“You need to get your luggage and go through customs,” the attendant said to Dave.
Dave barely glanced at me as he handed me my passport and ticket. He then turned back to the desk. “Where is customs?”
“Down that hall and out those doors,” the attendant said with a nod.
As Dave stepped in the direction indicated, another airport employee pushed my wheelchair toward a nearby elevator. I twisted around and pointed back at Dave. “I’m traveling with him. I need to stay with him.” He paid no attention to me. He was on a mission.
And then I was gone. Whisked into an elevator. Down to ground level. Out a double-locked basement door. Into the bright sunlight. On the tarmac again.
An airport ambulance arrived. Its back doors flew open, and a wheelchair ramp unfolded. I was pushed up into the ambulance. The doors slammed closed, and straps appeared out of nowhere to tie down the wheelchair. Off we went. I leaned over so I could see out the window. We wove between monstrous planes before emerging into a wide-open space. The attendant looked at my ticket again, said something to the driver in German, and we veered off to the right.
In no time, we were sitting under the belly of a large plane. People appeared seemingly from nowhere, and a lift was rolled over. My attendant and I were placed on it. And, just like that, I was aboard an empty airplane. Without Dave.
I stood up, took hold of my cane, and slowly walked sideways to my assigned seat. I felt vulnerable, a little like a kid again, wanting my mom or dad to rescue me.
The other passengers on our flight began to board. Dave wasn’t among them. The other passengers found and settled into their seats. No Dave. The captain and flight attendants made their announcements and readied the aircraft for departure. Still no Dave. They closed the doors and buckled themselves into their jump seats. The engines revved; we thundered down the runway and lifted off. Without Dave.
I had no idea where he was as I hurtled off into the sky. I was suddenly and unexpectedly independent. With a burst of elation, I sat up straighter, loosened my seat belt, and smiled. I looked like everyone else. I was on my own, going somewhere, ready for adventure. Even though he wasn’t in the seat next to me, Dave’s support and hard work had put me there. We were together even when apart.
Four hours after mine, Dave’s plane touched down. We were together again. Interdependent but not dependent on each other to go where we wanted to go.
A cuckoo clock sang its 9:00 a.m. song in Stuttgart, Germany. The merry, dirndled wooden girls laughed at me as my internal clock argued, insisting that it was really midnight.
“Your mom’s dinners are even more exquisite than I remember,” I said to Dave, hiding a yawn.
I hoped my second cup of strong black coffee would convince my tired body to buck up and fast-forward to morning.
The night before, Jack and Donna’s apartment had been the scene of a dinner party—a reunion of sorts: a mix of the Society for the Serendipitous Restoration of Social, Scientific, and Sexual Scintillation Among the Amorous, Erotic, and Occasionally Erratic Emmigrants [sic] and a few of Jack and Donna’s current friends and neighbors. It was a poignant but celebratory event, with many hugs and kisses, champagne toasts, and an occasional happy tear.
“Should we warm up the leftover filet mignon and pommes Anna?” I asked Dave.
“No way. I don’t think my body could handle it. How about toast, and maybe we split an apple or something?”
While I buttered the toast, Dave thumbed through his dad’s stack of vinyl record jackets and stopped on one that made his face light up.
“How about this?” he said, flipping the cover in my direction. A joyous Julie Andrews, her arms flung wide open, seemed to jump from the sleeve and dance toward me out of an Austrian meadow. Dave slipped the disc from its paper sheath and carefully set the needle arm on the outer edge of the record. The faint chirping of a bird, crescendoing strings with a flute trill, and deepening horns announced the prelude, and then Julie Andrews serenaded us.
The hills weren’t the only thing alive with the sound of music.
“Here’s to vacation,” I said as I raised my coffee mug.
Three days before, Dave had finished his oral boards in therapeutic radiology at the Executive West Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, an event every radiology resident spends four years dreading and thousands of hours preparing for. I knew he was exhausted but at the same time elated to be back in Germany, getting ready to finish the vacation that had been so rudely interrupted the year before. He looked up from the International Herald Tribune, his head swaying as he mimed Julie Andrews’s “favorite things” line with a broad smile on his face.
“You know,” I said, “you’re one of my favorite things.”
“And that’s why I never feel sad,” he said.
Dave was twenty-eight and I was thirty years old, but The Sound of Music still sent chills up our spines. His parents were at work, and we had no plans. After clearing the table, I settled in on the couch with travel guides and maps and train schedules. I turned away from Dave’s line of sight and surreptitiously unbuttoned the top of my shirt.
“So, which train should we try to catch to Salzburg tomorrow?” I asked, scooting over to make space for him on the couch.
“I think it’s about a four-hour trip, so we don’t need to go very early,” he replied.
“Come over here and show me,” I said in a husky voice. I sweetened the proposition with a little cleavage reveal and boob jiggle.
He casually but eagerly came closer.
“Show you, huh? Show you what?” he whispered in my ear as he snuggled up next to me. I slid my hand up his leg and leaned back invitingly. We’d learned to go slowly and gently when I had my fake legs on, because the tops of the hard fiber-glass sockets put Dave’s manhood at imminent risk—a level of excitement in lovemaking that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
As if in benediction, symphonic strings, then harp and chorus, joined in, swelling to a mighty climax: mountains, streams, rainbows, dreams.
The next day, I held Dave’s arm tightly as we walked into the Unfallkrankenhaus. It had been nine months since I’d arrived near death in an ambulance. When we passed the front desk of the trauma hospital, someone recognized us and shouted, “Die Amerikaner sind wieder da,” sending out the joyous news that we were back and that I was walking. I wasn’t on a litter, fighting for life. I had legs. Whole. Standing up and walking again. Doctors, nurses, orderlies, and other staff soon joined us in the lobby for a raucous and tearful reunion.
Later that week, as I followed Dave over a narrow Venetian canal on a rough cobblestone bridge, he turned around and snapped, “Come on, what is taking you so long?” Stunned, I stopped. I stared daggers at him before we burst out laughing. We were walking. We were traveling for five days without a wheelchair. Just like every other young couple. We might look a little funny, and we certainly are slow, but we’re doing it! Fake legs, real legs—it didn’t matter.
Within days, Dave was sneaking sidewise glances at me. “Your skin looks good. Glowing, even,” he said with a sly grin.
Then more to the point, a few days later: “You look pregnant. What do you think?”
I’d forgotten that Dave adores pregnant women. To him, they’re sexy, vibrant, and alluringly beautiful. Uh-oh. Now I’m in trouble. He won’t be able to keep his hands off me.
In a sudden rush, my cheeks felt hot. How can he tell? His green eyes twinkled. His mustached grin spread to his ears, and he gently wrapped his arms around me. My stomach lurched as I turned away. I tried to smile as the room closed in on me. This can’t be. But maybe it is. Maybe this explains why my breasts have been feeling warm and swollen for the past few days. I looked up at Dave again. His eyes were brimming with tears. Then he hugged me so hard that I couldn’t breathe. This was a leap forward in our lives as a couple, cementing our bond even more firmly and moving us one step closer to normal.
“You might want to sit down,” I said to my moth
er one afternoon near the end of my first trimester. “I’ve got some good news.”
“Oh?”
“Dave and I are going to have a baby.”
Silence. And more silence. A really long silence.
“Oh, no! You can’t be! How are you going to take care of it?” she finally blurted out.
It was my turn to be speechless.
“Well, I think we’ll be able to figure out how to do it. Don’t you want to be a grandmother?”
My mom and I had always had a great relationship, and we talked easily to each other. Her questions and implied criticism puzzled me.
She turned her head away and gazed out the window awhile, before looking back into my eyes. After another pause, she asked, “What will you do if Dave leaves you?”
There it was again: the gut-wrenching specter of the possibility that Dave might give up at some point and abandon me. That I’d be unattractive, or too much work, or too boring for him to want to stick around.
I gulped and forced a tiny smile. “I can’t know for sure, but I don’t think he’ll leave me. He really wants to have children—our children. Children who might turn out to be like us. We think we can do it.”
Suddenly, that beautiful, sweeping melody welled up inside me, the song that has become a recurring theme and inspiration for us: “A dream that will need all the love you can give.”
I tried not to think about it, but when I did, the prospect of having children scared me to death. I was all questions, few answers:
How will I feed them?
Can I change their diapers with one hand?
I can’t push them in a stroller, put them in a car seat, or hold their hand and walk in the park.
What if something dangerous happens to them and I’m unable to save them?
And, finally: How will they feel as they grow older and realize how severely disabled their mom is? Will they think we’ve been selfish and given no thought to how weird their mother is and how my disability will embarrass them and limit their ability to live a fun, normal life?
On a positive note, I rationalized that the slow weight gain of pregnancy would help me strengthen my back and hip muscles—my new favorite muscles, the ones I used for my toy-soldier walk. Plus, it would be a huge distraction that would keep me from focusing on myself and make me learn how to do things quickly before we became a threesome. There was no good reason to keep putting it off. At thirty-one years of age, I would already be an old mom when the baby was born, eight years older than the average first-time mother in 1981.
When insecurity and abject fear threatened to overtake me, I forced myself to remember what Dave had said to me: “There’s no difference between being disabled and being a dinosaur.”
If T. rexes, with their itty-bitty arms, and triceratops, with no arms at all, could be moms, why couldn’t I?
CHAPTER 6:
Independence Day
“Dave, I’m ready,” I said, a little too sharply. It was the 6:30 a.m. ritual, and I detested it. I’d powdered my stumps, pulled the pantyhose on them, strapped on my fake legs and was squirming in my wheelchair. It was spring 1980, and we were living by ourselves in Dave’s parents’ house in San Diego.
“There’s gotta be a way for me to put these on by myself,” I grumbled as he knelt on the floor. I levered up and grabbed the edge of the dresser to steady myself. Dave, on the other hand, grinned lasciviously as he scooted in between my legs and looked up my crotch while he wrapped the loose end of a nylon around his wrist and pulled down to snug my leg into the socket of my prosthesis.
“Ooh, I like your panties,” he said. “Especially these black ones.”
I rolled my eyes and wished he’d hurry up.
“Hon, you’ve got the cutest ass. This is my favorite time of day.”
“Well, I hate it. I hate being dependent, and I hate having you work so hard all the time.” My voice choked and I gritted my teeth, trying not to turn this into a bitch session.
“Well, I love your black panties, and you turn me on.” We had some variation of this conversation every morning, always initiated by Dave and always ending with a hug and a kiss when my legs were finally on. I smiled in spite of myself.
Dave rolled out of bed at four thirty every morning and pulled on an old T-shirt and shorts so he could get in a seven-mile run before six o’clock. Then Mr. Sweaty Body would haul me out of bed and plop me down on the floor of the shower, and we’d giggle a lot while lathering up—my turn to sit between his legs. There was no time for dilly-dallying, though, because every minute was scripted so we could eat breakfast, get my legs on, and get out the door. Dave dropped me off at the VA hospital or UCSD Medical Center, Hillcrest, and then drove downtown to the Naval Regional Medical Center in Balboa Park.
Eternal dependency was one of my earliest fears in the first days after the accident. Being incapable of going to the bathroom by myself, clumsily trying to eat, unable to move without assistance. Powerless, impotent, incapable, inept, inadequate, weak, unfit. Helpless. These words had never been in my vocabulary. Now they haunted me.
“Well, you know I can’t go back to LA if I can’t get these things on by myself.” There. It’s out in the open. I wanted to be able to live on my own again. I wanted Dave to be on his own again. And what if the worst happened? What if Dave decides he’s had enough and leaves me? I wondered.
“I’ve got some ideas about something I can make that might work.” One more tug on the last nylon; then he shoved the end of the nylon into the socket and screwed in the valve. “Something you can lean on and that will support you if you lose your balance; something to take my place. Sit down, and I’ll show you what I’ve drawn.”
Something to take his place. I hoped that would never happen, but I guessed it’d be good to be prepared.
The sketch was not much more than a scribble, but it looked brilliant. A three-by-three-foot piece of plywood on the floor with four vertical metal pipes, one attached at each corner. Horizontal bars would attach the tops of the pipes to each other, leaving one side open, like a square with one side missing.
“You can push your wheelchair up to the open side and lock it in place. Once you’ve pulled the pantyhose up on your residual limbs, you’ll reach for your prostheses, pull them to you, and slide them onto your stumps. Then you’ll buckle the straps around your pelvis and waist and stand up. Once you’re upright, you can lean over, with the back bar supporting your waist, reach down and grab the ends of the nylons, and pull yourself the rest of the way into your prostheses.” He paused for a moment to take a breath. “After you tuck in the ends of the nylons, you can screw in the valves, push yourself upright, pull up your jeans, and voilà—you’ll be whole again!”
I laughed out loud at the cartoon in my mind. The upper half of a person rolls in to meet up with a lower-half person. A few grunts and groans later, the torso can ambulate and the legs can vocalize.
“If you stand up, I’ll measure you so I’ll know how tall to make Iron Mike.”
“Iron who?”
“Iron Mike. Your new best friend,” Dave replied.
Hmmm . . . a ménage à trois? Why not!
Grasping the left armrest of my wheelchair and pivoting on my right heel, I strong-armed myself forward, hoping like hell that I wouldn’t push so hard that I toppled over and smashed my face.
“See,” Dave said, “Iron Mike will keep you safe when I’m not around. If you push too hard getting up, he’ll catch you with his strong metal arms so you can’t fall.”
Dave’s sketch became a reality. A week and sixty-five bucks later, the three black arms and four black legs came to life in the family room. That night, I unstrapped my legs and propped them in Iron Mike’s embrace; they reposed there while Dave carried me upstairs, where the rest of us slumbered. One more step on my road to independence.
By midspring, I walked well enough that Dave started taking me to the VA hospital to spend the day in the radiology department where I sat in on readouts
and conferences. It was the easiest way to build my strength and learn how to maneuver without the responsibility or pressure of reading films. For a few minutes a day, I felt a flash of my old self when I made the correct diagnosis on an X-ray image.
For the first few months, all I thought about was walking. No, actually, what I really thought about was falling. My toy-soldier gait is unique, and in case people didn’t see me, they’d definitely hear my thump, thud, thump, thud cadence as I made my way slowly down the halls. Even though I’m a small person, I take up a lot of space as I walk with my wide-base stride, by placing my cane out in front of me and to the left to protect the space around me. My biggest fear was that I’d be knocked down, so I hugged the right side of hallways, hoping the wall would break my fall if I lost my balance. Imagine walking on stilts with knees.
I thought back to the first lists I wrote with my left hand the week after the accident. We were making good progress, but the clock was still ticking on one thing: finishing my residency. My yearlong medical leave of absence would be complete at the end of August, so I had to be back to work by September 1980 to fulfill the last nine months of my residency. If I was even a week or two short of training, I’d have to wait another whole year to take the exam—an unacceptable option.
Dave and I had been in complete agreement about the importance of my becoming a radiologist. I’d spent many hours during the weeks in Salzburg dreaming and planning my return to finish my residency. In my bleakest hours, I found hope by imagining myself at a radiology viewbox—dictating films, calling clinicians with results, joking with my colleagues. All of this typically happens in a darkened room—a room in which people wouldn’t see my missing legs and arm, a room in which my radiologic interpretations would help my fellow doctors save lives and my empathy and humor would brighten the day.
When I had my doctor hat on, it was easy to forget my funny walk and missing arm. I felt worthwhile and needed.
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