As I am loaded into the ambulance, I hear my mom’s voice. She has just returned home from a long lunch. I cannot see her because my gaze is locked straight up into the blue sky again. I am braced and taped and fastened and flattened onto a wooden board. My head is moving nowhere. I can feel my mom and brother enveloped by silence. Once again, they stand and watch as people frantically work over my body. We are headed down another tunnel.
I wait alone in the emergency room. The doctors want to eliminate any temptation to turn my head, even if it is to connect eyes with a loved one. I am waiting for the consulting neurologist to weigh in on my case. Dr. Freeman is the father of a friend whom I played both baseball and basketball with. Now, the direction of my life will hinge on his diagnosis. Dr. Van Pufflen has already confirmed that I did, in fact, break my neck. The fracture is at the bottom, between the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae. He does not want to speculate whether the damage will be permanent, hence Dr. Freeman’s involvement. That my upper body feels like it is on fire is a good sign. Beyond that, he says little. These couple of hours spent waiting are the longest of my life.
I keep trying to move my arms. It’s like having a fat lip: Is it really swollen? I’d better check; it might be different this time. I keep trying to move, keep telling myself that this can’t be. Two spinal cord injuries in less than a year—what are the odds? Nobody’s luck is this bad. I wait, terrified, and temporarily ward off my fear with incredulity. Suddenly, one of my arms responds, not much, but enough to notice. This is not miraculous; this is the world snapping back into the realm of the conceivable. I have tears, silent ones, because I am grateful that my life has some sense of proportion. There is only so much I can take.
The movement in my arms is increasing, but it is still partial. I can just barely move them; their new weight exceeds anything I have encountered. Only threads of muscle fibers are engaging against gravity, against bone, a shrill shrieking at best. The cost is excruciating, molten beads fired haphazardly to their destination. But at least the pain proves my ownership. By the time Dr. Freeman enters my picture, I am gaining confidence. Complete and utter disaster has been averted.
“Matt, you must have a star by your name,” Dr. Freeman chirps in amazement. He is in the forefront; Dr. Van Pufflen waits behind, and my family is beyond him. “I’m not quite sure how, but the fracture at C7 did not severely impact your spinal cord. It’s hard to see why, but, in my opinion, the damage you have sustained should not be permanent. Over time, there should be a full recovery.” I can feel the relief wash through my mother and brother. They too have learned to trust nothing.
“How did this happen? I barely fell,” I ask. Dr. Van Pufflen steps forward on cue.
“We think the rods in your back are the culprits. The fracture is just beyond the top of the rods, the first unsupported point. We think when you fell, the impact had nowhere to go. Anyone else’s neck would have given some, simply flexed. Yours couldn’t. So the full force of impact was delivered to the point of fracture.”
“What’s to stop this from happening again?” my mom interjects.
“Quite frankly, not falling like that again.” This is not what I want to hear. It’s bad enough that I have horrible balance, that a stiff breeze feels like enough to spill me out of my chair. Now I am fragile in a way that was beyond my imagination a few hours ago. The ground never looked so scary. I am one awkward fall from quadriplegia. How does one absorb such a feeling? Already, I am recoiling from my body, letting a new reality set in. My body can break from being tickled. What else do I need to know? “But remember,” Dr. Freeman adds, “you’ve dodged a bullet. You’re a lucky young man.”
Relatively lucky.
Ten days later I am still in the hospital, but some movement has returned. I can push a wheelchair for short distances. It is not my wheelchair, because my unresponsive fingers cannot grab the rims. Instead, I am using a hospital loaner again. Rubber knobs stick out from the rims and allow the heel of my hands to push. I have lost virtually all of my strength—just holding my arms up is a strain. The more time my recovery takes, the more strength will be lost. I will be starting over. Physical therapy will begin again and weight lifting will begin again, all accompanied by burning pinpricks. When will this be over? I am ready to cash it in.
Right before Thanksgiving, I turn to my mom and try to make a joke.
“I guess it looks like we’ll spend another Christmas in the hospital. Two in a row,” I say, my head shaking with a faint, deadened smile. She knows what this means, that I am ready to give up. More than that, she knows that I am ready not to care.
A mother, when saving her child, is fierce, focused, and ready for action. She walks out of the room and calls a meeting with the staff. Her message is clear. “Start telling Matt he will be going home soon, that he will not be staying in the hospital much longer.” My mother is picking up the pieces once again, but this time not aimlessly, like at the scene of the car accident. Now, she is determined not to lose either of her sons.
My brother is also struggling. He lives with an incredible juxtaposition. He walks and I wheel. And now, he has been party to a horrific event, one that threatens to dissolve his younger brother. There is no blame, there is only what happened. He did not break my neck—it broke; the rods broke it. But his loving heart is shadowed by a potentially consuming guilt. He needs me to be all right. My mother is fighting for both of her sons.
Within a week, I am home. In another week, I am laboring to push myself down the halls at school, able to hold a pencil and even return to my typing class. (I was given a “mercy” B, with extenuating circumstances being cited.) I will fully recover over a period of five months. Physical therapy continues through the winter and into the first hints of spring. The main impact of this injury is not physical, however. I am pushed farther out of my body. Within my flesh, I carry metal objects that threaten me at every curb, during any loss of balance, during any collision with the floor. Being playful with my body is out, so is tickling, so is the relationship I know best with my brother. I move forward into my relatively lucky life with a deep mistrust of my body and an inward presence that continues to diminish.
11
Above the Chest
When Dr. Goff told me—in that final consultation when I first left the hospital—that if I was diligent, I could expect a relatively normal life, I felt a little more dead. And yet a relatively normal life is exactly what I set out to prove that I had. The years between ages fourteen and twenty-five, between breaking my neck and beginning yoga, were an attempt to live a normal life despite the traumatic rupture I experienced between my mind and body. For a long time, I generally succeeded.
As mentioned, I returned to school and became a leader in my class. I reestablished myself as a virtually straight-A student. In senior high school, I was treasurer of the Student Forum not once, but twice. Upon graduation, I won a local topflight scholarship to the college of my choice, one that paid me $3,600 a year for four years. I wore crewneck sweaters and boat shoes, and worked to succeed in the eyes of those around me. I imagined—along with everyone else—that I would become an attorney like my father, maybe even run for public office. On the outside, I strove to become the all-American product of my predominately white, Midwestern community.
I also had a steady stream of girlfriends. Looking back now, it was probably too steady. I was decent-looking enough, but the wheelchair, the disability—I was afraid it might keep me from experiencing intimacy with a woman. I went out of my way to prove otherwise. I sought to make my connections with girls more mature, more meaningful. I listened, I cared, I shared, and I laughed more deeply than most teenagers. I was selective, intuitively looking for depth, along with good looks, in potential girlfriends. When all was said and done, I pursued only one girl who was not ready to date a guy in a wheelchair. The downside of my approach was that I landed myself in some relatively serious relationships for a kid my age. Consequently, I think I missed some of the fu
n of high school.
I also became sexually active during this time—it was the last great uncertainty of paraplegia, or at least it seemed so to me. I can’t say it was great sex, but few can as a teenager. It was a bit clumsy and took a lot of communication with my partner about how things were different for me. It’s hard for anyone to talk about sex, let alone kids at that age. But this forced communication also put my sexuality on novel footing. Sex for me was not a lusty, backseat experience. It had to be planned, thought about, and discussed. Even in these first few experiences, I was beginning to learn something that I have carried with me for a lifetime. Sexual expression is a shared exploration of intimacy and bodies. One consequence of my spinal cord injury has been a de-emphasizing of the central role played by sexual intercourse. While I am capable of it and even enjoy it, there is so much more to sexual intimacy than an explosion of physical sensation between the legs. I doubt that I would have known this as deeply had I not been a paraplegic.
After spending my first year of college in Duluth, I chose to follow in my parents’ and my brother’s footsteps to the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. Never mind that the winters in Minnesota have always been brutal, that the U of M has one of the biggest campuses in the country, and that getting from class to class would take extraordinary effort. These considerations did not matter. I unconsciously wanted to prove my relatively normal life. My measuring stick—the life I would have had.
Something didn’t feel right, though. While the promise of a relatively normal life did not particularly inspire me, the issue went deeper than that. My life thus far had been anything but normal. Something had happened to me—not just the accident, not just the loss of my father and sister or my ensuing paralysis—something else had happened too. I felt like I had been left with a secret, an insight about living and dying. I could not articulate what it was, but I did have a nagging sense of what it was not.
It was not to simply live a relatively normal life. I felt far too weighty, too heavy, like there was a purpose to what I had experienced. My inward silence had also driven a wedge between my “relatively normal” achievements and my sense of accomplishment, not unlike when I stopped playing video games in the hospital. I felt hollow in what I was doing, not prideful or joyous. It would take years for me to realize that the silence itself was the insight I was sensing, that it held the key to what I was seeking.
In the meantime, I felt compelled to move my life in a different direction. In retrospect, I know now that the silence I carried within me was also coming unglued. Over the next five years or so, my perception became increasingly negative. I became disillusioned with the world, our country, our choices. Eventually, this negativity made it impossible for me not to seek a different path—after all, I was born with a smile on my face. Paradoxically, this difficult period also marked the beginning of my efforts to heal the dislocation between my mind and my body.
My twentieth year proved to be an important one. The change of direction in my life began with a powerful dream. I was a sophomore at the U of M. I lived with four other guys and was having a ball. Although we took studying seriously, we also didn’t miss any opportunity to be young and stupid. It was winter quarter. I was generally exhausted from trudging day after day around a snow-laden campus.
During a much-needed afternoon nap, I had this startling dream. I am sitting at my family’s dining room table. I am on one side and a whole slew of people are on the other. My sister is sitting directly across from me; everyone else is standing. I feel the heart-lifting warmth of a family get-together. Laura and I are chatting underneath the party banter. I can feel the smooth depth of her intonation, as if she is whispering in my ear. I feel deeply contented. Suddenly, I notice that the people standing behind her are my relatives. But more than that, they are my dead relatives—both of my grandfathers, my maternal grandmother, and others I can feel but do not know. They are all smiling at me. Once I realize that they are dead, their faces begin to dissolve, their bodies transform into a transparent presence. Laura maintains her form the longest. She floats across the table and gives me a wonderful hug. I can feel her—her smell, her loving kindness against my chest. As she releases me, I feel her whisper, “I’ll see you in four years.” I am so thankful. I have missed her terribly.
I wake up feeling that I have received a precious gift. I can literally feel the imprint of my sister against my chest. Who knows what ghosts are? Who knows what dreams are? I had just touched my sister in what felt like three dimensions. I am not doubting what happened; the experience is mine. But then, out of nowhere, I am enveloped by fear. Wait a minute, what did she mean by four years? Possibly she meant that she would return, that we would touch again. But what if she meant I would be joining her, joining my dead relatives? I become still. This late afternoon suddenly feels different, the things in my room—my desk, my discarded clothes, my wheelchair parked next to my bed—become a muted kind of new. Feeling the possibility of my own death, I feel survival take hold.
After much pining, I decide on an interpretation, a healing story. Laura would never burden me with the awareness of my own death. But she would warn me of an impending choice. I end up deciding that both of my initial reactions are potentially true. In four years, she will either take me with her or we will share another visit. I feel my survival is on the line and I need to choose—am I to move toward living or let myself continue to dwindle away? At twenty, I did not know how to react to such a thing, how to imagine that a dream can provide a pivotal message. But I knew that I had to do something.
At the end of this winter quarter, I switched my major from history—a clear-cut path toward law school—to philosophy. This signified more than a change of subjects. It was evidence of my growing belief that I had an insight to share, something that mattered. I thought I could explore what I was feeling through the study of philosophy.
Switching majors was also an acknowledgment that I didn’t have enough answers, that I needed to start asking more questions. This went directly against the underpinnings of my male, relatively normal life. Up until that point, I knew that I had much to learn, but I still possessed an underlying confidence that I knew how the world worked and what it needed. By opening myself to a wider spectrum of thoughts, to even questioning the basic components of reality, I upended that confidence and altered the course of my life.
My interest in philosophy, both in undergraduate and graduate studies, focused on the mind-body problem and issues related to consciousness. Without knowing it, I was beginning the process of reconnecting to my body. But at this point, I still believed what the doctors had told me at age thirteen—that there was no way to reconnect to my paralyzed body short of a regenerated spinal cord. This meant that to access my paralyzed body in a more living, engaged way, I needed a paradigm shift. I had to literally change my relationship to the world. Without knowing exactly what I was doing and why, I took a shot-gun approach—I began to question almost everything I had ever been told in my entire life.
At the same time, however, the switch to philosophy went against the practical vigor of my upbringing. Earning a living and providing for a family is a mainstay of a relatively normal life. And quite frankly, a lifelong pursuit of philosophy did not bode well for reasonable income generation.
Luckily, this tension was lessened for me. A few years earlier, my family had brought a lawsuit against the state of Iowa for negligence concerning our accident. We successfully argued that the Department of Transportation had violated their own guidelines when building the slope of the embankment down which our car tumbled. They also had violated their own guidelines concerning when to sand Interstate 35, the road on which our family was driving. This second issue came down to an ill-advised decision by a sand-truck driver not to sand on the morning of November 26, 1978. He hit his snooze button and rolled over—beginning the innocent unfolding of an accident. The result was that not one, but three cars slid down that embankment within a span of twenty minut
es. Our family sustained the only serious injuries.
How my mom came to bring the lawsuit is a story in itself. My recollection is that one day, less than two years after the accident, I asked a simple question around our dinner table: “Why weren’t there guard rails?” We mused about this for a while, shrugged our shoulders, and went back to using our forks. A short time later, my mom had a dream or a vision or something. In it, she was speaking with my father. He told her to initiate a lawsuit and told her to hurry. Keyed into the “openness” left by trauma, she obliged and called my father’s law firm. With a last-minute scramble, we filed on the final day before the two-year statute of limitations ran out.
By seventeen years of age, I was awarded, through a settlement, a hefty sum of money. It was for the damage done to my body, to my life’s arc. My mother was compensated for the loss of her breadwinner husband, and she also received a minimal amount for the death of my sister. Apparently, because Laura was only twenty and did not have an established profession, there was no basis upon which to assess her value. My brother was not a claimant in the suit. Legally, the courts do not recognize damages that cannot be measured, ones that travel strictly on the inside. He was again asked to stand on his own.
At the time, the money changed virtually nothing for me. I was firmly planted on my path of a relatively normal life. I invested the money, spending only what I needed to spend, for example, paying for costs associated with college. I kept the rest in a rainy-day fund—what if I need a drastic medical procedure, what if there is a miracle cure for spinal cord injuries? The money went into a mental compartment labeled “in case of the unthinkable.”
At twenty, I began to think differently, though. It dawned on me that there was enough money that, if I maintained a modest standard of living, I could live off of my investments. This afforded me the luxury of asking a basic, life-guiding question: How can I give back to the world? My initial answer was to start thinking—through the study of philosophy—about a world that felt increasingly out of joint, a world that was missing something essential. Of course, what was really missing was my body, but worrying about the world was safer.
Waking Page 12
