Waking

by Matthew Sanford

  “See, that wasn’t so bad. The infected screw is already out,” he says with feigned cheerfulness. I focus my gaze on the lights overhead. I reach with inner-intent and pull and merge and pull and merge. Soon it starts: the bleeding, the tearing, the sound, the pressure, the cracking, and then there is nothing but the lights. I am the lights. I see nothing. I am pushed outward and wait for space enough to return.

  I vaguely hear the words “All done.” I can see in front of me again. The doctor is holding my arm; his voice attempts to soothe. I am ready for him to leave. My mom returns expecting pieces, but there are none. There is only an unclenching jaw and an angry silence. I am powering down and getting sleepy.

  I awaken to my mom’s steadfast presence. Her imploring, heartbroken eyes ask, “Are you all right?” My first words, “I made it, Mom. I’m okay.”

  The old screw site is left open to heal. It doesn’t. Later that evening, I feel around the wound. It stings. I feel remnants of dried blood, my hair feels caked, but there is also something else. Something is sticking out. I ask my mom for a hand mirror. I see what looks like a miniature canine erection—something red and angry—poking out of the side of my head. Neither my mom nor the nurses know what to make of it. The resident on call eventually comes. He is jovial and honest and says, “I’ve never seen anything like this. Most likely, this is the sac that surrounds your brain. It looks inflamed and is probably infected, causing it to seep out.” He practices a commonsense remedy. He puts Vaseline over the site and wraps my head tightly with gauze. “Hopefully, this will push it back in.” He tells me to have my regular doctors check it in the morning.

  I am reminded of a Sven and Ollie joke my brother once told me. Sven falls asleep in the outhouse. Meanwhile, Ollie kills and guts a deer, then leaves the innards next to his unsuspecting brother. Sven finally returns to the house, visibly upset. He tells Ollie, “It was horrible; I woke up and found that I had plumb vomited out my innards. But with a little help from God and a stick, I was able to put them back in.”

  Not my intestines, but my brains leaking out the side of my head. Not God and a stick, but petroleum jelly and cloth. Once I get past the horror, a dark humor takes hold, a mixture of anger, submission, and absurdity. I can only silently observe the strange catastrophe that has become my body.

  7

  Gin and Tonics

  There is another story, one I haven’t been telling. Since the accident, my stomach, my intestines, my pancreas, almost everything in my digestive system has fallen completely silent, not a rumble, not a groan, not even a yawn. I cannot digest anything and have not eaten a morsel of food in nearly two months.

  Each day the stethoscope moves under my cast, and each day the doctors say nothing. Although I am only marginally aware of the threat—back in 1979, people could not live indefinitely when being fed only through IVs—my mother and the attending doctor are very aware of it. Amazingly, Dr. Telander and my mom went to high school together. He is a pediatric internal medicine specialist. His belief is that my pancreas has been injured, which, in turn, has thrown everything else off-line. For sure, my pancreas had been recklessly pouring digestive juices in many places where it shouldn’t. Recently that subsided, and they removed the tube running through my nose and down to my stomach. But still my body cannot take in food, not without causing irreparable harm.

  I just assume that I will eat again; that’s what living people do. Unknown to me, though, as my mom walks from her motel to my bedside, she prays for rumblings in my stomach, for the beginnings of movement. For without them, I will die. One day I ask Dr. Telander what he is doing to help me eat again. He says there is nothing he can do. The body is its own best healer, and we must give my digestive system time.

  I am obsessed with food. I miss the smell of my mom’s baking bread, the taste of my birthday dinner roast beef, and the water burst in one of my grandma’s homegrown tomatoes. Most of all, I miss the colors—eating colors, tasting colors, colors with nourishing dimension. This is to say nothing of what surrounds the act of eating. The shape of plates, the clanking of silverware, ice clinking from water pitcher to glass, the gathering of people, contact and love, all topped with food. People are at their best when they eat together. I miss it.

  My longing is made worse by television. Bombarded by images of food every fifteen minutes, I start channel surfing for food commercials, especially for the perfect red of a diced tomato. The tomatoes in fast-food commercials are killer. Did I mention tomatoes? Did I mention the dirt in my grandma’s immense garden, the sweat around the neck of her farm dress, the smell of noon dinner tucked within the dwarfing aroma of exposed earth? Did I mention what it was like to visit my grandparents’ farm, the importance of lemonade on a hot summer day, the feeling of plucking a tomato off a ripening vine?

  I am flooded by fantasies of food, by memories, the befores and afters, not even the actual meals. One second I am watching a perfectly made Big Mac, a price flashing yellow beneath the tempting treat. I don’t need the cost; I need the burger. The next instant I am with my family. We are in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, the Lower Forty-Eight’s last bastion of wilderness, thankfully preserved in northern Minnesota. We are camping on an island; the sun is setting, the temperature dropping. Dessert is being made—dehydrated blueberry cobbler—just add boiling water and stir. I hear the methodical rubbing of tin spoon against tin bowl. I watch as liquid solidifies into goo. My mom opens the packet of crushed graham crackers, pours it on top, and pains me with the instruction that I must wait for it to cool. This will be the best dessert I have ever had. Suddenly, a car salesman is yelling at me, his cheap suit and bad hair shocking me back into my hospital bed. I still haven’t eaten.

  I become fixated on the restaurants surrounding the hospital. My visitors are always going out to dinner. It gets my mom away from the hospital and into a version of normal time. When they return—my mom, my brother, or whomever—I must know what they’ve eaten. Often I don’t get past the first course. My mind has become stuck on the reddish orange, honeyed sweetness of Best Western salad dressing, especially when combined with the crisp, watery crunch of iceberg lettuce. I study faces, look for ever-so-slight smudges of grease, for toothpicks, for anything. I like it when a visitor has a beard. Sometimes, if I am lucky, there is a morsel left in a tuft of hair. I begin to guess what people have eaten by their expressions, by how they hold their bodies. Slow movements, touches of the belly, and unexpected exhales almost certainly mean a big piece of beef; self-righteous smiles usually imply some sort of salad; garlic belches become synonymous with pasta. My favorite restaurant is Michael’s, a fancy steakhouse. I like how it smells on my people.

  I have regrets. Some are easy to understand. I should have had another helping of stuffing. I should have been more thankful for my mom’s meatloaf or for the sparse school lunches she made me—a cheese sandwich and a pear, there’s nothing wrong with that. Oh, chocolate milk; I spend a lot of time thinking about stirring Nestle’s Quick into a cold glass of Bridgeman’s skim milk. More, I should have had more.

  Other regrets are mysterious. I am caddying for my dad. The day is hot and I am starving. The ninth-hole concession stand sells hot dogs. I want two, but I am saving for a new putter. I buy an orange pop, one dog, and opt not to add any relish. No relish! What was I thinking? For some reason, I return to this memory over and over. Maybe it was the texture of the day, how the sun hit my face, or the way the strap of my father’s golf bag cut into my shoulder … who knows what holds memory. As I lie here, all I know is that eating just one unrelished hot dog was a huge mistake.

  My trauma-induced fast transforms my body from a healthy, athletic five foot six and 119 pounds to a taut, sunken shell of a boy weighing all of 80 pounds. Then one day—just like that—the rumblings in my stomach return. A medical student makes the discovery. He is bearded, with dark olive skin and thick glasses. His eyes light up; he pulls the stethoscope out of his ears and turns quickly to get the doctor. The rum
bling is confirmed. My digestion has turned itself back on, from silence into function. My God, this means food. “When can I eat? I already know what I’m having!” “Not so fast,” they say. “You need to start slow. It’s clear liquids for you.”

  Bent straws, bent straws, and more bent straws. This is not eating. Clear liquids mean chicken broth, beef broth, and an assortment of Jell-O. I know that I should be happy, that I need to be patient. But this is not a hot dog with extra relish, ketchup, and mustard. That’s what I’m having by the way—that long-lost hot dog from summers past. I will have to wait more than a week.

  When it finally arrives, it is freezer-burned and without relish. It does not connect me to my previous life. As I set aside the promise of this hot dog on my hospital tray, I ache with the feeling that the path ahead of me will be unfamiliar, that I will be entering a very different world.

  I have an experience that I cannot shake, a hallucination really. Every so often, I ask my mom for a hand mirror to survey how I look. I stare at the silver halo around my head, at the metal screws that puncture my temples. The surrounding skin falls inward like water circling a drain. The oddity of it all. Screws don’t belong in someone’s head, nor was my skull ever intended to provide backing for hardware. And yet, there it is.

  My hair grows longer and longer. It’s darker and very greasy, leaving marks on the pillow. My cheekbones stick out as the imposed famine has sucked my face inward. Dark rings sink beneath my eyes. I am painfully pale. My first acne shows on my forehead and new facial hair is threatening to connect my eyebrows. In the mirror, I see a boy who is beginning puberty—I do not recognize him. The decay that I am perceiving accelerates, moving past life and into a death mask. My bushy eyebrows are a straight line across my forehead, no shape to my face, just a pale skull and hair … my skin a colorless disappearing. I shudder with the feeling that I am seeing into my death. Just as quickly, the face I know returns and the apparition vanishes.

  The time has come to move from the plastic surgery ward to the rehab floor. The descent is only from the third floor to the ground level, and I can even keep the same bed. But to me, it feels like I am going to another planet. I am leaving the security of my first home and moving to another. I feel like a baby bird falling from its nest. Everything about this new place feels different—the smell, the color of the lights, the shape of my room, everything. I lose my favorite nurses—Diane, Deloris, and Ray. I also lose Dr. McMeken, the strength behind his eyes, and the charming freshness of his smile. My new lead doctor is from Iceland. I can hardly understand him because of his accent; the words roll off his tongue at unusual pitches. He offers me no stories of an exotic land. Rightly or wrongly, the idea of Iceland brings me only images of desolate tundra. Unlike Australia, it does nothing to light my imagination. I feel both betrayed and strangely afraid.

  I am introduced to my new lifelong companion: a wheelchair. The first one I sit in is burnt orange and has a back that is taller than my head. I need something to lean against because my neck can barely support weight. The chair is reclined to a forty-five-degree angle because if I sit up any more than that, I will faint. I am far too weak to push my own chair, but if I hold the IV stand, my mom can push me up and down the hallway. My endurance for sitting up is limited, so my stays in the chair are short, maybe fifteen minutes.

  I was expecting more. I thought sitting up in a wheelchair would feel like a giant leap forward, that I would feel more like a person and less like a broken body. But the wheelchair does not bring reprieve. Instead, I feel unnatural and awkward, like a flustered guest. The experience is painfully unsettling.

  I am told of a break room down the hall from my new room. It has a television that is equipped with video games. This catches my attention. I am excited at the prospect. My mom, however, is not much for video games. Rather than play with me, she sits and sketches in her notebook. Playing these games by myself is lonely and exposes them as pointless. Staring into a TV screen and pressing a button to shoot missiles at images of airplanes only heightens my feelings of emptiness and disconnection.

  This is the silence rushing forward, the price of befriending it. While it has protected me, the silence has also put a distance between my actions and finding joy in things. I used to love playing video games. My neighbor had the first-generation home video game called Pong—we played it for hours at a time. But while playing these new games in the hospital, I feel nothing. I am shaken by the sense of not recognizing myself, like suddenly feeling lost in a familiar place. I want to say that the world has changed and it is to blame, but I know better. I have lost something, something invisible. I stop playing video games.

  This is a moment familiar to most of us, a time when life suddenly becomes different, like the day when getting kissed by a parent is no longer comfortable or skipping no longer feels cool. In such examples, childhood innocence is discarded—for example, the act of skipping—so that something else can be embraced; that is, wanting to be a “bigger” kid.

  When I stopped playing video games, something happened, something more akin to growing old. I had nothing with which to replace video games. Rather, I simply accepted the feeling of disconnection, of not feeling what I used to feel. I flatly accepted this loss of myself and stepped more deeply into the silent place between mind and body. The effect was deadening. This is an instance where the absence of a healing story is itself a healing story, although not a very good one. The silence was left to fester. The same thing occurs if we fail to stay present as we move into old age.

  For the last few weeks, my brother has been talking to me, trying to convince me of something. “Matt, you’ve got to beat this thing,” he whispers in quiet moments. “You have to believe you can beat the odds, that you will walk again.” I try to believe him.

  I cannot imagine what he feels when he is with me. We have spent so much time wrestling, playing, and imagining together. I have been working to follow in his footsteps for years, especially athletically. I have gotten a jump start on every sport possible. I have spent my childhood competing with older kids, honing my skills as he discovers them. I am a gifted athlete, and he has forged a clear path. Now he looks at me and struggles with acceptance—my body will never be the same.

  One day I announce to Dr. Quinlan that I most definitely will walk again. The assertion is met with a frowning silence. Eventually, she admits that anything is possible, but that the odds are better that we will get hit by a meteor. She encourages me not to think about my condition in these terms.

  This conversation concerns my doctors. They begin worrying that I might not be “accepting my situation,” that I might be “harboring false hopes.” In response, they keep reiterating the fact that my spinal cord has been severed, that I should plan on never walking again, and that I will experience no sensation below the level of my injury.

  The last part confuses me, however. At first, when I tried to feel within my paralyzed body, I felt nothing. In fact, the acute absence of any sensation within my perception was alarming. But now, as I listen more carefully, as my condition improves enough for me to do so, I do feel something. It’s not like normal sensation, like what I feel in my arms, for instance. But all the same, it is noticeable: tingles, surges, sometimes even mild burning. I tell the doctors. They grimace, worried that I will continue with what they perceive as denial. They prepare a powerful and pivotal healing story, one that aims to rid me of any false hope.

  “Matt, what you are experiencing are phantom feelings,” Dr. Quinlan explains. “You know, like ghosts or spooks. They’re not real.”

  “Where do they come from then?” I ask.

  “We don’t know exactly. The best guess is that they are memory. Your mind remembers feeling your legs and continues to project their presence, even when they’re not there.” Her finger pushes her glasses securely back on her nose.

  “Are you sure? They seem to be there even when I’m not thinking about them.”

  “Phantom feelings are wide
ly reported by people who suffer an amputation. Lying in bed, they swear they still have two legs and are horrified to discover otherwise. The feelings can continue for quite a while. Some people even report them as downright pain-ful. They are more of an annoyance than anything else. Luckily, as the mind forgets, these imagined sensations will fade.”

  “So I’m feeling what an amputee feels?”

  “Yes.”

  Not the best healing story. Comparing my paralyzed legs to amputated ones only heightens my sense that they have become pointless. The silence within my perception grows deeper. Something in me riles with defensive pain. It’s not easy to be told that what you are feeling isn’t real. The healing story continues the next day.

  “Dr. Quinlan, how do you know that what I’m feeling are phantom feelings?”

  “Trust me, I know.”

  “How?”

  “Experience. I just don’t want you to think they mean anything … that they might be the beginning of walking again. Because they aren’t. They aren’t real.” I feel pressed and getting angry.

  “How do you know?” I snap.

  “Okay, let’s back up. Would you like to speak to a neurologist? Tell him about these feelings and then get examined?”

  “Thank you, I would like that.” Somehow, I feel vindicated.

  Cometh the hammer. Not one but two neurologists enter my room. They look young, so they must be residents. I tell my story. They listen patiently and say, “Well, let’s check it out.” They have come prepared. A black case appears. Its contents include various needles, rubber mallets, and small hammers, some with rollers, some with spikes. “We use these things to test sensation. Don’t worry, none of this will hurt.” First, they test my arms. They poke my finger with a needle, run the roller hammer over my upper arm, show me the reflex in my elbow. Next they move to my feet and repeat the tests. “Are you feeling any of those sensations, any changes?” they ask. I am quiet. “How about this?” I say nothing. “I just stuck your toe hard enough to make it bleed and you didn’t feel anything?” Again, silence. “Do you want us to show you again?” I am feeling sick and fighting back tears of humiliation. “See, whatever you are feeling is not connected to anything. The sensations are not real. They exist only in your head. We’re sorry.” These doctors are setting my reality picture. They seal the healing story with shame. Now I am an object of pity. They leave. Stupid boy, what were you thinking?