Gone

by Linda K. Olson

  “Are there any open wounds?” Donna asked as she took off my JOBST stockings and felt the ends of my legs to assess how much muscle the surgeons had been able to wrap around the ends of the bones after they’d been cut away.

  “Did they skin-graft anything?” she asked. She was all business.

  “No,” I said, before Dave corrected me by saying, “She has a split-thickness skin graft on her left medial thigh.”

  “They were meticulous surgeons,” I continued, grabbing center stage again. “All my wounds were totally healed by the time we left Austria. We had incredibly good medical care there, probably better than we’d have gotten many places here in the States.”

  Satisfied with my level of healing, my new therapist looked away from my legs and motioned toward my torso.

  “Okay. The most important thing for you will be core strength, so can you lie down and do some sit-ups?”

  “Sure.” I lay down on my back with my hand behind my head and crunched up, or, shall I say, tried to crunch up. Nothing happened. I tried again, with the same result. My short legs flew upward, but that was it.

  “Here, let me hold your legs down, and you try again,” Donna said. Not much better.

  The three of us sat side by side on the table, letting the gravity of the situation settle in. I have to make this work so I can walk again. I looked at Dave. I have to do this so he can stop feeling guilty.

  Donna stood up. “I’ve never seen, let alone worked with, a triple amputee. And I’m pretty sure there’s no book to follow. I guess we’re on our own.”

  So, three twentysomethings set out to create a plan, work their butts off, and hope for success.

  My goal was to get Donna to laugh; hers was to get me to concentrate.

  It was game-face time whenever my wheelchair rolled into the big PT room. With a loud “ta-da” and a boob jiggle, I’d make my grand entrance every morning and every afternoon. After all, a gal’s gotta do what she’s gotta do when she enters a room full of young sailors. The room was full of train wrecks like me, so I figured anything went to get people to look up and laugh. “Laughter is the best medicine” was my motto from day one, an approach that works wonders when people are allowed to make fun of the shitty things that have happened. Without legs, I couldn’t sashay in or wiggle my butt, so I perfected the boob jiggle. Before long, everyone developed their own risqué greetings. But for all the innuendo, I was one of the guys.

  “Hey, Linda,” shouted a young guy in a wheelchair one afternoon. “How many pull-ups are you going to do today? Bet I can do more than you.”

  “Yeah, right. . . . I have to do only half of what you do, ’cause I have only half as many arms as you.”

  “She got you, bud,” came a response from another corner of the room.

  I butt-walked onto the large exercise table and rolled onto my stomach. I was intent upon mastering one-armed push-ups. It was hard. Really hard. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could do it.

  I looked around the room. My eyes lit on a skinny kid who couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old.

  “Hey,” I said, looking straight at him. “What’s your name?” He looked away, ignoring me. But I was relentless. “Why don’t you come over here? I need some help figuring out how to do these stupid push-ups.” Before I could count to ten, I was surrounded by guys stretching out on the table, one arm behind their backs, showing me their own versions. The physical therapists and techs sauntered over to goad us on for a bit before breaking up our lovefest.

  It took a few weeks for me to hear the story of how Donna and I got paired.

  The Monday after my admission, my request for an evaluation had arrived in Physical Therapy.

  As usual, Donna read through the orders and stacked them for assignment. She admitted later that, knowing how much work my rehab would be, and deep down questioning her abilities, she’d stacked this pile so that Mel, another therapist, would draw me.

  Before Mel finished reading it, she started crying. “I can’t do this one.”

  “Why not?” a tech asked.

  “No way. It’s a doctor’s wife. Plus, she’s a new amputee,” she sniffled.

  “She’s probably fat and whiny. I don’t want to get near her. I bet she’ll make us all miserable.”

  At that point, Commander Weber walked in, took a look at the papers, and turned toward Donna.

  “Miss Pavlick, you’ll take the amputee case. You’re the most experienced.”

  Pairing me with Donna turned out to be one of the most important elements of my rehab and long-term success as a functional, walking amputee. Her younger brother had been injured as a preteen, with resultant brain damage and severe physical impairment requiring long-term care, which she and her family had provided at home. Teaming up with me seemed therapeutic for her in ways that I couldn’t understand for a while.

  Stuck in my bed, I’d pretend that the hospital’s green walls were at the White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles. That’s where I should be. My legs at their walk-run pace, rushing from room to room, doing upper- and lower-GI barium studies under fluoroscopy, dictating chest X-ray results, calling referring docs with exam findings, being grilled at conference by my radiology faculty. I’d completed the written portion of the American Board of Radiology exam just before the accident. I should have been studying for the oral examination that all radiology residents take at the end of their residencies. Only nine more months, and I should be certified by the American Board of Radiology as a diagnostic radiologist. And then, finally, after twenty-three years of school and training, I should be getting a great job somewhere, and Dave and I should be able to think about settling down, having a family, and eventually growing old together.

  I looked at the thick radiology textbooks stacked on my nightstand, books Dave had placed there, hoping I’d start looking at them. I didn’t have the energy to pick them up, let alone study them. On the other nightstand sat a fourteen-by-seventeen-inch radiology view box, the hallmark of a radiologist at that time. It had been placed there at the request of Dr. Webster.

  As the weeks wore on, Dave started pushing me downstairs to the radiology residents’ noon conference—an important educational part of every residency program. I fought him at first because I didn’t want the guys I knew to see me—guys I’d studied and attended conferences with. Dave eventually won that fight, and, by extension, I won, too.

  As I sat between a bunch of Navy men in white uniforms, my cotton T-shirt and shorts made it look as if I’d just popped in from the beach. Sometimes the on-call radiology resident would come up to my room to look at interesting X-ray cases on my view box with me or take me down to the department to read films in the evening for a while. Because I was in my last year of residency training, I had more experience than many of them, and they liked having a more experienced set of eyes look at the cases with them.

  I guess Dave thought that if I looked as though I’d just come in from the beach, I might as well actually go.

  “Hey, Olsie,” he said one evening, “I’m trying to get a weekend pass to take you home Saturday after PT and bring you back Sunday night. Let’s go to the beach this weekend.”

  “Wow,” I said with a big smile. “That would be very cool.”

  Saturday arrived, and Dave pulled out my bikini and put it on the bed. I looked at it and said, “I am not going to sit on the beach in a skimpy bikini and let people see me looking like a freak.”

  “Oh yes you are,” Dave said. “I’m going to parade down the hill to the sand with you in my arms. I’m going to show everyone how beautiful and sexy my wife is! And I don’t ever want to hear you say again that you look like a freak.”

  Squirming and grumping, I did my best version of a poor, ugly, wimpy wife refusing to cooperate. I was getting stronger, but I lost what had been a full-on battle.

  After pulling into the parking lot, Dave said, “Hang tight. I’m going to take our stuff down and will be right back up to get you.”

&n
bsp; “It’s not like I’m going anywhere,” I mumbled.

  I watched as Dave sauntered down to the beach with two folding chairs under one arm and towels and a beach bag in the other. People glanced at him as he passed, just another good-looking California dude out for a day at the beach. Nothing anyone hadn’t seen before. That’s about to change.

  When he lifted me from the car, I hid my face in his shoulder and squeezed my eyes shut. I felt the ground beneath us change from pavement to soft, deep sand. I didn’t open them until he finally leaned over and plopped me into my low-lying beach chair. He smiled and took off my long-sleeved shirt and shorts, leaving me in my bikini. I just watched as if I weren’t in my body.

  I have a book to read. I can look at the Scripps Pier and the waves. I can turn and face Dave and pretend I’m having a good time for his sake. Over the next few minutes, I did all three and finally gave him a weak smile that said I was actually glad to be there and grateful to him for making me do this. As I did, I pulled his face down to mine and gave him a big kiss.

  When I let him come up for air, Dave reached into the bag and said, “Come on—want to play a little Frisbee?” Clearly, he’d planned this whole thing to get me back doing some of the things we used to do, to prove to me that we could still do them, just a little differently.

  In the hospital, nothing changed. Every time I woke up, I still looked like an egg. Less than ten inches of my upper legs remained, and there was nothing where my right arm should be. What was left was so little that I looked tiny balancing in a wheelchair. Day after day, it was the same oppressive horror.

  It wasn’t the train hitting the van.

  It wasn’t seeing my foot and my leg and my arm.

  It wasn’t anything I’d seen in the past. It was about what I could see in the future.

  Losing life as I knew it.

  Losing my husband.

  Losing my looks, my career, my identity.

  At least going home with Dave on weekends gave me some sense of normalcy, some sense of security.

  “All right, Dave. Let’s see how these things work,” I said one Saturday afternoon after strapping on the stubbies I’d been prescribed. “Lift me out of this chair, will you?”

  Dave lifted me out of the chair and placed me down on the floor. And I mean way down. Fully upright, I was only forty-eight inches tall. The distance from my crotch to the floor was probably about eighteen inches. To walk, I had to hike my hip up a little, move my “stump” ahead two or three inches, come down on the rocker-bottom platform, and then repeat it on the other side.

  My hand nearly dragged on the floor.

  “I look like an ape!” I looked up at Dave and thought, When in a wheelchair, I view the world from belt level. Now, with stubbies, I’m at crotch level! Strapped in, trapped in. What a choice this is, looking like an egg or tottering around on mini stilts.

  A flood of tears followed.

  “Olsie, listen,” Dave said as he bent down to look me in the eyes. “Just try a few more times. It’s better than being in a wheelchair, isn’t it?”

  Not by much.

  Shuffling was all the stubbies were good for. Because I had only one arm, I couldn’t pull myself up into or safely lower myself out of a chair. I couldn’t climb up onto the toilet. Nothing in the kitchen was reachable. Sweeping the floor and a little gardening were possible. But I would clearly never make a living wage.

  “I can’t do this, Dave. Other people might like them, but I hate these things! It’s humiliating.”

  While I recognize the advantages of putting bilateral above-knee amputees into stubbies as early as possible to prevent contractures, build strength, do basic activities around their homes, and get exercise, it didn’t take long for me to push what I thought were useless objects into the back corner of a dark closet.

  Butt-walking was my only other option. It’s still often the best one. I do this by getting down on the floor without my prostheses, putting my residual legs straight out in front of me, and moving forward one butt cheek at a time. At my size, I advance 4.4 inches with each butt step. Sometimes I put my hand down on the floor and push myself a little with each step. This increases my stride to nine inches.

  While this is a good way to get exercise, it pretty much makes me the human equivalent of a snail. It makes Los Angeles traffic look like a race. On the upside, it’s a good way to clean the floor.

  “This is a waste of time,” I told my doctors the following Monday. “I’ll do whatever it takes to be fitted with full-length legs. Let’s get on with it.”

  The ortho-rehab team gave in and wrote a prescription for my first full-length pair of legs.

  My prosthetist, Randy Strong, explained in mechanical jargon what needed to be done to create my first set of long legs. I paid little attention to the details but did hear him say we needed to supply him with a pair of shoes. Finally, a girlie thing we could do!

  Sensible, sturdy shoes with leather soles and flat or small heels, he’d instructed. So, off went Dave and his good friend Lee Parmley, yukking it up as if they were still college boys and out to conquer the world.

  “We looked at every pair in the store,” Dave said expectantly when he returned. I lifted the lid of the shoebox. Inside were two utterly atrocious brown pilgrim shoes with big, flat square buckles on the toes.

  “Uh, are these for me?” I asked, trying to keep a straight face. “They’re old-lady shoes. I can’t wear these things!”

  “But they look like they’ll be stable. We don’t want you falling,” Dave and Lee said, almost in unison.

  Stable shoes. My new reality. What happened to cute shoes or sexy shoes?

  “Never send a man—or, worse, two men—to do a woman’s job. We’re taking these nasty things back. You’re taking me to take these things back and find some that I can be seen in.”

  We giggled our way into the shop and returned the pilgrim shoes. I sat up straight as they pushed my wheelchair up and down the aisles, peering intently at dozens of shoes before settling on a pair of leather slip-ons.

  “Why don’t you try these on?” the salesman said as he handed me a size 8. We all burst out laughing as I dangled it with my one hand, hovering over the nothingness at the end of my foreshortened lap.

  I loved getting everyone to laugh at my disability. This was something I wanted more of.

  On October 16, nearly seven weeks after the accident, Dave and I were in my warm, stuffy hospital room, watching the 1979 World Series on our new nine-inch TV. The Pittsburgh Pirates had evened up the series by winning game six against the Baltimore Orioles when Randy walked in carrying the legs. Like some medical pied piper, he was followed by nurses, therapists, and doctors, who jostled for space in my room.

  These medical professionals were truly invested in my rehabilitation. I think they realized that trauma is no respecter of persons, that they could have been in my place. They seemed amazed by Dave’s absolute commitment to me and our marriage. I think they wondered whether they would stick around if they were saddled with a loved one’s unexpected lifelong disability. After all, we live in a disposable society. We throw out the Bic pen when it runs out of ink. We buy new shoes rather than resole our worn ones. We leave when things don’t go our way.

  Randy placed the legs straight out on the bed, the open ends of the sockets up against my residual legs.

  I reached down and ran my hand along one’s rigid socket and over the thick felt strap screwed into its top. The sockets were glued to a boxy knee contraption that bolted into naked, hollow metal pipes, all of which ended in the brown slip-on shoes I’d chosen for myself.

  As everyone watched, Randy said, “Okay, Linda. Here’s how these work.” He pulled from his lab coat a pair of long cotton stockings and showed me how to pull them all the way up each of my legs and then push up the rigid sockets so the rims reached my pubic bones. He crisscrossed the thick felt straps tightly over my pelvis and fastened them around my waist.

  “Well, this is the
least sexy garter belt I’ve ever seen . . . but I love it,” I said with a giggle. There were a few muted chuckles, but everyone seemed anxious to see how they’d work.

  Dave turned me gently so the legs dangled over the edge of the bed. I put my arm around his neck.

  “Dave,” I whispered, “can I really do this?”

  In a voice so low no one else could hear, he said firmly, “You can do it. I’ll help you.”

  “Are you ready?” Randy asked as he and Dave slipped their hands under my armpits.

  I nodded.

  “Okay, Dave . . . one, two, three.” I heard sniffles as Dave and Randy hauled me up onto the stilts.

  The first thing I saw were Dave’s green eyes. Something was wrong. I was looking straight into them instead of up into them. They’ve made me too tall! Then I glanced down to see if maybe the legs were tan. How cool would that be? Tall and tan, like the girl from Ipanema. They weren’t, but ahhh, what a relief.

  Ahhh turned to ugh and then ouch. The bony ends of my legs hit the bottoms of the sockets. The inner, upper socket ledges cut into my tender skin and pushed against my pelvic bones. Randy and Dave helped propel me three or four steps. The clumsy experiment lasted less than two minutes before I crumpled in a sweaty heap on the bed.

  The staff were all pleased with themselves as they strolled effortlessly out of the room. They’d made a Linda stand-up doll, which meant they’d done their job. I watched them walk away, leaving to go home, where they could run, skip, jump, wear cute clothes, walk on the beach, and live carefree lives.

  The truth was that I was exhausted. My legs hurt. The positive was that I now knew I could look normal because I’d have legs. But they hurt so much that I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to walk. Dave and Donna were more positive than I was.

  I waited until Dave was gone, then burrowed my head under the pillows and cried myself to sleep and to dream. Vivid Technicolor dreams. Dreams with real legs and two arms.