Rehab Hell

Physical rehab is hard. Really hard. It’s a mess of sweat and pain and exhaustion that has probably worn many a grown person to tears. I was a pretty tough nut to crack, but there were times when rehab bested me. It was slow going, building strength in my wasted and reconfigured legs. The simple act of bending my knees was agony, and for a while, bending my knees was all anybody ever seemed interested in making me do. I got to a point where I dreaded seeing anyone in a white coat come through the door: nurses, doctors, physical therapists. They all put me through the ringer -- and the ones who walked in smiling like they’d had laughing gas for breakfast were the worst.

When it came to rehab, I wanted people to give it to me straight. I was no fool: if I knew something was going to hurt and whoever was going to do the hurting downplayed it, I made it harder for them than it had to be by intentionally refusing to cooperate. (If you’ll pardon my French, I was a pain in the ass. But I’d earned the right to be, so I don’t feel too bad.) Lie to me, and you’d have an awful day at work. I could stonewall with the best of them. I pitched fabulous fits, too. By the rehabilitation part of the whole rigmarole – after being cut open, rearranged, pumped full of drugs, incapacitated with plaster for months and then practically attacked with a terrifying saw, for which I tolerated needles, blood, bruises, I.V. lines and so much damn medical tape I’m surprised I ever re-grew the hair on my arms – I was utterly and completely sick of acting nice when I didn’t feel nice in the least, teensy tiny little bit. So during rehab, when I was frustrated, angry, depressed, taken for an idiot,  I let ‘em have it. When something hurt, I cried about it as loudly as I wanted for as long as I wanted. Screw everyone else: the one being tortured was me. It was the most selfish I have ever been.

It wasn’t all bad. For one, being surrounded by so many people day in and day out meant Mom couldn’t beat the crap out of me for several consecutive weeks. All the hell I went through was almost worth it for that alone. In that sense, rehab was like a perverse kind of vacation. I actually cried the day I was discharged, because I knew that beyond the hospital walls, I wouldn’t be safe anymore.

Believe it or not, some things about that hospital stay were actually really fun. Lying in bed stuffing myself with sherbet – practically the only thing I ate, since the universal truth about hospital food seems to be that it’s disgusting – and watching Heathcliff and Fat Albert and Top Cat was great. Taking a tour of the hospital just to get away from the pediatric unit for a bit could prove very interesting as well: the main lobby had a piano that played by itself, and I was absolutely intrigued by it. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it worked. For several weeks, I thought there was an invisible person sitting at the bench like some kind of magic trick that I couldn’t quite puzzle out. I’d peer at the air trying to see hands or a head. I was also greatly amused by the automatic revolving doors – I was perfectly content to sit and watch people walk in and out of the building through those things. I’d never seen any. They were a marvel.

Pediatrics had a playroom, of course, and it was truly awe-inspiring. The first time I saw it, I think I just sat there in my wheelchair with my jaw hanging into my lap. One entire wall was taken up by a life-sized dollhouse that kids tumbled in and out of at will. I’m pretty sure I actually groaned in anticipation at the sight of it. Then there were shelves upon shelves upon shelves of glorious toys: a thousand kinds of dolls and dishes and blocks and cars and dress-up clothes and books and crayons and games. I worked myself into a tizzy trying to decide what to do first.

One of the things I grew to love the most was painting. There was a big wooden easel with an expanse of white paper that thrilled me. I didn’t even have to paint anything recognizable to enjoy myself; swishing the brush back and forth and watching the color go where I sent it was more than enough. I tried watercolors, oils, pastels, finger paints. Bright, bold colors made me so happy I used to laugh out loud with delight. Yellow! Green! Red! Orange! I was the mad artiste, gleefully painting to music that only I could hear.

Occasionally, we took a jaunt off the hospital grounds. My mother became friends with the mother of a little boy named Kyle, and we used to have lunch at the Hardee’s down the block. The Hardee’s slogan back then was, Are you ready for some real food?, and after three meals a day of hospital-issue cardboard in various deceptively attractive disguises, “real food” was exactly what my customary order of two roast beef sandwiches and a box of curly fries felt like. I’d wolf it down with gluttonous satisfaction – I was skinny enough to pack some fast food onto my bony little frame back then, and as much as I loved sherbet, it did get a little tiresome trying to subsist on nothing but sherbet after a bit. Having pop was great, too – the hospital operated on a strict, “No soda allowed” policy. The best you could hope for there was a diminutive can of knockoff Sprite.

The hustle and bustle of downtown Indianapolis wowed me every time I encountered it. I was a small-town kid, accustomed to a few stores and houses spread far apart, and not a lot of people. Coming out the doors of Methodist Hospital into the traffic and the noise and the chatter took my breath away. I loved it. I wanted to see everything there was to see: poke my head into every place of business, read every billboard, turn every corner just to see what was on the next corner, and the next corner, and the next corner. We never stayed out long enough to suit me. I could’ve spent an entire day exploring just that one city block. But when you’re in rehab, you’re a slave to the hospital. The hospital becomes your life: you wake there and sleep there and play there; you learn the names of all the nurses and their shifts and who’s nicest and who’s meanest and who’s a pushover and who isn’t. You make friends; you make enemies. You keep going back because, like it or not, the hospital is your second home.

I had an ulterior motive for wanting to delay our return for as long as possible. Physical therapy always came after lunch, and I hated physical therapy. I hated it because it hurt. Boy, did it hurt. I cried every day. I dreaded it so much that I used to plead with my mother not to make me go. After about a week, I started to cry as soon as we’d head in that direction. After two weeks, I was faking illnesses in a desperate attempt to avoid it. By the third week, I had become quite the little fatalist – the torture, I surmised, was simply never going to end. There was nothing I could do. I was at the mercy of my therapist.

In spite of the trauma associated with physical therapy, I actually remember my therapist fondly. She was firm, but sympathetic: she did everything as efficiently as she could, never dared fib about what I should expect, and talked me through the pain in a calm, bright voice that never wavered, even when I was bawling my eyes out and pleading to just be done already. Half the time I never even heard a word she said, but her voice was an anchor in an ocean of hurt. That woman had to have possessed nerves of steel: I can’t imagine spending my every working day around children in dire pain and coming back to it again and again with a voice that unceasingly pleasant. Maybe she practiced in front of the mirror at home. I don’t know. However she did it, it worked: she was a rock, a steady stream of strength.

With excruciating slowness, I regained my legs. Walker, tricycle, parallel bars: I remember it all very well. I remember staring at the mirror at the end of the bars and getting pissed that it persisted in being so far away, getting so incredibly fed up that I lurched to my feet and staggered down the long wooden plane just to prove to that damn mirror that it was not better than me, that I could reach it anytime, any day, and it had better watch out because as soon as I was able, I was going to kick it. I remember the struggle to keep my feet positioned correctly on the pedals of the tricycle, how mad I got that they slipped off again and again and again in spite of all the concentration I could muster. I remember how trial number one with walker number one turned into quite the fiasco: the therapist let go of the gait belt for a split second to readjust her grip, and I picked that exact moment to pass out and give myself a concussion by cracking my head against the floor.