Moving Forward in Reverse

by Scott Martin

  ‘Now for the hard part: I’m going to move around to the front of you and hold your shoulders while you sit for a full minute. Okay?’

  I nodded, trying to fathom how sitting had become such a challenge. Kathy shifted to stand before me, letting her right hand slide to my left shoulder while her left went to balance my right. With only this meager support I felt my body trying to cave under me. She glanced from the clock to me and back to the clock as a sheen of sweat spread across my forehead.

  Sixty seconds had never lasted so long. My abdomen burned, my back ached, and my chest heaved at the effort involved. I had been in training for most of my life, but even pushing out those final two bench presses couldn’t compare to this. Atrophy suddenly held new meaning for me as I became aware of every place on my body where those lost forty pounds had come from.

  ‘Ten…Nine…Eight…’ she began to count down and I gasped another breath, mentally gritting my teeth against the voice in my head pleading to be released.

  ‘Four… Three… Two… One.’ It seemed like she was back against my side in a flash: her shoulder under mine and her arm around my back before I could take a full breath. I sagged against her.

  ‘Rest for a minute and we’ll try again, all right?’ I dipped my chin and sucked oxygen into my lungs, mentally whimpering, Again?

  A part of me wanted to mourn, disheartened by how pathetically difficult that whole process had been. But the bigger, more rational side of me saw that each minute was one step closer to getting back to my Eau Claire soccer team. For every time I never let them quit, I would damn well ensure that I stayed at least as strong and pushed through one more set.

  After the sluggish progression of the previous minute, my sixty seconds of rest seemed to slip by unnoticed. Just when I thought my breathing was beginning to slow down, Kathy cleared her throat and gave my right shoulder a squeeze.

  ‘Ready to go again?’ She asked.

  I swallowed and licked my lips. ‘Ready.’

  She maneuvered to the front of me again and we began my stay in Hell once more. In some ways, the subsequent sets became easier because they had lost their shock factor. I went into each of the five reps knowing that this one would be worse than the last but determined to make it through nonetheless. My abdomen was a furnace of heat and pain but this, I reminded myself, was what I had wanted. I needed physical activity. I needed this pain. So I forced myself to revel in the burn of muscles rebuilding.

  ‘Okay,’ Kathy breathed when the fifth minute of sitting had ticked by. She helped me move back against the bed and I sank into the cushioned support of the mattress.

  She took her time putting the bed rails back into place as she lowered the bed to horizontal; I began to wonder if she was dillydallying so she could make sure I recovered okay. Pausing with her arm on the left hand rail, she leaned on her forearm as she looked at me, considering. I watched her eyes wander over my flushed face and the slowing rise and fall of my chest in a contemplative manner. After a moment of pursed lips and quizzical, scanning eyes, she nodded to herself.

  ‘That was such a good start; I’m just thinking what other exercises we could add to keep you progressing as fast as possible.’ I grinned. I had been thinking the same thing for a week now.

  ‘Go to the foot of my bed.’ She looked at me, her eyes narrowed under furrowed brows, and opened her mouth to respond. I silenced her with a pointed nod in the direction of my feet. Shrugging, she turned and walked to where I had indicated.

  ‘Now hold down my ankles.’ At this her face opened up, the dimple between her brows disappearing as they arched high over her eyes.

  ‘You want to try a sit-up?’ I could see the head-shaking about to commence. ‘You can’t do that…Can you?’

  ‘Shut up and get to work.’ She blinked owlishly then laughed and took hold of each of my ankles with a broad grin on her face. A confidence was growing between us; I knew it would only get stronger from here.

  With her hands wrapped securely around my ankles, I reeled off ten sit ups at a forty-five degree angle. On each upward heave, I pushed a gust of air out of my lungs. If my abdomen had been in agony before, it was beyond words now. By the third sit-up I wanted nothing more than to collapse back into a blissful sleep. By six I would have let them move me back into the ICU and happily relinquished my arm for the morphine drip. By nine I wasn’t sure I had legs anymore because I could feel nothing below my stomach. By ten I was satisfied.

  I collapsed back against the mattress, breathing so loud I wouldn’t have been surprised if the person in the room next door could hear me. I closed my eyes and focused on the burn in my abdominals. Never in my life had an exercise rendered me this excruciatingly exhausted. When I opened my eyes, Kathy was still standing at the foot of my bed. She had released my ankles and was smiling at me in her usual, vibrant way. There’s nothing usual about that smile, I thought and tried to return it with my own. Unfortunately, only half of my mouth seemed functional.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ Kathy said. ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’ I wanted to chuckle when I realized she was quoting one of my favorite actors, Humphrey Bogart, in Casablanca, but it came out as more of a snorting gush of air.

  ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.’ I quoted in return.

  She snickered and tapped my feet. ‘Well done. I’ll be back after lunch so get ready for more pain at my unyielding command.’

  She skipped towards the door of my room. Before she had made her dainty, dancing exit, a thought struck and I called out to her.

  ‘Hey, Kathy? What’s up with Dr. Molin and bagels?’

  A grin lit up her face. ‘He has them flown in overnight from New York for the Rehab staff. A New Yorker, through and through, our Dr. Molin.’

  ‘Ah…’ Still didn’t explain why he asked me about them, unless–

  ‘If he mentioned bagels to you, he must like you.’ She jiggled her eyebrows and winked at me as if we were a couple girlfriends sharing a secret. I laughed and jerked my chin towards the door.

  ‘Funny. Now get the heck out of my room. I need my beauty rest.’

  Her laughter flitted across the room, cascading over the things in her wake like a blessing of fairy dust. With a sigh I leaned back to bask in my new accomplishment of sitting up for five nonconsecutive minutes, and ten whole sit-ups. Yup, I was on the road to physical recovery. And with a staff like this, it might turn out to be a fun journey after all.

  ‘Bagels.’ I snorted and shook my head. Who were these people?

  Breezin’

  No more than fifteen minutes after Kathy had left, Helen strolled into my room. As usual, she was rather parsimonious and took the liberty of turning off the TV without comment. It had been on VH1 and the Peter Gabriel video for Kiss That Frog was playing. The fact that I loved that song and she hadn’t even asked permission to cut it off didn’t exactly start us on the best foot. No pun intended.

  She came bearing two sets of ankle weights, which she plopped onto the end of my bed before coming around to my right side. As Kathy had done, she took over the bed controls, but I found myself fighting the urge to resent this act with her whereas I had been happy to oblige with Kathy. This is your physical therapist, Scott. The person who is going to play the largest role in getting you back on your feet and out of this hospital. You don’t have to be chummy with her to recognize her skill and succeed under her care.

  I took a couple deep breaths as I convinced myself to behave and be reasonable. She returned to the foot of my bed where the weights were and selected the two smallest ones wrapped in green neoprene. As she walked back to my right side and lowered the bed rails, she addressed me for the first time that day.

  ‘I’m going to start you off with these two-and-a-half pound weights, Scott. They’ll be strapped to your biceps and I want you to lift your arms like this.’ She demonstrated by holding both arms out to the side forming a T with her body then raising th
em over her head to form an I with her fingers pointing towards the ceiling before bringing her arms back to her sides. ‘We’ll start with five repetitions.’ I nodded as she strapped one of the weights to each of my arms.

  I had been prepared for agonizing pain after going through the sitting exercises with Kathy, but lifting my arms with the small weights on was surprisingly easy. I felt a surge of pride as I raised my arms through five effortless repetitions. When I brought them back to my sides after the fifth lift, she asked, ‘Could you do seven?’

  ‘Let’s find out.’

  During the next two reps I was again able to squeeze out a sixth and then a seventh repetition. When my arms were back to a resting position she reached over and unstrapped the weights.

  ‘That was a good start, Scott.’ She set her weights on the edge of my bed and walked over to the television. ‘Rest for a moment before we do another set.’

  ‘VH1 sounds good,’ I remarked as the screen flickered to life. This time a Genesis video was playing and I leaned back against my raised bed with a content curve to my lips. Helen may not have had the vibrant personality of Kathy, but I enjoyed the way she challenged me. I could tell there would be no slacking off under her supervision. Not that I anticipated wanting to slack off.

  When the video ended Helen was back at my side, strapping the weights onto my biceps once more. She had me do three sets of double arm raises and this time I barely made five reps in each set. When the third set was over, she removed the weights again and traded them for their heavier, red counter parts. A part of me cringed at the thought of adding even more weight to my arms, but I was determined to rise to any challenge Helen issued.

  ‘That’s enough work for your arms for today.’ I nodded, holding in the sigh of relief that wanted to escape. ‘I’m going to have you do leg raises with these on.’ She raised the red weights as she spoke then lifted each of my ankles to wrap the weights around my bony legs. ‘I want you to raise each leg, one at a time, up to here.’ I eyed her spindly hand hovering about a foot above my bed.

  ‘Let’s start with ten repetitions and go from there.’ Start with ten, I repeated to myself, a hint of a smirk creasing my eyes. She was catching on quickly, making it clear that she anticipated more without directly asking for it. Clever.

  I started with my left leg, lifting it to meet her right hand again and again as I propelled myself through ten, then twenty-five, then fifty raises. By the fiftieth lift with my right leg, my thighs were screaming for release. My legs and abdomen trembled as I struggled to lift my emaciated limb those last couple inches, pushing through the tearing burn with gritted teeth and wild eyes.

  When my right leg had fallen back to the bed for the final time, Helen nodded approvingly at my panting form. I could sense that I had earned her respect already and enjoyed a quiet, vainglorious moment as she unstrapped the weights from my legs. My entire body was exhausted and it felt so good! Even in my spent state, I longed for the next round of exercises these two women would thrust upon me. Halfway through day one and I was already feeling livelier than I had at any point in the past week.

  On her way out, I asked Helen to put the Breezin’ album by George Benson in. It took her a moment to sort through my tapes, but eventually she found the album I had requested and put it in the cassette player. I was asleep before the final song had ended.

  ~~~

  Things quickly fell into a routine in rehab. I was visited by both Kathy and Helen twice a day and reveled in the rapid signs of improvement I saw under their diligent care. For the next two weeks, Kathy continued to push me through longer and longer periods of sitting, Helen brought bigger and bigger weights, and I instituted crunches into the private training regimen I had begun in my free time. My strength was increasing even faster than my amputations were healing. Barely three weeks into Rehab, I moved from using the small weights strapped to my arms and legs to the Nautilus weight training machine down the hall.

  My familiarity among the staff also grew in leaps and bounds. Dr. Molin had Kathy wheel me down to the staff room the next time bagels were flown in. It may not have been a very long distance to go – the staff room was located around the corner from my room – but, as with every excursion from the confines of my stifling room, it felt like a taste of freedom to me.

  While I watched from my wheelchair, Kathy prepared a poppy seed bagel with plain cream cheese. I wondered idly if cream-cheese smearing would ever be listed among my skills again. Since waking from the coma, I’d been fed like an infant, my food cut to bite-sized portions then transferred into my waiting mouth. I’d forced myself to accept this as a temporary evil, but temporary had never felt so long-term. My strength was clearly returning. I had mastered the art of scooting myself to one side of the bed to jab at the TV controls with the end of my right forearm and call for a nurse when needed. But I still couldn’t feed myself. The dependency of it aggravated me to no end.

  With my bagel balanced in one palm and the other wrapped around the back of my chair, Kathy pushed me over to one of the round tables so she could sit while feeding me.

  ‘Kathy,’ I said when she had situated herself across from me, ‘can I feed myself?’

  She paused with two fingers from each hand delicately pinching the bagel, poised to tear. ‘Feed yourself?’ she asked as if the concept were a novel idea.

  ‘Yeah. If you could just place the bagel between my st–’ I paused, reconsidered. ‘Stumps’ sounded so negative and derogatory. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life referring to my arms as ‘my stumps’. I cleared my throat and amended, ‘between the ends of my arms, I can do the rest.’

  I held my amputated forearms out together, demonstrating how I could pinch the bagel between their two bandaged ends. She studied me for a minute. I mimed lifting an imaginary bagel to my mouth, biting off a bit, and chewing happily.

  With a smile and a shrug, she conceded. ‘All right, but if you drop it I’m not picking it up for you.’ I grinned at the twinkle in her eye and held out my arms for the bagel. She slid it into position and waited for me to pinch it carefully.

  I tried to grip it tenderly, but being delicate was much more challenging when working with bandaged forearms as opposed to hands. The bagel began to compress under the pressure. With pursed lips I quickly remedied my mistake and focused on gentle movements.

  Once satisfied that I had the bagel in my grasp, Kathy lowered her hands and watched as I raised it inch by inch towards my mouth. It was painfully slow going, agonizing in the care required, but eventually I managed to bring the cream cheese sandwich to my mouth and take my first bite.

  Spread oozed from the middle and smeared across my lips and chin, but my mouth was full. I grinned dopily as I chewed my bagel. Kathy looked away, biting her lips around a smile of her own.

  It took me the better part of half an hour to finish, but at long last I brought the final bite to my mouth and dropped it in.

  I looked down at my arms. I had done it! I’d fed myself for the first time in a month and a half. There was cream cheese smeared all over my bandages and face, but the bagel was where it belonged: in my belly.

  Kathy was watching me, a smile playing about the edges of her mouth. She met my eyes and the smile grew to a grin almost as proud and boisterous as my own. Her eyes dropped to my mouth and she reached for one of the napkins on the table.

  ‘Well done,’ she said softly as she wiped cream cheese from the edges of my lips and parts of my chin, dabbing at a spot on the side of my nose I hadn’t realized I’d hit with smear.

  One small step towards recovery, one giant leap in independence, I thought gleefully as Kathy wheeled me back to my room. I would never again allow someone else to feed me a meal which didn’t require silverware.

  The Bane of Captain Hook

  It was sometime after breakfast but before my morning training with Kathy and Helen that Dr. Molin came into my room

  ‘Hey, Doc!’ I called out in greeting. Just as my reputation among
the staff had progressed, my relationship with Dr. Molin had developed into a sort of brotherhood. We spoke regularly and freely, and I greatly appreciated his candor. When turbulence was ahead, I could always count on Doc Molin to keep me abreast of it. That morning would prove no different.

  ‘What’s happenin’?’ he replied, walking to my bedside and cuffing me not-so-gently on the shoulder. I grinned and rolled my shoulder into his clout to reduce the impact.

  ‘Eh, you know, just the usual excitement: changing channels, turning pages, eating hospital food. What else is new?’

  Chuckling, he reached for my left arm and held it in his hand. Slowly, he rotated my arm as far as my shoulder and elbow sockets would allow, studying the ace bandage wrapped around its end. After a moment of silent contemplation, he set my arm back on the bed and said, ‘Well, how about we take these bandages off? Is that new enough for you?’

  ‘What, you mean remove them for good?’ I had been through a few bandage-changings since entering Rehab and for the most part they’d become old news – just another facet of the routine.

  He nodded.

  ‘Go for it! I could use a good scratch under there.’ He smirked, but as he began removing first the white tape securing the ace bandage, then the bandage itself, and finally the gauze underneath, the smile slowly faded. We were both quiet as Dr. Molin exposed the ends of my arms. What kept him silent, I could only guess; for me, it was fear.

  This was it: the last time my arms would be bandaged. Before, each time they’d been removed for cleaning and inspection, it had been like watching a car wreck unfold. Dreading to look because I didn’t want the images of my crippled, unhealed arms in my mind but unable to turn away. Like a child watching a horror movie or a patient receiving a shot, I had peered at what was happening through narrowed eyes with my head twisted to one side: Maybe if I just don’t look directly at it the shock won’t hurt so badly.