by Don Piper
They attached me to a morphine pump they called a PC. Whenever the pain was really bad, I pushed a button to give myself a shot. I had to have pain medication constantly. At first I tried to resist taking more painkillers, but the doctor rebuked me for that. He said that my body was tensing from the pain and that retarded my healing.
At night they gave me additional medication to try to make me sleep. I write try because the additional medicine didn’t work. Nothing they did put me to sleep—not sleeping pills, pain shots, or additional morphine. I had no way to get comfortable or even to feel relieved enough from pain to relax.
I’ve tried to explain it by saying it this way: “Imagine yourself lying in bed, and you’ve got rods through your arms, wires through your legs, and you’re on your back. You can’t turn over. In fact, just to move your shoulder a quarter of an inch is impossible unless you reach up and grab what looks like a trapeze bar that hangs above your bed. Even the exertion to move a fraction of an inch sends daggers of pain all through your body. You are completely immobile.”
Because I began to break out with bedsores on my back due to being in one position too long, the hospital finally provided a special waterbed that constantly moved. That did take care of the bedsores.
The only time I ever left the room was when they wheeled me down to X-ray, which was always an adventure. Because of all the metal parts and equipment on me, they had trouble figuring out how to x-ray me. Three or four men wore lead suits in the X-ray room and held the lens and plates behind my steel-encased limbs, because no machine was designed to x-ray those types of things.
That also meant that some days I spent two or three hours in X-ray while the technicians tried to figure out how to take a picture so the doctors could see whether the bones were knitting. They had no precedent for a case such as mine.
When someone came to wheel me to X-ray, he’d always say, “We’re taking a trip down the hall.”
That was all they had to say, because I knew what they meant. To distract myself as the gurney cruised down the long hallways, I played a game of connect-the-dots with the ceiling tiles. I started that the day I came back from the first surgery. I was probably hallucinating, but I remember the ICU unit was brand-new, and I was the only patient. When they brought me in, I was moaning and couldn’t stop. Then I saw the ceiling tiles, and as I stared at them, it seemed as if they were running together and forming some kind of pattern that I couldn’t figure out. In my mind, I began making pictures and designs out of them. As I did that, I’d also think, I’m going completely crazy. But I did it anyway. Eventually, connecting the dots became a form of distraction allowing me to focus, if only momentarily, on something other than my pain.
The worst daily torment took place when a nurse cleaned the pinholes where the wires went into my skin. All the nurses that treated me on the orthopedic floor, the twenty-first floor of St. Luke’s Hospital, had to be taught how to clean those pinholes. Because they didn’t want the skin to adhere to the wire, they had to keep breaking the skin when it attached itself—as it did occasionally. Then the nurse forced hydrogen peroxide down each pinhole to prevent infection. I could think of nothing worse to endure, and it happened every day.
That wasn’t all. Four times a day, every six hours, they’d take an Allen wrench and turn screws on the device. The idea was that this would stretch the ends of the bones inside the leg and eventually cause the growing bone to replace the missing bone. The turn hurt beyond description, even though each turn was very slight, less than half a millimeter. It didn’t matter whether it was day or night, every six hours someone came into my room to turn the screws.
As a pastor, I had visited many hospital rooms, including trips to the ICU. I had seen agony on many faces, and I had frequently winced in sympathy. Even so, I couldn’t imagine anything on a day-to-day basis that could be more painful.
Perhaps the worst part for me was that I never slept. For eleven and a half months I never went to sleep—I just passed out. Even with megadoses of morphine, I was never pain free. When they decided it was time for me to go to sleep, a nurse injected me with three or four shots of either morphine or another sleeping medicine. I’d lie in bed, and no matter how much I told myself to relax, I couldn’t. I fought the pain and then, apparently, I passed out. My next conscious moment would be an awareness of intense pain. I felt nothing else in between.
Eventually, family members and even hospital personnel left me alone because they knew I didn’t have a functioning body clock. I had no sense of time, and I couldn’t relax, because I was under such tension. If I made the slightest effort to move, a wire embedded in my flesh would tear my skin at the point of entry. I could move, but the wires didn’t. With even the tiniest movement, excruciating pain slashed through my entire body.
After a while, I learned to live with that situation, but I never got used to it.
The first person I “met” (we never saw each other in person) for whom the Ilizarov frame was used for its original purpose was Christy. The Ilizarov procedure was created to lengthen bones for people born with congenital birth defects. However, the device could not be attached until the bones had stopped growing. Especially during adolescence, bones grow at a very rapid pace, so doctors must carefully choose the right time for the procedure.
Christy, a teenage girl, was in the room next to mine. She had been born with one leg shorter than the other. Once her bones had matured, she had chosen surgery to attach the Ilizarov frame to have her bones lengthened so that both legs would be of normal size.
Because Christy’s surgery was elective, she had some idea about the pain and the length of recovery she would have to go through. For months, she had gone through extensive counseling, and her family knew how to take care of the wounds. They also knew approximately how long it would take and the commitment they had to make to care for her.
The difference between Christy and me was that she knew what she was getting into—at least to the extent that anyone can. I woke up with the device already attached. In my depressed state, that made me feel even worse. Even though I knew they had put the Ilizarov frame on me to save my leg, I could only see it as the major source of my agony.
Another problem arose, although a minor one. Even though we had different doctors, the same staff people came into Christy’s room and mine to turn the screws. Sometimes the wrenches got misplaced, and the attendant couldn’t find them in my room so they’d rush over to Christy’s for hers. Or they’d come and borrow mine. Fortunately for both of us, our fixators were interchangeable and someone could borrow wrenches from one room to adjust screws in the other room.
That’s how I first learned about Christy—the borrowing of wrenches. We never saw each other face-to-face, but we did see each other’s doctor, and somehow that, plus our common problem, created a bond between us.
Christy and I shared something else—pain. Many times I heard her crying. I don’t mean weeping, but a cry, or a scream, and sometimes just a low moan. She probably heard similar sounds from my room as well. I wasn’t as likely to cry because that’s not my nature. One of the nurses suggested it might be better if I did let go and scream. Even though she may have been right, I never did—at least not consciously.
When I was in control of my faculties, I never cried out. I had heard others scream from their pain and their cries disturbed me greatly. Also, I had learned to keep my hurts and emotions to myself. I believed at that time that moans, wails, and screams did no good. The only times I screamed, I was either unconscious or heavily medicated. I learned about those outbursts because other people told me.
Although Christy and I never met during the twelve weeks we lived next door to each other, we corresponded by sending letters back and forth, and the nurses willingly acted as our mail carriers.
I tried to encourage Christy. She told me her story and was very sympathetic to my accident. She was also a believer. We corresponded on that level as well.
In some of my worst mome
nts of self-pity, however, I would think that when all the pain was over, Christy would be a normal young woman; I would never be normal again. She could play and run and do everything a normal teen did. Even then I knew I would never run again.
I had many, many times of self-pity, reminding myself that she chose her pain, while I had no warning and no options. She knew in advance what she was getting into; I had no idea. She was doing something that positively impacted the rest of her life; I was doing something just to save my life. Yes, self-pity filled my mind many, many days.
Always, however, I came back to one thing: God had chosen to keep me alive. Even in my worst moments of depression and self-pity, I never forgot that.
Christy and I shared similar pain. We also shared a faith that reminded us that our loving God was with us in the most terrible moments of suffering. Just having her in the next room comforted me, because I’d think, I’m not the only one; somebody else understands how I feel.
That’s when I began to think of being part of an exclusive fraternity. In the years since my release, I’ve met other members of this reluctant and small fellowship. Because I knew what it felt like to suffer, I could understand their pain, just as Christy had felt mine and I had understood hers.
More than enduring, eventually I was able to do something doctors said I would never be able to do: I learned to walk again. I can stand on my own feet, put one foot in front of the other, and move.
They had warned me that because of the broken knee in my right leg, and the loss of the femur in my left (even with a replaced-and-stretched bone in place), I would not walk again, and if I did, I would be wearing heavy braces. More than once, I came close to losing my left leg, but somehow God took me through each crisis.
Therapy began on my arm about four weeks after the initial operation and on my legs two weeks after that.
About the same time, they put me in what I referred to as a Frankenstein bed. They strapped me to a large board and turned the bed so that my feet were on the floor and I was in a standing position, although still strapped to the bed. Two physical therapists placed a large belt around my waist and walked on either side of me. My legs had atrophied and grown extremely weak, so they helped me take my first steps. It took me days to learn to stand again so that I could put weight on my own legs. My equilibrium had changed because I had grown used to a horizontal position. I became incredibly nauseous each time they raised me into a vertical position. Days passed before I was used to that position enough to take my first step.
I didn’t really learn to walk until after the hospital discharged me. A physical therapist came in every other day to help me. Six months would pass before I learned to walk on my own more than a few steps.
My doctor removed the Ilizarov device eleven and a half months after the accident. After that, I could use a walker and eventually a cane. I didn’t walk without leg braces and a cane for a year and a half after the accident.
My accident occurred in January 1989. They removed the external metal work from my arm fixator in May, but they put internal metal plates down both of the bones of the forearm. Those metal plates stayed there for several more months.
In late November, they removed the fixator from my leg, but that wasn’t the end. After that, I remained in a cast for a long time, and they inserted a plate in my leg—which stayed there for nine years. I was content to leave it there, but they said they had to take it out. My doctor explained that as I aged, the bones, relying on the plate for strength, would become brittle. As I learned, our bones become and remain strong only as a result of tension and use.
During those years with the fixator and the subsequent metal plates, whenever I had to fly, I set off metal detectors from Ohio to California. Rather than go through the customary walk-through detector, I would say to the security people, “I have more stainless steel in me than your silverware drawer at home.”
They would wand me and smile. “You sure do.”
My children took pride in referring to me as “Robopreacher” after the title character in the movie Robocop. After a horrible incident, doctors used high technology and metal plates to restore the policeman so he could fight crime.
Regardless of how barbaric all these rods and wires and plates might have seemed, they worked. People gasped when they saw them embedded in my flesh. Those same people are now awed at my mobility. But under this thin veneer of normalcy, I’m still a work in progress, always adjusting.
9
ENDLESS
ADJUSTMENTS
A friend is always loyal, and a brother is born to help in time of need.
PROVERBS 17:17
It’s amazing how differently people responded after the accident. Several friends and members of South Park Church saw me during those first five days after my accident. Many of those same people saw me after the all-night prayer vigil that David Gentiles instigated. As they watched each tiny step of my recovery, they rejoiced. I saw everything in my recovery happening so slowly that acute depression continually gripped me. After the ICU, I stayed in the hospital 105 days the first time. I suppose depression would strike anyone who has been confined that long.
During the months of my recovery, the church worked hard to make me feel useful. They brought vanloads of kids to the hospital to see me. Sometimes committees met in my hospital room—as if I could make any decisions. They knew I couldn’t say or do much, but it was their way to affirm and encourage me. They did everything they could to make me feel worthwhile and useful.
Much of that time, however, I was depressed and filled with self-pity. I yearned to go back to heaven.
Beyond the depression, I had another problem: I didn’t want anybody to do anything for me. That’s my nature.
One day Jay B. Perkins, a retired minister, came to visit me. He had served as pastor of several south Texas churches before his retirement and had become a powerful father figure in the ministry for me. South Park hired him as the interim while I was incapacitated.
Jay visited me faithfully. That meant he had to drive more than forty miles each way. He came often to see me, sometimes two or three times a week. I wasn’t fit company, but I smiled each time anyway. I’d lie in bed and feel sorry for myself. He’d speak kindly, always trying to find words to encourage me, but nothing he said helped—although that wasn’t his fault. No one could help me. Not only was I miserable but, as I learned later, I made everyone else miserable.
My visitors tried to help me, and many wanted to do whatever they could for me. “Can I get you a magazine?” someone would ask.
“Would you like a milkshake? There’s a McDonald’s in the lobby. Or I could get you a hamburger or . . .”
“Would you like me to read the Bible to you? Or maybe some other book?”
“Are there any errands I can run for you?”
My answer was always the same: “No, thanks.”
I don’t think I was mean, but I wasn’t friendly or cooperative, although I wasn’t aware of how negatively I treated everyone. I didn’t want to see anyone; I didn’t want to talk to anyone; I wanted my pain and disfigurement to go away. If I had to stay on earth, then I wanted to get well and get back to living my life again.
Because Jay visited often, he noticed how detached I was from friends and family. One day he was sitting beside me when one of the South Park deacons came for a visit. After ten minutes, the man got up and said, “I just wanted to come by and check on you.” Then he asked the inevitable question, “Is there anything I can get for you before I leave?”
“Thank you, no. I appreciate it, but—”
“Well, can I get you something to eat? Can I go downstairs and—”
“No, really. Thanks for coming.”
He said good-bye and left.
Jay sat silently and stared out the window for several minutes after the deacon left. Finally he walked over to the bed and got close to my face and said, “You really need to get your act together.”
“Sir?” I said li
ke anyone would say respectfully to an eighty-year-old preacher.
“You need to get your act together,” he repeated. “You’re just not doing a very good job.”
“I don’t understand what—”
“Besides that,” he said and moved even closer so that I couldn’t look away. “Besides that, you’re a raging hypocrite.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“These people care about you so much, and you just can’t imagine how deeply they love you.”
“I know they love me.”
“Really? Well, you’re not doing a very good job of letting them know you’re aware. You’re not treating them right. They can’t heal you. If they could heal you, they would do it. If they could change places with you, many of them would. If you ask them to do anything—anything—they would do it without hesitating.”
“I know—”
“But you won’t let them do anything for you.”
“I don’t want them to do anything.” Without holding anything back, I said as loudly as I could, “The truth is I don’t even want them to be here. I’d just as soon they didn’t come. I know it’s inconvenient. They must have better things to do. I know that—why would I want anybody to come and see me like this? It’s just awful. I’m pathetic.”
“It’s not your call.”
I stared back, shocked at his words.
“You’ve spent the better part of your life trying to minister to other people, to meet their needs, to help them during times of difficulty and tragedy and—”
“I . . . I’ve tried to—”
“And now you’re doing a terrible job of letting these people do the same thing for you.” I’ll never forget the next sentence. “Don, it’s the only thing they have to offer you, and you’re taking that gift away from them.”
Not ready to surrender, I protested and tried to explain. He interrupted me again.
