I spend three weeks on the rotating bed. They had put me in something called a halo vest. I could remember flashes of when this was attached to me: the doctors shaving the sides of my scalp with a dry razor so they could put screws into my skull; two of my good friends appearing in the doorway, me catching them looking horrified just before they bolt back out; the doctors putting the screws into me in a much rougher way than one would expect a doctor to do, working so close to my brain and all.
After the rotating bed, I am put into ICU. This is the first time that I really experience the halo. When I was on the Rotator the halo kept me in traction with wires going from my head back to some apparatus mounted behind me. Once off the bed, I am able to move; or rather, I am able to try to move: the only thing I have control over is my arms. I fully experience the halo vest now, the way it traps me either like a prisoner or like the arms of God, I can’t really tell. All I know is that I cannot move my neck or shoulders, not one single inch. This is most apparent when I try to communicate with people via the small head signals that many of us pay no real attention to: a tilt, a nod, a shaking back and forth. I have lost this most fundamental way of communicating, and every subtle thought that was once communicated by my body must now be put into words. The vest part of it is made of plastic, and the halo is attached to this in order to keep my neck perfectly straight. The reason I wear this getup is because the cervical vertebrae in my neck were twisted in the car accident; it is meant to keep me out of the operating room for a second surgery. I had come very close to being a quadriplegic, but instead I am a paraplegic. I wear this for three months.
A few days after being transferred into the new room, my physical therapists come to meet me. Angel is a 21-year-old student; Darrell is in his mid-thirties. They help me sit up for the first time in my new body. I am struck by how difficult this basic move is for me. Without the use of my thighs, hips and butt, I have no idea how to sit up. Once I am being held upright by Angel, Darrell asks if he can take a picture of me. Sure, I say. Smile, he says. I don’t want to, I say. In my head I am thinking: this moment is real, one of the realest of my entire life, and I cannot put something dishonest on my face. I look into the camera’s eye and I know that I am looking at my future self, the one who I cannot hardly imagine, cannot conceive of, but who I know will be there. And what do I want to communicate to her? How am I going to shape this memory? I open my eyes wide and give myself a secret look, one that says, Well, aren’t we in just a mess.
Yep, it's a polaroid. Remember those?
After the picture Darrell asks me if I want to try and sit in a wheelchair. I do, I do want to. I want to do something other than lay in a bed as I have been doing for almost a month. They get me into the chair, instructing me to tighten whatever torso muscles I still have control over, and Angel keeps pressure on my abdomen so that all my blood does not rush to my feet and I do not pass out. Once I am in the chair Darrell says he has something to ask me. Would I consider going down to the rehab gym where a number of student therapists would be collected? Part of their training involves dealing with patients who are at different stages of recovery, and I would be model number one: the earliest stage. Yes, I will do that, I tell him almost immediately. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, he says. Well, I say, I figure that you and I will be doing a lot of things for each other, so I might as well start. He looks me in the eye with an expression I might have labeled tender if I had known him better, holding my gaze for a few seconds. He nods and thanks me.
I go downstairs and see the gym for the first time. I do not yet know how much of both joy and pain I will be experiencing here. For now it is a pleasant place, warm wood floors, bright lights, some sense of normalcy after weeks of sterility. A group of about twenty young people is gathered at one end. Darrell wheels me in front of them; although they are smiling none of them speak to me, so I say Hi everybody, and they respond quickly and happily. I do not retain much of what he is telling them, because I am absorbed by a feeling that I can’t quite put my finger on. Later on I will be able to identify it as the first time I began feeling the artificial separation between me and the society I was once an unquestioned part of. The short session in front of the therapists exhausts me, and I am ready to go back to bed. They all cheerily applaud me as I get wheeled out.
Before I get back to bed Darrell asks me if I want to go outside. Yes, I reply. I really, really do. Before the car accident I had been living in one of the most beautiful places in the world, Northern California, where one-hundred-foot-tall, ten-foot-wide redwoods were the norm. After a month of being in a hospital room I felt like my soul was choking. The minute I get outside I am startled. It is almost like I am on LSD. Everything is just so present. The first thing I notice is the circulation of the air, the water-like way it swirls around me, caressing my skin. The sunshine, oh, the sunshine. And trees. Little, scrawny, underfed, wonderful and magical parking lot trees, full of life. Birds. Traffic. Sweet smell of the outside; the short breezes of cigarette smoke and exhaust bring out the sweetness even more.
But I cannot stay outside for long; my energy level is rapidly dropping. Darrell does not want me to be in the chair for longer than twenty minutes at first – I need to build up to it, build up to sixteen hours or more. Because my life will now be lived in the chair. I am taken back inside, and the stale, medicine-y miasma of the hospital closes around me like a blanket, one I am not entirely sad to be wrapped in because although the outside is like heaven, it is also terrifying. How will I ever learn to live there again? The hospital is safe, it is secure, it is a place where someone will catch me if I fall. I am scared of freedom, yet I want nothing more. I have a lot of work to do before I can face freedom again.