Moving Forward in Reverse

by Scott Martin

  Almost always. I wondered what the numbers were for the people who walked away from this disease still fully intact.

  Each case I came across was like an echo of my own. From the flu-like symptoms and lethargy that mark its onset to being sent home from the hospital only to return in a worse condition than before. But one thing all of the cases had which I didn’t was a cause: a splinter, a prick of a needle, a cut. Each one seemed to have a visible place where the infection had found its hole. But I hadn’t experienced any cuts or lacerations. The only injury I could recall was a slight tear to my pectoral muscle while training, nothing that broke the skin. So where had my infection come from? I could think of only one person who might be able to help me find an answer: the man responsible for saving my life.

  ~~~

  Dr. Henrickson picked up on the fourth ring.

  ‘Scott! What can I do for you? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘I was calling because I hoped you could help me find an answer to something that’s been bothering me.’

  ‘Okay. I have a minute. Tell me what’s on your mind.’

  ‘I want to know how I contracted the bacteria. I’ve been reading about it and I think I have a pretty good understanding of how it works, but what I don’t get is how it entered my system. I never cut myself nor was I pricked by anything that I can remember.’ I spoke in a rush, the thoughts that had been nagging at me for the past few days suddenly gushing forth in a mad torrent. When I bit down on my lip to keep from saying more, all I got was silence from the other end of the line.

  ‘Dr. Henrickson?’ I said, worried I had lost him, either figuratively or literally.

  ‘Yes, yes. I’m still here. But, Scott, I think you’re asking the wrong question.’

  My brow creased.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rather than worry about where or how you contracted it, you need to look into what happened in the emergency room on your first visit.’

  I stood suspended with the phone clutched to my ear, trying to wrap my head around what Dr. Henrickson had just said and what he had implied.

  ‘Are you,’ I said slowly, cautiously; venturing into the land of assumptions, ‘telling me that the doctor misdiagnosed my condition?’

  ‘You need to look into what happened in the ER on your first visit.’

  As I hung up the phone, my mind whirled. I looked at the myos and thought about all that I had been through. I could still remember the beginning clear as day. It had looked like heat exhaustion; the fatigue, headache, and nausea all possible symptoms of being out in the sun for too long. Hell, I had been the one to diagnose it as such. But here was Dr. Henrickson turning it around and suggesting the blame should fall on the hospital, the medical professionals.

  I didn’t know what to make of it all. If I had been living in a fog before, I was in a full-on mental trance now. The second I stopped focusing on work, my thoughts flashed back to the conversation with Dr. Henrickson, to the first time I was seen at the ER and released. I remembered how I had felt much better after getting the IV, and it was only once I had proclaimed exactly that, that the doctor had let me go. But then I remembered how young the ER physician who treated me was, and how he had let me, the patient, determine the course of the visit without taking the time to run even routine tests for veracity’s sake; An event that only reminded me how bull-headed I could be and led me to think of my mother and all that she had been through, remembering her tears and imagining her devastated grief when I was in the coma. She blamed herself, taking responsibility for her thirty-five-year-old son’s fate in some crazy, incoherent way as only mothers could.

  Did I owe it to her to get to the bottom of this? Would she even want me to try? Unable to bear the confusion and uncertainty alone any longer, I picked up the phone.

  I eventually found Herrick and Hart, a full service law firm located in downtown Eau Claire, less than a block from the Eau Claire County Courthouse.

  After a phone conversation with attorney Mike Schumacher, I was invited to come in for a face-to-face meeting.

  We gathered in the office conference room, an elegant space with shelves of law books and various certificates and awards received by the firm decorating the walls. The décor served its purpose: I was duly impressed.

  Mike met me in the conference room moments after I arrived. He looked a lot like General George Armstrong Custer (minus the goatee) in a modern suit, with well-groomed brown hair, an almost blonde, straight painter’s brush moustache, and a very direct gaze.

  ‘Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. Schumacher,’ I said as he grasped the right myoelectric hand in the only handshake I could offer.

  ‘Call me Mike,’ He indicated that I should take a seat and turned to do the same.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I quickly replied and received a turn of the head and smirk from him. We each took a seat in one of the black leather chairs, facing each other across the long, dark walnut table.

  ‘Give me a rundown of what happened. Starting with your initial visit to the ER.’

  I nodded. ‘Okay, Mike…’

  As he took notes, I told my story to the best of my ability. At times he would pause in his writing and ask me to provide more detail. Frequently throughout the telling he would shake his head from side to side, often punctuating the motion with a disbelieving, ‘Really?’

  I did my best to stay objective and accurate, and tried to keep the emotion out of my voice as the story delved into the events of my stay at Mercy Hospital. I wanted him to see worth in my case, but I also wanted him to understand me and know where I was coming from. If he took the case, he would be fighting against injustice, but he would be doing it for me.

  When he had finished the interview, he shifted the yellow legal pad and black, ballpoint pen to his right, folded his hands atop the table and looked at me. I met his eyes and took a breath.

  ‘We’ve got a case here, Scott.’

  I started to grin, bit down on my lip to keep it in check, then reconsidered and let it grow. ‘Let’s roll.’

  ~~~

  I just about skipped back to campus. For the first time in – well, since the illness, I felt a surge of confidence. I was doing something; fighting back. I may have been standing up against negligent doctors, but it felt as if I was challenging the disease itself, contending with it out in the open and bringing it before a court of law.

  I met with the attorneys at Herrick and Hart again the following week to start digging deeper into the names, dates, and such of the care I received at Mercy Hospital. At the outset of the meeting they gave me another gift: the benefaction of an eventuality. They would not only take my case, but take it on a contingency, meaning the firm would only get paid if there was a settlement of positive verdict – a win. It was too much to hope for and just like that it was mine. I thanked them ardently and vigorously.

  It would be another eighteen months before Herrick and Hart felt comfortable enough with their outline of the case to finally request a hearing with a judge and to be placed on the court calendar. I continued to meet with them on a monthly basis and in the meantime funneled my newfound buoyancy into straightening up the rest of my life. I searched high and low, and finally managed to find an apartment that fit my budget and my needs.

  17

  Back on My Knees

  In the 1995 season, with only two players left from my first team at UWEC, I was forced to face my new, amputated self more than ever in regards to soccer. What had been my one haven on campus, my refuge from strangers’ peeping eyes, suddenly became unfamiliar territory. I found myself standing before a group of young women I hadn’t known before the illness. I didn’t know what they were thinking as they stared up at me with keen eyes. What would any player think of a quadruple amputee for a coach?

  As the academic-year work schedule resumed, it also became apparent that the bolster I had felt from joining teams with Herrick and Hart was mostly hot air. The prospect of a trial, altho
ugh to all appearances a positive thing, in actuality raised more questions than it did answers. As the leaves began to change, I found myself confronted with the same struggles I had faced the past winter, only this time with seemingly nowhere left to turn.

  The Fog rolled over me like waves at high tide, and with each swell I felt myself sinking deeper into its murky depths. I swirled so deep, not even my nomination for National Coach of the Year for the successes of the previous season could keep my head above the suffocating mist. I was drowning in its vapor, so fast I was barely aware of the rate at which I was descending. If the prospect of a lawsuit with Herrick and Hart had nudged the pendulum a few degrees forward, the slow deterioration of my soccer team yanked it right back again.

  Because I failed to recruit a top goal scorer, we had issues heading into the season. Starting at number 12 in the national rankings, we slipped from the beginning of the season and ended with 10 wins, our poorest showing ever. Looking back, that season reflected my attitude, my lack of spirit.

  ~~~

  When the hole in my right foot resurfaced at midseason, I had no energy left to feel. I took a breath as I gazed at the red divot in the forefoot under the metatarsal bone, and felt my lungs begin to fill with metaphoric dank air. On the phone with Dr. Rucker’s office, I heard the perky voice of a well-meaning nurse come across the line. I told her who I was and explained what was wrong, answering her inquiries in an inflectionless monotone. I already knew where this road led and had started boxing up my emotions for the long trip that lay ahead.

  We scheduled my surgery for the day after the conference tournament because I knew we wouldn’t be receiving a bid to the National Tournament. During this surgery, Dr. Rucker told me, he would like to try lengthening my Achilles tendon.

  ‘I believe that your tendon shortened from the reconstruction your foot underwent,’ he said in his matter-of-fact tone, ‘and hope that if I lengthen it, we’ll be able to get a more natural pivot. Or, at the very least, change your foot’s pivot point inside the insert to an area that isn’t immediately under the metatarsal bone.’

  I dipped my chin once and made a sound in the back of my throat intended as consent but which could just have easily been read as ‘I couldn’t care less. ’

  ‘Now,’ he went on, unperturbed by my lack of enthusiasm or concern, ‘there are four common ways of lengthening the Achilles surgically. The technique I think best in your case is called the percutaneous method. It requires that I make several small cuts in the tendon using stab wounds through the skin. The intention being for the cut ends to then move apart and lengthen the Achilles.’

  I nodded along, barely listening. By this point, I wasn’t sure I’d even care if they gave up half way through the surgery and sawed my foot off. It had become just another piece of baggage. Maybe it was better gone.

  Dr. Rucker went on to assure me that this, too, was a very simple surgery which had seen ‘excellent functional results and low complication rates’ in case studies. I should recover as easily as last time and hopefully require no future surgeries, he assured me in a light tone.

  Another bob of my head. No need to inform him of just how “easy” my last recovery had been.

  Following the morning surgery, I was back on my knees that afternoon. Like dolphins to a drowning man, people began to flock to my side. Tom and Sue took over my groceries and, on occasion, my cooking. I sensed my family taking stock of me whenever we spoke or spent time together and wondered if they shared notes on what they saw in me. Everyone hovering uncertain, waiting, looking for a sign. Will he be able to cope? their overly attentive eyes seemed to be asking. Their altruistic efforts fell on my unresponsive shoulders.

  They did have cause for concern. More so than even I realized at the time. My team noticed, though, and our seasons were hurt for it. As poorly as the ‘95 season turned out, ‘96 was no better with another measly 10 wins.

  As we gathered to say our brief goodbyes after the 1996 season, I gazed tenebrously at the players sitting around me. Through my own obscurity, everything seemed as it should be. In a life void of emotions, it’s easy to overlook those of others.

  ~~~

  Life returned to campus after winter break as it had left: in a trickle followed abruptly by an all-out flood. I opened the doors of the Soccer Office and set about the routine tasks of each day. After going through the mail and finding nothing of particular interest, I turned to the school newspaper for a momentary indulgence. Called The Spectator, the paper was student-run and naturally student focused. Just as naturally, my primary interest lay in the Sports section, so, after skimming the front page, I flipped to page one of Sports.

  And there it was: Front page, above the fold, an article that would change everything.

  The headline escapes me now, but it was of little importance. What mattered was the body of the piece where the author seemed to have taken one comment from a player and blown it up to make a story in the frame of gossip. A piece worthy of The National Enquirer, in my opinion.

  Three of our players were quoted as saying they’d lost interest in the program. Among them: a team captain. Her main contributing quote read, ”The focus is too much on winning. We just want to have fun.”

  I read those two sentences, and then read them again. And again. Each time I felt the same aura of betrayal lacing her words. It was a slap in the face of the University, of the students and the Athletic Department, and of her teammates and the coaching staff. Athletics was funded by the school and the student body; they weren’t paying for the players to ‘just have fun.” Representing UWEC in a varsity sport was an honor. I found myself blown away by the arrogance and audacity of such a statement.

  And yet, although I was disappointed in such a thing being said publicly and in how they had conveniently forgotten the list of priorities I had indoctrinated them with during recruiting, I couldn’t begrudge them their feelings. The signs had all been there – the conversations consumed by talk of parties, the fact that one of the players had shown up to a match hung-over during the past season – and it was my job as a coach to address these issues.

  What did it say about me that I may have been too disconnected to see what was right before my face? What did it say about my relationship with the team that when the player in question arrived hung-over, none of the other players who knew came forward to tell me until after the season?

  With a weary sigh, I turned back to the article and read it through. By the time I was finished I had sunk back into my familiar disenchantment. I shook my head and set my eyes back at the beginning. Partway through rereading, I looked up at a figure in the doorway.

  A tall, slender woman with bobbed silvering hair slid through the doorway, her bright floral dress a spot of color in an otherwise suddenly dull space. By the strained and sympathetic expression on Marilyn’s face, she knew what was in my hands.

  ‘May I sit?’ she asked, taking a seat on the edge of the blue sofa cushion. She settled herself and took a moment to collect her thoughts. Marilyn was my boss and the type of person to speak always with conviction and forethought, two qualities I greatly admired in her.

  After a lengthy pause, she told me of a similar situation in which a reporter once published comments from her players that negatively slanted a story while brazenly failing to ask Marilyn for her own comment before printing the piece.

  ‘Deal with it in the manner that you feel is right,’ she advised me in the end, ‘but don’t do it through the press.’ Her expression was solemn and stern. I wasn’t sure if it was a boss’s order or a colleague’s concerned advice she was offering. Either way I nodded my agreement. Apparently satisfied, she stood and left me to my rereading.

  ~~~

  The columnist who had written the story called me the next morning fishing for a response. I listened to this faceless voice and tried not to think of him as a scapegoat for my frustrations.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ I said when he paused for my response to his question,
‘it would have been responsible journalism to have asked my opinion before you went to press? Unless, of course, you were more interested in reporting only one side of the story.’ I let the implication linger just long enough to prove he had no ready response to such an accusation then added, ‘As to your question: No comment.’

  No follow-up story was run.

  ~~~

  I called the apartments of each of the players who had appeared in the article. All three calls dumped me to voicemail. I left each a message calmly asking for them to return my call; if they had issues with the team or my coaching style, they needed to bring those concerns to me. I hoped that after an open conversation we could resolve the problems and move forward.

  When none of them returned my calls or took the time to stop by the Soccer Office to talk by the end of the following week, I paid a visit to Marilyn in her office.

  ‘Scott,’ she said by way of greeting. I thought I could detect wariness in her tone and recognized the same keenness in her eyes as she gazed up at me that I saw in my friends and family. I held out the piece of paper.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked, taking the sheet from me.

  ‘My resignation.’ Her eyebrows peaked over wide eyes. When I glanced pointedly at the letter in her hands she did the same. I watched her read it with her elbows propped on her desk and the letter pinched between her thumb and forefinger. In it I stated my respect and gratefulness to the University, the Athletic Department, and Marilyn for giving me the opportunity to represent them. Then I regretfully said the past season would be my last with UW Eau Claire.

  When she had finished reading, Marilyn looked up at me carefully. ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’

  ‘You know that I didn’t come here to build a recreation program.’ She watched me, then nodded slowly, lips pursed, and glanced down at the paper, gingerly laying it on her desk.

  ‘I’m going to pay for you to attend that coaching school so you can earn your Advanced National Diploma,’ she said, still looking at the letter. ‘Submit the paperwork to Nancy when you’re ready.’