrible, old lady voice wailing in distress, then exclaiming, “I hate you!” before dissolving back into soft cries. Across the Therapy Room another elderly lady in a walker is shuffling very slowly toward a kitchen set-up where patients practice using a mock stove or toaster oven. This lady’s face is pinched white with pain and sorrow as she moves, tortoise-like, towards the stove, her thin, white hair a frizzy ball on the top of her head. Push walker forward six inches. Pause. Inch right foot forward six inches. Pause. Bring left foot up even with right foot. Cry with pain and hopelessness for several seconds. Take breath. Repeat. Once she reaches the “stove,” she stands shakily within the walker, wheezing, eyes shut, clearly unable to do anything else. It is obvious that some patients are not going to regain the use of their bodies. I spend about 45 minutes this session being twisted and moved and then trying to pick-up small objects and put them in special containers. My hands are slowly coming back to life.
A question(s) purely meant as seeking information.
Can you provide some context ... are you the author ... is this autobiographical?
Many thanks.
Go to the source - this is a fascinating multi-part series about a pilot recovering from an aircraft crash.
Go to the source - this is a fascinating multi-part series about a pilot recovering from an aircraft crash.
Compelling story ...
There, see how easy that was?
Just one little clue as to the subject isn't all that hard, and it gives us all we need to know about whether or not we WANT to go to the source.
Don't know if you are the author, pabianice, but I am mesmerized with the story being spun. When and where will I be able to read more?
There but for the Grace of God go we all.
We will never have to look very far to find someone who has life tougher than we do.
Thanks Pabianice...as stated on your last post regarding this journey, I'm hooked.
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