Gone

by Linda K. Olson

  Our families and friends guffawed as they took turns reading aloud their assessment of our recovery.

  Our last night in the Salzburg hospital came in late September. Five doctors filed in and stood at the foot of our beds to bid us an emotional farewell. Three and a half weeks earlier, these vastly experienced, gray-haired, stern trauma surgeons had saved my life. The one who was fluent in English spoke for them.

  “We have something we’d like to say. We’ve been watching you for the past three weeks. If you were Austrian, you might not have opened your eyes yet. You have shown us what we believe is the American spirit.”

  Dave and I were silent, not wanting to break the spell. We knew it was time to leave the Unfallkrankenhaus and our castle on the hill, which had brought us deep fear and magical hope. By then, I knew that Dave’s love would give me the power to prove these men right.

  Six weeks short of my thirtieth birthday, I found myself strapped to a gurney in a back room of the Salzburg airport. Dave stood next to me, holding my hand, the only one I have now. We felt naked. We were leaving the trauma hospital where we’d been for three and a half weeks. Our hands were free of luggage, but our minds were full of baggage. We were going home, back to what we knew, but everything was unknown. Breathing was the only thing left that was automatic.

  I was a baby, tiny, no clothes, beginning a journey on which I must start over, learn a new way to do everything, from sleeping on my side to dressing to sitting in a wheelchair, and to getting people to see me, notice me, know me.

  We were silent. There were no words for where we were. Even though our minds overflowed with questions and fears, we knew it would do no good to verbalize them. It is time for me to grab hold of myself and take charge, I thought. At the same time, I knew that I must let Dave hold me and take care of me until I could do things by myself again—if I could ever do anything by myself again.

  Through the large plate-glass windows, I saw the tarmac stretching away from me, vanishing. At intervals, planes roared in and throttled off. Nothing stays still. Everything is coming or going, and while the passengers inside them think they know their destination, I wondered how many of them, like us, would not end up where they thought they were heading.

  CHAPTER 4:

  (In)dependent Wife

  A hot, dry Santa Ana wind greeted us when the door of our Navy medical transport plane opened at Naval Air Station Miramar late on the afternoon of September 20. Waves of heat rippled across the tarmac as four muscular Navy corps-men hoisted my litter and carried me down the stairs into the blinding sun. Dave and I were silent as the military ambulance drove us to the Naval Regional Medical Center San Diego emergency department, where a young, blond female intern assigned to do my admitting history and physical met us.

  She was so beautiful that I couldn’t stop staring at her. I shrank into the gurney. I am a doctor, just like her, but no one is ever going to think of me like that again. I closed my eyes and hoped she couldn’t see me crying. My side of our conversation was a series of mumbles.

  She pulled her stethoscope out of her white coat pocket and asked, “Can you sit up so I can listen to your heart and lungs?”

  I fumbled with the sheet, trying to pull myself up. Nothing moved. Likewise, my attempt to roll over failed. I gasped when she lifted my gown and placed her cold stethoscope on my bare chest. She winced and averted her eyes when she saw my mangled body. I imagined myself soaring out the window, fluttering away with normal arms and legs.

  As we rolled toward the admitting area, I held Dave’s hand. This was his hospital. Mark had been born there twenty-five years before, and we’d been married in the naval chapel less than two years before. There were already emotions tied to this place.

  Out of nowhere, Dave asked, “Did you know that this was the largest military hospital in the world during the Vietnam War?”

  “Really?” I said, more than anything just to keep the conversation going.

  “Yeah, it had over twenty-five hundred beds at that time. Now we have twelve hundred.”

  That’s huge by any standard. There must have been miles of hallways. I bet people got lost all the time. How would you keep track of everything in a behemoth like that? How many X-ray machines would have been there? Dave has always been a master at knowing when and how to distract me.

  The next morning, bodies in neat white uniforms crowded into my room. Having been a medical student and resident, I recognized the ritual of daily morning rounds and understood the pecking order. The chief resident stood at the head of my bed and shuffled a handful of three-by-five-inch notecards. The scribbles on each were there to remind him of the pertinent facts for the patients in his care. The other residents, medical students, and nurses whispered while checking their notes for the relevant lab and X-ray reports.

  Voices floated back and forth above me. “This is a twenty-nine-year-old dependent wife who was admitted last night by medevac from Salzburg, Austria.” Dependent wife. Dependent wife—that’s what I’m called in this hospital. Just someone married to an active-duty military member, not a person. In my hospital, I’d be called Doctor.

  “She and her husband were in a train-versus-car accident in Berchtesgaden, Germany, with traumatic amputation of both legs above the knee, a right-arm amputation, and L3, 4 vertebral fractures. Surgical sites are well healed. Her husband, Dave Hodgens, is an active-duty physician, third-year resident here in Radiation Oncology.” I recognized and appreciated the detached-sounding clinical description summarizing my condition as something I’d done many times over the past several years. But now that I was the “she,” the description didn’t compute. I thought they must be talking about a different “she” until I looked at the empty space in the bed where my legs should have been.

  The intern pulled back the sheet and touched the large red, puckered scars that extended over the ends of my residual legs, what they called stumps. He tugged on the shoulder of my hospital gown to display the wrinkled, flabby remainder of my right arm, which ended at my shoulder.

  I saw them looking over and around me. I’m a nobody, a crip, a patient who appears to have nothing ahead of her but life in a wheelchair. I stared up at the orthopedic team. They don’t know that I’m one of them, that I’m in the third year of a diagnostic radiology residency in Los Angeles, that I passed part one of my radiology boards just before leaving for Germany. They don’t know me as a person yet. I’m just an interesting case. After all, what are the chances they’ll ever get to work with a triple amputee again?

  It was difficult to smile when my broken back hurt like hell, and I had sporadic spasms of pain in my nonexistent feet or hand. Pain that I eventually learned is called phantom pain. Pain that jabbed and stabbed me unexpectedly and for no good reason. Pain that hurt so badly that sometimes my entire body would jerk violently. I felt it most often at the outer aspect of my left foot—or where my left foot should have been.

  I was always in pain, always hot and sweaty. My face was pale and gaunt, my hair frizzy and unruly. What do they see? Certainly not the attractive used-to-be me. Not the five-foot-five-and-one-half-inches-tall, well-proportioned, 103-pound me. They were looking at a three-foot-tall, egg-shaped thing that weighed seventy-five pounds. I closed my eyes. I’ll ask Dave to bring in a picture of us together so people can see the real me. Maybe one with me wearing a bikini or my tight jeans and halter top. Maybe a picture of Dave hugging and kissing me, so they’ll know that I was attractive and sexy. I had wished for such pictures when we were in Salzburg.

  I wanted—needed—to show them that on the inside, I was still a normal person.

  Determined to sit up and be part of the conversation, with a little butt jump, I reached with my left hand for the trapeze bar that hung from a large orthopedic frame over my bed. Grabbing the bar lifted me slightly off the bed. But without the aid of legs or another arm with which to push and pull, I couldn’t brace myself. My body swiveled, and, embarrassed, I let go of the suspended bar and fell back
onto the pillow.

  “Is she ready to be fitted with prosthetic legs? What are our options here?” the attending orthopedist asked.

  Dr. Webster was in charge. I liked him. Dave liked him. But most important, he was hell-bent on rehabilitating me.

  Dressed in their crisp white summer uniforms, the interns and residents glanced at each other. “Some studies show that stubbies are psychologically beneficial because the patients are upright immediately,” one resident said.

  “What are stubbies?” I asked.

  Finally, someone acknowledged me.

  “Stubbies are short prostheses without a knee. They attach to the stump and have a rocker-bottom platform in lieu of a foot. They’re useful in the post-op period to get people upright quickly, help strengthen them, and keep them from developing hip contractures.”

  Stump. Why would anyone say that? It sounds like something you’d hear discussed at a lumberjack symposium. Why can’t they just call them my residual legs?

  “Why can’t I just have regular-size legs?”

  “This is quick. It’s easier and takes much less energy to walk. And you’re probably not strong enough yet to use long legs.”

  None of these orthopedists had ever seen a triple amputee. It was September 1979, only six years since the end of the Vietnam War. The wave of six thousand amputees from that war were treated in one of six military hospitals when they returned stateside, but San Diego was not one of them. So, in a way, we were all on the same learning curve.

  As the doctors moved on to the next room, I tried to imagine myself with fake legs. Will I ever really walk again? I’ve since learned, from various doctors and medical journals, that it takes 280 percent more energy for a bilateral above-knee amputee to walk with prosthetics than a person with normal legs. According to a 2007 article in inMotion called “Stepping Up to Health, Using a pedometer for amputee fitness,” if you were to follow the recommendation to walk 10,000 steps per day, I would expend the same energy after only 2,500 steps. Only 20 percent of bilateral above-knee amputees become successful prosthetic users. I can’t even find any numbers for the success rate of triple amputees.

  The magic of Salzburg was gone. No longer could Dave and I gaze out our window and see the Hohensalzburg castle floating above us. No longer were we the darlings of the Unfallkrankenhaus, the brave young American couple whom our Austrian doctors and nurses admired.

  An inaccessible bathroom beckoned from across the room, its doorway too narrow for a wheelchair to enter. Oh, to be able to stretch, sit up, and leisurely swing my legs over the side of the bed, then stroll into the bathroom and sit on the toilet in privacy. Instead, I jabbed the buzzer and commenced the long wait for an overworked orderly. When he arrived, he leaned over my bed, put his arms under my tiny torso, and pulled me up against his chest while I hung on like a monkey. He walked the ten feet into the bathroom and lowered me onto the toilet.

  “Let me know when you’re done,” he said. Then he walked out, leaving the door wide open.

  Eventually I learned to transfer myself onto a bedside commode, an alternative that was only a little more acceptable than calling the orderly. It’s like having an open-air toilet in the middle of your living room. Over the next two months of hospitalization, I would spend hours agonizing over whether I really needed to have a bowel movement.

  When I finished, I pushed the call button and sat helplessly until he came back to reverse the process. Reasons number one through ten for me to learn to walk are so I can go to the bathroom by myself.

  In the dark hours of that evening, I tried to be positive about my goals. I forced a smile, but my wet cheeks and quivering voice betrayed me. Reality eclipsed my shining positivity. Anger consumed me.

  “Why did this happen to me . . . to us?”

  Dave cuddled up to me as I sat on the hospital bed, one of only three places I could be: in a hospital bed, on a toilet, or in a wheelchair.

  “If I could have just run faster, I’d have gotten you before the train hit.”

  As our tears flowed, he whispered, “Remember our pact.” Putting his arms around me, Dave assumed the role of cheerleader. “Olsie, our lives aren’t over, you know . . . we can still go out to eat, go to movies, work . . .” He hugged me tightly. “And we can have a family. Even if you don’t have legs. Even if you can’t walk.”

  By the time Dave left each night, I was exhausted.

  Falling asleep was easy. What I couldn’t do was stay asleep. Most nights, I found myself in a twilight zone of dreams, reality, and memories. I fought to find stories of fun times, anything to get through the dark, lonely nights. Incarcerated in my hospital cage, I would drift into fun-filled, physically active outdoor sequences. I’d ride my mint-green Bianchi racing bike twenty miles, with a gain of 3,300 feet, into the San Bernardino Mountains. Lured by the apple orchards and cinnamon–apple pie fragrance in the bakeries of Oak Glen, I’d ferociously pump up steep, windy roads with hairpin turns, then speed back down to Redlands, tucked compactly over my racing handlebars. Or I’d cruise leisurely along the long, empty two-lane stretches of San Timoteo Canyon Road, deeply inhaling the sage and dirt aromas of the chaparral hills and rocky canyons.

  I’d jerk back to no-leg reality when I woke and lie there confused by the dreams that always seemed more real than what I saw when my eyes were open. I began to understand schizophrenia, delusions, and hallucinations, the inability to know which scenes are real.

  During our stay in Salzburg, I kept telling myself that I was a doctor. When we got to San Diego, I started reminding myself that I was a radiology resident and that I needed to get back to my residency. But even after Dave brought my books and stacked them within reach of my bed, I’d open one and flip through a page or two before putting it back down. Telling myself I was a doctor was one thing; actually being one was another.

  Dave marched into my room one morning while I was picking at my breakfast.

  “You ready, Freddy?” he said.

  “For what?” I mumbled, my mouth full of cold, rubbery scrambled eggs.

  “Today’s the day for your cute little ass to get to work down in PT.”

  My cute little ass had no desire to be rolled anywhere, let alone to what was probably a stinky hellhole in a Navy hospital basement.

  Five minutes later, we stopped outside a room labeled PHYSICAL THERAPY. The door opened into a large square space filled with exercise tables, free weights, chin-up bars, and floor mats. It could have been any gym in America. Except for its clientele.

  Light streamed through windows that stretched all the way around the room near the tops of the walls but didn’t reach into the souls of many of its inhabitants. Near the door was a beaten-up institutional-gray metal desk strewn with loose papers and patient charts, around which lounged three or four burly Navy techs. Three women in white uniforms chatted over coffee. One looked to be several years older than me. Two appeared to be my age. Insignia on the black shoulder boards of their uniforms indicated they were officers, but as a civilian I was clueless about their ranks. The warm, muggy air smelled sweaty and mixed with the odor of alcohol and antiseptic.

  I took a deep breath. No use pussyfooting around.

  All seventy-five pounds of me sat up straight and gripped the armrest of the extra-wide wheelchair that Dave had pushed me in from my hospital room down to Physical Therapy. My nondescript white T-shirt and gym shorts made me fit right in with the other patients in the room, except they were all guys who were much younger and much bigger than I was.

  “Pardon me,” Dave said firmly to a woman wearing what were, unbeknownst to me at the time, commander shoulder boards. “This is my wife, Linda Olson. She is here for a physical therapy evaluation.” He was also dressed in Navy whites, his shoulder boards informing them that he was a doctor and a lieutenant commander.

  All three women turned toward him and then, in unison, looked down at me. While one shoved papers around on the desk, looking for my orders, I swiveled sideways in my wh
eelchair and put my hand out toward the woman standing closest to me. After a noticeable pause, she reached out with her right hand. In a split second, using a maneuver I’d already mastered, I rotated my left hand 180 degrees to meet her outstretched palm so she wouldn’t be embarrassed by awkwardly connecting with my left hand.

  “I’m ready. What shall we do?” I asked, with a big grin on my face. “Or maybe I should say, what do you think I can do with only one arm?”

  They just stood there. Okay, I thought, let’s do something.

  Commander White sighed and cleared her throat. “Your orders came down yesterday.”

  The other two women fidgeted, gazing down at the floor, or their shoes, or whatever else they could find to look at. Anything but the thing sitting before them. Silence. I’m not sure who was more uncomfortable.

  “You’ve been assigned to Lieutenant Donna Pavlick, whom I believe you met the other day,” she said as she handed the chart to one of the women. My eyes followed the chart to the hands of the young woman I’d spoken to briefly in my room. She was about my age, with medium-length blond hair. About the size I used to be. And a no-nonsense look. I was the first to throw down the gauntlet.

  “I’m ready. Let’s see what we can do.”

  Now it was her job to help make me strong enough to walk with prostheses. She, like everyone else there, had never seen a triple amputee, but I was soon to find out that she had a will equal or superior to mine.

  Dave and I followed her to a corner of the room, where he leaned over, put his arms around me, and set me up on an exercise table.

  “The accident was four weeks ago, in Germany. We just got back here a few days ago,” he said.

  “I’m tired of lying in bed. I need to get started on doing something,” I said, feigning enthusiasm and butting into Dave’s conversation.