Waking

by Matthew Sanford

  “I’m concerned, Matt,” I remember my dad’s face as hard but expressionless. “You’re still a young kid and look what you’ve already done to your body. This summer you’ve been a walking disaster.”

  My gaze cast downward, I said, “I don’t understand.”

  “Matt, you run around with your head in the clouds. Look at the consequences. You need to pay more attention; you need to look before you leap.” A sly smile broke across my face. “It’s not a laughing matter,” he firmly commanded. “What if the accidents get bigger as you get bigger—more serious? What then?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I want you to be more careful, to grow old and have a full life. You’ve got to use your head, or you might not make it.”

  Fear pulsed through me. My father spoke of something I couldn’t quite grasp, but I had an inkling. I didn’t feel scared exactly, but I suddenly knew something had to change. “Dad, how can I control accidents? I don’t understand …”

  “Hopefully by being more aware,” was his even response.

  The world suddenly became bigger—I wasn’t invincible. My own death was making its first conscious appearance in my world. It changed me; it vaguely changed the way I experienced my life. Something quiet had been added, something subtle, like another light in an already lit room. Remembering, I am struck by that conversation. It contained three defining features of my upcoming life—pain and injury, my response to it, and the possibility of death.

  As I left my father’s bedroom that day, my seeking path became a little more tangible. Did I have a vision of what lay ahead, of my upcoming experiences? Not really. But the feeling, the struggle to understand, the alertness that I took away from that encounter strike me now as a form of preparation, as a form of grace.

  If life allowed it, I would go back and hold that boy, whisper to him, let him feel warmth before life breaks him apart. I love him in that moment, when he somehow senses an unpredictable future. I love his willingness to move forward, to engage, to use a strength that is born of innocence. Feeling without knowing, that is our fate.

  5

  Pain and Silence

  For well over three weeks, I have been surviving a waiting period in the intensive care unit. Waiting for when: when my condition stabilizes, when I can withstand more-aggressive treatment. Contrary to prime-time television dramas, hospitals are boring. They are not like the fast-paced, code-blue, blood-spurting images we watch while eating popcorn. Instead, surviving devastating trauma features an abundance of mind-numbing time. It requires incredible endurance, a timeless focus when nothing else is possible.

  In particular, I am waiting for surgery. My back must be stabilized. The three vertebrae between my shoulder blades, T4–6, are severely displaced to the back and left. The procedure will be extensive, requiring six to eight hours and the stamina of two orthopedic surgeons. They will attempt to straighten my skewed spinal column, harvest bone from my hip, and then fuse the damaged vertebrae together. Finally, they will insert into my body two interlocking Harrington rods, with their accompanying nuts and hooks, along each side of my spine. These rods will span about seven vertebrae, from the base of my neck to my middle back. They will stabilize my spine while the bone fusion solidifies, a process that takes about two years. As these large chunks of metal are submerged into my back, I feel like a tar pit, absorbing tubes, screws, IVs, needles, and now rods into the darkness of my body.

  The surgery will be a good thing. The Foster frame has been only a resting place until I can survive the violence of this procedure. Being fit enough means I have made progress. More important, having surgery is the first step toward leaving this frame and entering a plaster body cast. I am promised that the cast will markedly curb my excruciating pain, a pain that is seemingly untouched by drugs.

  I cannot say that this pain is consuming. That implies I have boundary enough to recognize my own consumption. I don’t. This pain obliterates my cohesion, like pools of water separating on an uneven floor. It is not the acute pain of, say, breaking a wrist. Hurt as that does, the wrist is only a peripheral body part, not the core. It is possible to isolate your wrist, surround the pain, know its beginning, and foresee its end. The pain I have at this point grants no such luxury. It undercuts any unified sense of self, spreading me thinner and thinner—a silent hollowing toward death.

  I remember nothing of the day of surgery, not the lead-up, not anything. Like the day of the car accident, there is a blotch in my continuity. Perhaps intense trauma reaches back into memory and erases what needs forgetting. Maybe it’s like the precise moment one falls asleep—remembering its passage might reveal a necessary secret.

  In any case, the surgery went well. The fusion took, the hardware was installed. A neurosurgeon was called in to take a look, but, as predicted, the damage was too extensive—nothing could be done to reverse my paraplegia. His confirming verdict: paralysis for all the days that I shall live. It is too early for disappointment, as I am barely holding it together. I am not able to think about anything yet, let alone the future. All I can do is tell myself, This is things getting better.

  After a week or so, it is time for a body cast. How bad could it be? It’s just a cast, I say to myself. I am hopeful, as though I am coming down the homestretch.

  I am taken to an operating room. It is cold. Yellow tile is everywhere except overhead. Above is dominated by penetrating surgical lights. As I lie on my back, I see spots that shift as I move my eyes and are highlighted when they cross the shadowed faces of those around me. As this is not a sterile procedure and there are no surgical masks, I can see mouths move, even connect them to the voices bouncing off the tile. My gurney is lined up parallel to a bigger structure. It is a frame, like that of a canopy bed. But there is no mattress, just a platform of three metal bars running lengthwise. People close in around me. “One, two, three,” someone says, and I am hoisted up onto this rack, a naked, shivering five-foot-six-inch body and a mind unprepared for what is coming. Since the surgery, my back is a screaming bundle of cut nerves and muscles, like kindling and gasoline waiting to ignite. The pressure of lying on three narrow metal bars is the match. A searing burn courses through me, my recently sewn flesh rages alarm. I become lost in the fire that is my back.

  As the pain is literally unbearable, my mind escapes and becomes intensely aware of the smell of the room. It attempts to attach elsewhere, allowing only an edge of what’s happening. It’s not unlike admiring the beautiful sky of a sunset but not peering directly at the sun itself. The needed result: a nearly mindless body absorbs the unconscionable pain.

  Time goes off-screen. When I come around, I am back in intensive care. I feel like I have been assaulted, subjected to a curious blend of betrayals. At least the drawn curtains are familiar. I am back where I started.

  Just as things couldn’t get worse, they get better. The pain has decreased. The plaster encases my whole torso, front and back, from my pubic bone, over my shoulders, and surrounding the base of my neck. The cast gives me boundaries, borders around the pain. The result is a calming compression, a feeling of safety that allows me to let go.

  In retrospect, I realize how profoundly this feeling of boundary imprinted me. It is an insight that I will carry through my lifetime. Years later, a calming compression is what I experience when I practice yoga. (I now recognize it as the feeling of embodiment.) The spinal integrity of that thirteen-year-old boy was spewing all over the place, like a downed electrical line. The plaster cast directed this spillage back through his body, restoring his sense of place.

  The body cast allows me to move off the Foster frame and into a bed. This is my Christmas present from Dr. McMeken, who insists that I be released from the intensive care unit. “Too long here makes anyone crazy, especially your family,” he says. Dr. McMeken is a handsome Aussie, middle-aged, with blond hair, flaming blue eyes, and a mustache. I love hearing him talk. There is something so crisp and pure about an Australian accent. It inherently s
prings joy.

  Moving me out of intensive care is a medically questionable decision, but Dr. McMeken works a compromise among all of my attending physicians. The plastic surgery ward has only four of its twenty-two beds occupied. Apparently, cosmetic surgery doesn’t mix well with the holidays. Here I will get extra attention simply because they are overstaffed and the nurses need something to do. I lose the geese migration but gain an amazingly friendly nursing staff.

  Dr. McMeken does something else for me, though. He gives me wonderful stories about Australia. He tells me about the color of the water, the night stars, the Great Barrier Reef, and the prevalence of great white sharks. But the snakes—we speak long and hard about the snakes. He grew up in the rural areas, where snakes, especially poisonous ones, are quite common. He claims that one should never walk off into the countryside in shorts but wear only long, thick pants. One should also carry a walking stick, not for support but for protection. I suspect that he is pulling my leg. Still, I make him describe all the different snake varieties, their coloring, their mannerisms. I even learn that his mother was the local expert at “flipping” snakes, whatever that means. His stories take me to a mysterious land with sharks and snakes but also with walking sticks, shimmering blue water, and exotic beauty. Do I know that the life ahead of me will be much the same, that going forward I will journey into a strange territory? Not exactly; I am only thirteen. But Dr. McMeken performs an essential healing task. He relights my imagination.

  It’s funny what can bring reprieve. A body cast makes obvious sense. The core of my body—the spine—is held firmly in alignment. My body’s energy regains downward guidance to my feet. From the outside to in, from plaster to bone, I am held steady. Just as important, though, are these stories of Australia. Through my imagination, my perception begins to move. No longer just statically absorbing trauma after trauma, it shakes off and begins to light. I feel more hopeful because I start to “see” in color again. Now, I look forward to seeing people, not just being with them. I start to notice their moods, their footsteps, their mannerisms. I make jokes; I tease—all signs that the pain is becoming manageable. I need these connections because I am heading down another tunnel.

  The upcoming trauma proves to be a defining one. But not because of its severity, or its overtly dramatic effect. Rather, how I responded was critical, how I prepared. It was my first conscious attempt to remove my mind from my body.

  One day during their 6 a.m. rounds, the orthopedic residents tell me that my body cast isn’t fitting right and that I need a new one. My mother arrives a couple of hours later. She enters softly, pulls the chair a little closer to my bed, and sits down lightly. Immediately, she sees that I am distraught. “What’s wrong?”

  “I need another body cast … Mom, I can’t do it.” Tears fall softly over her cheeks. How does a mother watch her little boy suffer again and again? She is desperate. A pivotal conversation ensues, the first of a series.

  “Matt, tomorrow, try leaving your body for a while.” She leans back and grabs the arms of her chair. Her posture reaches for authority as her gaze moves sideways into emptiness.

  “What?”

  “You’re smart enough … just step outside the pain.” Silence.

  “So it’s okay, then … just to let it happen?” I am vaguely afraid but also relieved.

  “Yes.”

  “I know what you’re talking about,” my voice barely audible.

  “Good.” As an empty, dulled look claims my mom’s face, I am forced to look away. She has moved past tears, toward silence, for the survival of her child.

  I recognize the importance of this conversation primarily in retrospect. At the time, it seemed ordinary and practical, not strange and metaphysical. After all, the experience of moving out of my body was already occurring. Her words felt like a whisper in my ear, a granting of permission, a way to trust and let go.

  Years later, I find out that her desperate advice came in part from a passage in Aldous Huxley’s novel Island. A main character, enduring a painful death from cancer, leaves her body and watches from the corner. My mom has always explored ideas through books, and this time, she hit the mark straight on.

  A very odd encounter also likely played a part. At about this time, Bob Hardman, the new minister from our church, paid my mother a visit. She had recently rejoined his church after a five-year hiatus. We had attended services only intermittently, so we knew him sketchily at best. He made the drive from Duluth and met privately with my mom. I never saw him.

  “Paula, I have something a little awkward to tell you. I don’t really believe that God talks to us through dreams, and yet I feel compelled.” He fidgets but then continues, “I had a vivid dream the other day … I was told that Matt would pursue an alternative path, some alternative form of healing. You need to trust this, it’s okay.”

  “Can you be more specific?” my mom asks.

  “I can’t. I am at a loss. I just know that I am to tell you.” A strained pause. “This seems strange, I know, but I felt it was my duty to …”

  “I am touched by your concern. Thanks for coming.”

  My mom does not tell me about this conversation for years, although it guides some of her actions. A few years later, she lets a friend pay for a psychic/astrologist to do an extensive chart on me. Years after that, when a friend recommends a body worker, she immediately puts us in contact. Finally, when I come home from graduate school and proclaim my lifelong commitment to the practice of yoga, she smiles and tells me about the strange visit with Bob Hardman.

  And maybe, just maybe, this odd encounter led my mom to set the whole thing in motion, to offer her own interpretation of an alternative path. In the heat of the moment, she had reached back and pulled an image from her own idea of metaphysics and offered it to her desperately hurting child.

  This conversation began my first conscious attempts to dislocate my mind from my body. It is not like I suddenly became an expert. But I did vaguely grasp that a resource existed within me, a silent place into which I could retreat and find protection. What I didn’t realize was the long-term cost of going there and becoming comfortable.

  The day quickly arrives for my second body cast. It’s one thing to get mugged; it’s even worse to know that you are going to get mugged. I am a mess—terrified, panicked, and silent.

  It turns out that this next encounter with plaster is somewhat anticlimactic. I am prepared to go to war, to leave my body, to kick, to scream, to push back. The procedure is still painful, but nothing like before. Maybe my back has healed some. Perhaps I am gaining ground. In part, there is a practical explanation. My old cast is not sawed off me all at once; instead, it is done in sections. This means that the doctors replaster in segments, and my naked body does not press against that metal rack all at once. My back smolders but never completely catches fire.

  I am getting better at this. I know that the trauma will not annihilate me, that my mind can find a silent place, and my body will absorb the pain. Within this silence, I am gaining confidence.

  For Christmas, I receive a Bigfoot stuffed animal from a family friend. To this day, I’ve never seen one bigger. It sits five feet tall, its three-toed feet at least two feet high, its nose almost a foot long. Long, reddish brown hair and a goofy grin make for a hilarious appearance. The 1,200-bed hospital is relatively empty; my ward is down to three patients, and holiday spirits are running high. The nursing staff is so bored that the games begin. They admit Bigfoot as a patient, give him a private room next to mine, and create his own medical chart. They call staff members to draw blood, give IVs, and even catheterize him. They add him to the doctors’ scheduled rounds and even get some to write orders and comments in his chart. There are many howls and giggles. Bigfoot is a hit. For me, it is the best part of this Christmas.

  I am beginning to feel flashes of being a thirteen-year-old boy. I have a color television, complete with a remote control, neither of which we have at home. Better yet, no one tells me I c
an’t watch late-night TV. Who would dare? Sleep does not come easy when one is in bed every hour of every day. So I stay up late, very late. This becomes a problem. Often, I do not wake up for the doctors’ early-morning rounds. For a while I fool them, as I have developed the habit of sleeping with my eyes open. This is not great for the eyes, but it makes for more morning sleep. Unfortunately, the doctors catch on, and I am denied the television flipper after 11 p.m. For a thirteen-year-old, this feels like being held hostage.

  Why don’t they understand how hard the nights are? Alone, in the dark, and unable to sleep is when my new reality envelops me. I do anything I can to avoid it. My brother gives me a red-lighted, hand-controlled electronic football game, and I play it well into the night. Sometimes a night nurse named Ray plays it with me. Those nights are less painful. Soon, I will be denied access to this, too. Apparently they think I need more sleep—as if it were that easy.

  My friend Roger has given me a tape recorder. The idea is that we can send tapes back and forth. He sends me a tape of him talking while he puts on his equipment for a hockey game. His life is so different from mine. I never get focused enough to send one back. But the tape recorder serves a different purpose for me. My brother tapes a cassette with Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty and Jerry Rafferty’s City to City on it. I feel grown up, sharing music with my brother. I identify with the title track of the first album in the dramatic way that only a thirteen-year-old can. It is exactly how I feel. I am running on empty, and I am old enough to know. The second album was my sister’s favorite when she died. She had played “Baker Street,” the album’s best track, many times, helping me feel how the lone, dreamy saxophone carries the song. I listen to this tape over and over as I silently and unconsciously grieve in the institutional darkness.