Yes, You Have Legs

The surgeon took Dr. Bear away from me. Just took him away, and tossed him down to the end of the gurney where I couldn’t see him anymore. I wanted to weep, to scream, to demand him back, but my jaws were locked. A man told me he was going to give me something to make me go to sleep. He put a plastic mask over my nose and mouth. Everything was foggy. The man said to count backwards from nine. I tried to shake my head to signal that I couldn’t, but someone held me still. Count backwards from nine; count backwards from nine …

I whispered, “Nine … eight …”

When I woke up, I couldn’t remember where I was or what had happened. I was moving; there were people walking next to me and they were shaking me, saying my name. I swam up from a deep, deep pool and pried open my eyelids a fraction of an inch into a light so bright it blinded me. The only thing I wanted in all the world was my Mommy; I was anesthetized and confused and something awful was wrong with me. My body was heavy. My head hurt. I was surrounded by people I didn’t remember having met – and then it dawned on me that I could not move my legs. I panicked. I tried to thrash, to cry out, but I was so exhausted I only managed to turn my head and whimper. Someone said, “She’s awake.” But why were they trying to wake me up? Couldn’t they see that I was tired, that I was grievously injured, that all I wanted to do was sink back into whatever empty place it was I had come from? I started to cry, but I couldn’t even do that right: there was no sound, just hot, heavy tears leaking down my face.

And then my Mommy was there. Mommy! She parted the crowd around the gurney and grabbed hold of my hand. Her face was blurry, but it was her: her voice, her touch,  both gentle for once. I tried to tell her what was wrong, how much I hurt and how very tired I was and that I was afraid my legs might never work again, or that I didn’t have legs anymore at all, but my lips were cracked and my throat was sore. I just shuddered as I cried. She petted my hair. She kissed my forehead. She told me I could go back to sleep.

I didn’t at first. I forced myself to stay awake even after I’d been taken to Recovery and the nurse had drawn the curtains on the windows to block out the sun. I’d been in surgery for hours; it was afternoon, and the light coming in was too strong for my eyes to bear. My mother, the nurses – everyone kept assuring me that it was okay for me to go back to sleep, now that they had so rudely woken me for reasons I could not discern. But I wouldn’t shut my eyes until I had been repeatedly told that yes, I still had legs. Patiently, everyone repeated what had taken place: You’ve had an operation. We fixed your legs and they’re in casts right now. That’s why you can’t move them. You’ll be able to move them again later, when we take the casts off. Finally realizing that my post-operative confusion was giving way to a stubborn insistence on proof that I could see with my own eyes, a nurse pulled back the sheets and showed me my casted legs. She pinched my toes to prove to me that everything was still attached. Then, and only then, did I allow myself to drift off on a wave of morphine and surrender to sleep.

Casts suck. I’m sure that anyone who’s ever had a broken arm or leg or wrist knows this all too well. Casts are hot. They make you itch and render you incapable of scratching. You have to go to crazy lengths to make sure you don’t get them wet. And when they are Spica – when you’re wearing so much plaster for so long you forget what it’s like to bend your knees or feel the soles of your feet on the floor, when you have to concentrate to remember what your legs actually look like – they suck even more than usual.

Holy God, I hated those things. The itching, first off, was eternal: it. just. never. stopped. Within less than a week, an unholy din of drumming and screeching would issue forth from wherever I happened to be as I pounded on the plaster with both fists, trying to hit hard enough for the force of the blows to travel down through the casts and alleviate the never-ending sensation of hundreds of tiny ants nibbling on my skin.

Secondly, they made everything ten times harder than it had to be. Rolling over in bed was a chore. So was taking a shower, going to the bathroom, or getting into the car. I took up the entire back seat because I had to be laid out with my head propped against the door and secured with a special vest that had buckles built into it. In the hospital, at least, the matters of personal ablutions were easy: catheters, bedpans, and basin baths exist for a reason. (Though I hated both catheters and bedpans more than I will ever be able to adequately express, I loved basin baths – the warm water and the rough rag were a treat, and the nurses used to talk to me and brush and braid my long hair after they washed it. I was also quite fond of watching them make the bed with me still in it. It was kind of cool, how they could make the sheets so smooth and roll me back and forth at the same time.) Home, though, was a different matter entirely.