My father felt a different kind of pain than I did in the ICU. He hated himself for not having enough strength to stand up and voice his discontent about my decision to have surgery. He damned my mother for not only also supporting my choice, but also encouraging me to go after my independence at any cost. Mom understood what I yearned for, but Dad never saw a need for it. In his mind, no matter how old I got, he would simply take care of his little girl for as long as she needed. I think his pain, ultimately, was worse than my own.
I felt my eyelids get heavy again and slowly close, almost without my consent. Then, like magic, all the sensations that had been whirling around in my body gently floated away. My pain lifted and I sank deeper into the mattress below. It was as if I was drowning under heavy, crashing waves, but I finally had relief from the stifling pain, and that was all that mattered. Everything went weightless, including my mind.
The methadone had finally started to work.
A few hazy, foggy days later, a physical therapist arrived at my hospital bed. Dr. Mortimer had sent her. I was told I had to stand for the first time since my bones had been surgically broken. She insisted I move my legs to prevent blood clots and to get the circulation flowing again after remaining immobile for so long.
I begged for more time but was quickly denied.
Gently but purposefully, the therapist swung my metal-clad legs around to the side of my bed and hoisted me to my feet. My body insisted that everyone hear how badly it hurt.
More rabid animal than teenage girl, I screamed, jerked, shook, and cried. The sounds caused my mom to well up with tears and the assistant nurse gripped my mom’s hand tightly, if not to support my mother so much as herself. My cries flooded the room and reached out into the hallway.
I felt like an anchor being thrown off a ship: heavy, paralyzed by my own weight, and unable to change a damn thing about it. The sweat developing on my feet did nothing to create stability for my body on the cold floor. It felt much harder under my feet than I ever remembered it feeling before.
Someone thrust a walker in front of me and the assistant nurse struggled to fit my legs with their pins between its metal bars. The walker clicked and clanged against the black half-moons fastened around my shins. I felt every vibration. I was unable to stand without literally hanging on to the therapist, and I couldn’t adjust my posture from an involuntary slump. Just standing upright was more difficult and more painful than I ever could have imagined.
The skin around the wires in my feet ripped. It made my spine flex, my pupils dilate. Even the distinct, sharp feeling of adrenaline pulsing through my body didn’t seem to help me. All I could do was stand and endure it.
“Okay, okay! I did it! Let me back on the bed! Get me back on the bed!” I screamed.
“One more minute. Try to breathe for one minute, Tiffanie. You can do this!” the therapist said.
It seemed far too easy for her to say as she held tightly on to me so I wouldn’t fall forward. She was trained to be loud and demanding in times like these— so expertly unmoved by agony.
“I did it already! God, please! I did it already!” After days of adjusting to the pain of staying still, I had to bear the far more excruciating pain of movement and learning how to function all over again.
“Breathe, Tiff! Breathe! You have to breathe before we can lift you back on the bed . . .”
“Please! Please! Please!” I screamed over and over.
“Breathe!”
“C’mon, Tiff, you can do this!” my mom chimed in.
“If you can scream, you can breathe!” the therapist shouted over me.
“I’m breathing, damn it!” I cried. Sounds exited my mouth that I never knew I could make. My chest heaved violently up and down, unable to keep up with the emotions inside me. The pain was excruciating but all I could think about was completing the task so that the torture would stop. Quitting wasn’t an option.
My eyes darted at everyone in the room. No one moved. They waited, gripping one another for support. They braced themselves for the possibility that I was going to crack and maybe even admit that I had made a horrible mistake having this surgery.
This was my first battle, not only to prove that I made the right decision to undergo bone-lengthening again, but to also prove I could take responsibility for my actions.
I decided to fight.
I took a deep breath and pictured an imaginary figure standing before me. I stared at that little girl, barely four feet tall, sitting on an egg crate in front of a room full of students, being forced to hear all the things that made her different.
I didn’t blink. I stopped screaming. I just kept staring at that little girl I conjured in front of me. She was everything I hated. She was my enemy. Despite the pain thrashing inside my body, I released the hardest breath of my life.
A second later, the nursing assistant and the therapist lifted me quickly back on the hospital bed. They smiled with relief and covered me with a blanket. I had won.
I sat trembling, trying to catch my breath, staring at my legs. I needed a moment by myself. Mom followed everyone out of the room and stopped in the hallway. She thought she was out of earshot, but I could hear her sobbing and speaking quietly with one of the nurses. She didn’t want me to see her, my pillar of strength, collapse.
Slowly, I pulled the blanket aside and gawked at the pins sticking out of my skin. I envisioned how they must look fastened down into my bones. Underneath all the muscles and nerves, I imagined them looking very raw.
What would everything look like when all the pins, nails, and wires were removed? What scars would they leave? How would those marks be different from those that all my other surgeries left behind?
Some of the scars would overlap, I thought to myself. Some would be deep and rooted, while others would just be pink knots on the surface. They would be engraved, crescent-shaped reminders telling a tale of pain, determination, and happiness. My battle wounds— complex markings more original and intricate than any tattoo. Then, clearing her throat, Mom made her way back into the room. She approached the bed and took my hand in hers.
“You did good, Tiffie. You did so good.”
I felt I had done nothing special. I did what I was told to do.
“It took you a bit, but you got control. That’s what you have to do from now on, gain control.”
“I didn’t think I would have to feel anything like that in my life,” I told her.
“You have a new life now. This is what you have to feel in your new life.”
I said nothing, just relieved that the pain was over, for now.
“You did good,” she repeated. “I knew you could do it. I’m proud of you.”
“Why?” I said softly, in between shaky breaths.
“Because nowhere during that godawful experience did you once say, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
Several days later, I came home from the hospital. The sweet, familiar smell of cinnamon buns filled the house. I spent the night on our hideously upholstered sectional pullout couch. It was convenient, low to the ground, and I could watch TV with my family (or even all night if I wanted to). Mom stacked mountains of pillows under my legs to ease the pain.
Just like when I had pins in as a kid, Mom sat beside me with two plates in her hand. I picked at my food while she made quick work of hers. I’d left my taste buds somewhere in the hospital, sedated and unresponsive. With my mom by my side, I filled my days attempting then perfecting bed transfers, moving from the couch to a reclining blue chair. I watched National Geographic tornado specials on VHS, but the drugs never let me get through them in their entirety. I was constantly in limbo between sleep and reality. I worked on developing an appetite after all those days in the hospital and took in my surroundings at home as best I could. Despite the sweet smell of cinnamon sugar hanging in the air, my home felt strangely foreign, as if I had been gone for years.
My couch setup worked for a day or two, but eventually, my moderate level of comfort
deteriorated.
As I tried to drift off to sleep one of my first few nights back home, the autumn air blew in through our living room window and kept my forehead and face cool. The rest of my body felt like it was burning up. I tried so hard to sleep, but to no avail. Each time I moved, even the tiniest bit, my body worked up so much heat that the sheets stuck to my skin. My shoulders ached from the pressure of being pinned to the couch— now my bed— for hours on end.
It’s amazing how many noises you can hear at night when you’re struggling to sleep. Frogs and insects that never seem to make a peep in the daytime suddenly can’t shut up. To me the crickets were the worst. They seemed to grow louder and louder with each passing minute. What could they possibly have to drone on about all night? I felt like the Grinch: I was restless and angry from all the noise, noise, noise!
There was just as much of a racket inside my house as there was outside, anyway. The refrigerator rattled and then began to hum every six minutes. I timed it. And then there was this random scratching inside the walls, like something was trying to get in. Does anything ever sleep? I wondered. By eleven p.m., I was ready to drift off. But amid the cricket-refrigerator-house-settling chorus, one a.m. appeared on my clock before I knew it.
Then two a.m. came and went.
Three a.m. rolled by.
By five a.m., the crickets had finally started to grow quiet, but the sun was rising over the nearly bare trees. The light was somehow louder than all the noises combined. It wasn’t until six a.m. that I finally figured out why it was so incredibly difficult for me to fall asleep.
I couldn’t roll over.
I wanted desperately to turn on my side and pull my legs up under me as I’d done so casually over the past fifteen years. But thanks to the metal halos around my legs, I couldn’t comfortably snuggle under my sheets. I couldn’t throw one leg up over a pillow or turn and plop on my stomach with a foot dangling off the bed. Just finding a comfortable sleeping position was a luxury I had taken for granted.
I had no choice but to sleep on my back. Worse yet, I had to sleep like that every night for at least a year until my entire procedure was over. This was just another surprise included with the package of the surgery.
Welcome home, Tiff.
By seven a.m., I was desperate. My father’s alarm clock had just gone off and echoed throughout the entire house. He was beginning his day when I never had the opportunity to end mine. As he came down the stairs and into the living room, I noticed he was frowning. His eyes looked sad at the sight of what was before him.
Me.
“You’re still up?” he asked.
“No, no, I’m fine. I just heard the alarm clock.”
He saw right through me.
“Can I get you anything? Can I fix anything?”
“My waist is a little hot, but my feet are really cold,” I told him. They were always cold. It was a numb cold. And they were so swollen.
He walked toward me slowly. Then he folded the covers away from my upper body and grabbed a blanket that was tossed over the blue chair and placed it softly across my feet and legs.
“There. How’s that?”
I smiled at him in response.
Later that morning from somewhere upstairs, I heard my dad ask my mom, “What if . . . ?” again and again. No longer did he ask how things were. He became more concerned with how things were going to be.
“What if she came home too soon?” I heard him ask. They must have thought I was asleep and they gradually lost track of their volume, speaking louder and louder.
“She’s fine. Dr. Mortimer wouldn’t allow that,” Mom assured him.
“What if she wants a snack later on and we’re not home?”
“We’ll put some snacks on her table by her chair,” she said. “I already have that covered.”
“What if she needs to use the bathroom? Is she going to use the bedpan during the whole recovery process?”
Mom paused. She couldn’t answer that as simply and optimistically as she answered the others.
Dad repeated: “What if she has to use the bathroom, Robin?”
“She’ll walk.” Mom tried to hide her uncertainty.
“Walk?”
“She’s going to have to.”
“How the hell is she going to walk, Robin?”
“She’ll do it. People do it all the time.”
“Other people didn’t have her surgery.”
“She’s not the only one to have this operation, Gerry,” Mom said with a sigh. “Dr. Mortimer wants her to walk. It helps the lengthening process.”
“I didn’t hear him say that.”
“You didn’t hear him say that because you were too busy avoiding the idea. Now you hear me saying it. People break their legs, get pins and external fixators in, and they learn to function. They have to walk. She has to walk.”
My dad raised his voice. “Other people break a leg! She has both legs wrapped up in those things!”
“So?”
“So?”
I could tell my dad was stunned at the way Mom dismissed his worries. “So don’t you think you should have thought about all this before you jumped in the Jeep and went to the hospital?” he shouted.
“She did think about it.”
“Not enough!”
“Believe me, she thought about it plenty!”
“How is she going to function with them?” Dad snapped.
“How is she going to function without them?”
Their argument was like a tennis match, with each of my parents trying to score a point on the other. It sounded a lot like the ones I remembered from my childhood.
“The same way other people with disabilities go through life,” Dad yelled. “They have help! They have help without surgery.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want help!”
“She’ll take my help. She doesn’t need to reach pedals in a car. I’ll take her where she wants to go.”
My mom sighed and the conversation stopped momentarily. I craned my neck to hear them.
“It’s not just about a car,” Mom continued more softly. “It’s about independence.”
“I’ll help her.”
“And when you’re dead and gone? And when I’m dead and gone? What then, Gerry?”
My dad said nothing. There was more silence. Then I heard him stomp across the hardwood floor in the master bedroom.
“You’re not going to live forever, Gerry!” Mom called out after him.
“Yes, I am!” he shouted back. It was an absurd retort, but his frustration had gotten the best of him.
Dad rushed down the stairs and flung the front door wide open, and seconds later the sound of it slamming shut echoed throughout the house.
I watched out the front window as Dad picked up the leaf blower. Our lawn wasn’t cluttered with leaves. It wasn’t speckled with any remains of the season, in fact, because he had cleaned it all up the day before. Yet he still turned on the obnoxiously loud machine.
Dad moved it quickly side to side, aiming at anything in sight— pebbles, grass clippings, freshly dropped acorn tops. His frustration and anger blew everything in the yard away. But he couldn’t do anything about the pain. He gripped the leaf blower as if he were strangling the very life out of it, and I studied his face. He was beet red, with his bottom lip tucked under his upper lip.
I was no longer the only one in my family going through this surgery. I wasn’t the only one fighting.
I heard my mom coming down the stairs and I turned away from the window and faced her when she came into view. She didn’t have to say anything. I knew what needed to be done.
There would no longer be the comfort of a bedpan or the security of having Mom to help me make it to the toilet in time. There would no longer be yelling for help or waiting until the last minute to go. From that point on, there was just me, and the distance I had to travel to the bathroom.
Taking it easy was officially over.
“You should try
now,” she said as if reading my mind— or assuming I’d heard her fighting with my dad.
I glanced at my juice cup. There was just enough left to swallow a Percocet. The pain would be impossible to ignore. I hated taking pills, but they would be my modest level of protection against the wires barbed through my feet.
I didn’t know how long it was going to take me to reach the bathroom or what it would feel like to walk. I had taken just a few little steps from the bed to the recliner and that had been pure hell.
It’s hard to explain the difficulty of forcing yourself to do something that you know will cause you pain. Somehow I allowed myself to let Mom grab the metal rungs around my legs, lift them, and then place them over the side of the bed. She did it very slowly. Then she stepped away and waited. I struggled to balance just sitting on the edge of my bed. My back muscles were so weak from constantly lying down.
When I lowered myself to the floor, the pain in my legs was immediate. It was sharp, like a million jagged pieces of glass slicing through my muscles. I felt the blood rush down to my legs and swirl inside my feet. I felt like they were going to explode from the inside out. Part of me wanted them to explode so they wouldn’t be there anymore.
I closed my eyes and accepted the pain. I swallowed hard and took one quick glance at the distance to the hallway. It seemed like a mile away. Every bit of it was going to hurt.
I gripped the walker my mom handed me so tightly that my knuckles turned white. With one quick pull, I yanked myself up onto my feet. What I felt next made me wish for something I never expected.
I wanted to die.
I wanted the out-of-body experience people talk about on TV, the floating sensation. I wanted the weightlessness, because everything was too heavy to bear. I wanted out of my body. But I was stuck, yet again, inside of it. I had no choice but to force myself to accept that, too.
“Use your arms as much as you can,” Mom said.
She sounded awfully far away for being right at my side.
“Breathe, honey.”
I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.
My first steps were hardly steps at all. They were more like swings. I saw my mom tense up as I took my first one. She relaxed a little when she saw me do it successfully.
Dwarf: A Memoir Page 11
