A Love Story with a Little Heartbreak
Page 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
On Monday, two days later, Ruby, Henry, and Connie were crossing the Mississippi River with a blood-red sun setting behind them. They were on their way back to Chilton from a long day of diagnosis and follow-up meetings at The Mayo Clinic.
The whole experience had been a huge let down. Ruby, Henry, and Connie had arrived several minutes before eight that morning, in anxious anticipation of a day of testing that would mean—they were so hopeful—that Connie’s wheelchair would soon be no longer necessary. By the end of the day, after hours and hours of subjecting Connie to testing, probing, twisting, bending, and turning, not to mention a dozen x-rays, they met in a conference room with several doctors. They were all seated around a large table, where a spokesman, in the presence of the doctors, simply said that the work at St. Agnes had had a maximum impact and there wasn’t really anything else they felt they could do.
The doctors at Mayo suspected that Connie had suffered severe bilateral leg peripheral nerve damage, as had been indicated in the medical records they received from St. Agnes, but they couldn’t be sure, and they said they couldn’t do anything about it. The presenter muttered something about “time will tell.” Aside from some miracle or exceptional therapies that they were not yet aware of, the prognosis was bleak. They said Connie should expect to be, for the most part, consigned to a wheelchair the rest of her life, with maybe some limited mobility on crutches. There had simply been too much damage to the nerves in her legs, in their opinion, especially to her left leg, to believe that her legs could function. They said the “skeletal support structure” was insufficient for any sustained walking because of demineralization—in effect, osteoporosis—complicated by severe muscle atrophy. But both of these conditions could be improved with extensive physical therapy; and yet, their recovery might not matter if the nerve damage was permanent.
The doctors said they were sorry and then filed out of the conference room one by one, leaving Ruby, Henry, and Connie alone, stunned with frustration and, worse, hopelessness. Connie had no idea that she could feel so devastated. These men were, after all, specialists and regarded as the best in their field. “How could that be?” and “How could they not be sure?” were questions she asked over and over. At that point, Ruby and Henry stood up, wheeled Connie out of the clinic, and all three got into Henry’s car and began the long drive back to Chilton.
Well into the second hour on the road, no one was talking. The silence, like the heat that had settled on the Midwest for the week, was oppressive. The threesome was on the bridge going over the expansive Mississippi River, just above French Island, an island tucked in on the Wisconsin side of the border. The river air carried a slight smell of sewage and decaying vegetation, emanating from the stagnant pools of river water that had collected in the shallows and inlets, where pools had been heating up all day under the hot sun.
The bridge fed into the town of La Crosse, where they would be spending the night. Henry pulled up to the front of Hotel La Crosse, parked, said he’d be back in a minute, and jumped out of the car. Moments later, he was bounding up a couple of steps and entering the hotel through its ornate double doors. He would ask for a suite in the hotel, which he quickly learned meant two adjacent single rooms that had a door between them for easy passage back and forth. Henry would also ask for the first floor to minimize the challenges of getting Connie in and out of the hotel. The desk clerk was very accommodating and handed him a key to each of the two rooms.
Henry returned to the car and shared the news and then began the process of getting Connie into the room. Ruby pulled their suitcases from the backseat, shared by Connie. Henry then lifted Connie’s wheelchair out of the trunk, having first untied the straps that secured it in the well of the trunk, and carried it up the front steps to the hotel lobby. It was a fairly routine process for getting Connie from the car to someplace else. In this case, he would carry her up the stairs to the first floor, where she could be placed in her wheelchair and wheeled to the rooms.
Connie hated this experience every time it was repeated. She was, of course, grateful for Henry’s strong arms and, when necessary, the care of others, but nothing made her feel as helpless as this public transition, and nothing made her feel that her helplessness was so conspicuous. She didn’t want to accept this as a regular occurrence and reminded herself what a disappointment the visit to The Mayo Clinic had been. She had talked to Dr. von Hoerner a while back about improving her mobility, and she’d have to give more thought to his advice, now that help from The Mayo Clinic was no longer a possibility. Connie would have to figure out how to get around on her own, but not now.
The humidity from the river multiplied the discomfort of traveling in the heat, and the temperature seemed to be climbing, although the day was at its end—maybe it had something to do with the river. The three of them had no choice but to stop there. They couldn’t make the drive all the way back to Chilton that day, so Henry had elected to check into the only real hotel in this river town. All three travelers were exhausted. Connie couldn’t wait to climb into a bed—any bed—and fall asleep. Lately, sleep had become her best escape from a flagging spirit.
It soon became evident that wanting sleep and needing sleep has nothing to do with getting sleep. The midnight hour had passed. Connie lay stretched out on her bed, with just a thin sheet over her. She had quickly dropped her night gown over the side of the bed onto the floor moments after climbing into bed. It was too hot to wear it. The air was still, and the humidity from the river added moisture to it that was at levels unlike anyone in Chilton surely had ever experienced. She was thinking that Mama and Henry must be suffering, like her, in the next room.
The hotel was old, like an elegant old lady, but old nonetheless, and because it was in Wisconsin, cooling systems were rare. There weren’t even any ceiling fans, not in the rooms, not even in the lobby or the dining room. Wisconsin building design was dedicated to heating, not cooling. This wasn’t the South. Connie’s window was open, but air didn’t flow in or out. It was as stifling in the room as outside the room. Because of the heat, nobody was moving in town, so traffic noise was essentially nonexistent. Occasionally, she’d hear long and short whistles, which she assumed were made by boats on the river, but she wasn’t sure exactly what they came from or what they meant. Their intrusiveness just added to her discomfort.
For an hour, Connie stared at the drab, monochromatic darkness of the ceiling, feeling as if she were an alien on another planet, so remote was her present experience from where she had thought she’d be at this point in her life. The accident had transported her to a different world, and it was a world, at this moment, defined by sweltering heat that was unbearable and air that was unpleasant to breathe. A tear ran out of her eye just then, one of so many that had fallen over the months of surges of despair. She wondered how there could possibly be any more.
The dismal outcome at The Mayo Clinic made her suddenly afraid that she would have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, scarred, and forever bereft of children. “Children?” she whispered to herself, causing more tears to flow. She recalled the prognosis that she probably wouldn’t be able to have a baby in her condition. All she had ever truly wanted in life was a child—or two or three! “Now that’s unlikely,” she thought to herself. She thought some more, and it occurred to her that she might have difficulty getting a husband. And then—it was all too much—as she whispered aloud to herself, “Who’d ever want to marry me?” Connie rolled over onto her stomach, burying her face in the pillow, and started sobbing, feeling entirely lost, spent, and alone in a stuffy room, in an old hotel, in some fetid river town that was as foreign to her as Manchuria and as hot as a summer day in the Congo. Despair moved in on her like a hungry tiger moves in on a tethered lamb. Sleep saved her from being devoured.
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