52 Days
I have just spent fifty-two days in the hospital or rehab facility because I was virtually immobilized. Many quads out there will snicker at this predicament, since they are immobilized all of the time. But I’m just a puny T-10 para and have spent 27 years wheeling around in my zippy Ti-Lite manual, transferring at will, driving, and everything else that healthy T-10 paras do. Two years ago, the rotator cuff tendons in my left shoulder wasted away from wear and tear. I had a reverse shoulder replacement operation – replacing my ball and socket with a steel ball and plastic socket -- and I was on the way back to my previous state when something happened.
The damned thing broke.
The screws holding the prothesis to my scapula broke in half. I may have written this earlier but I’ve been “on vacation,” as mobsters like to call prison time, for so long that I forgot exactly how I got here. Oh, yeah, I had to have a second operation to fix the first one. This one is called a “customized glenoid implant,” involving a three-D printed shoulder unit made by some technical whizzes in Indiana and Fedexed to my surgeon in LA. It took months to arrive but made good chat material.
The new surgery took place in late January. Because this was a “revision” operation on the same shoulder, it demanded a much longer and more rigorous healing period. Fifty-two days, in fact, with my left arm in a sling attached to my torso that I couldn’t move or use in any way. Working with only one functional limb, I couldn’t roll over in bed, only transfer in and out of bed via a Hoyer Lift, only move in the chair by being pushed, and unable to even scratch my heinie.
Again, these are conditions that quads deal with daily, but after decades of living with my own paralysis, it was an emotional struggle as great or greater than my original injury. I did daily PT/OT stretches, but other than that, I did little else but talk, read, waste time surfing the web, and lie there. When I first became paralyzed, in 1996, I spent my first days in rehab learning something new, something that my life going forward depended on – sitting up on the side of the bed without falling over; perfecting the art of transferring from bed to chair without help; everything involved in going to the restroom; and all the lessons of avoiding problem wounds, part of the course I have flunked repeatedly.
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This kind of skill-mastering gave me an enormous psychological boost. Through some kind of molecule-shifting in my brain, I saw the seemingly unsolvable problems I had the day before I was paralyzed – a career going nowhere, a mortgage I couldn’t pay, a life without momentum – in a whole new light. They now seemed fixable. It took a few years, but, by gum, they all got fixed.
During this latest period of incarceration, I was learning nothing but the art of doing nothing, not in Zen way, but in the common meaning of just staying alive and crossing the days off on a calendar. It was, in a word, tough. It was monumentally boring, frustrating, infantilizing, and without my wonderful wife and kids and generous friends, a mindless slough.
That’s all in the past, thank goodness. I’m at home now, with steady home care in all areas and feeling like I am truly healing. I can even roll around the house with both arms without the sling. I now see the whole ordeal in the rear view mirror, getting smaller and less significant as I move along. If I learned anything, I think I’ve learned how not to look back and incessantly amplify the pain of the past. It’s a waste of precious time.