The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race (31 page)

Imagining oneself as Barbra Streisand is dangerous behavior for a woman on a bike. Nonetheless, the worst I suffered at the hand of my own distractibility was a lightly bruised ego. I’d been flying down the Queensboro Bridge after having been dumped by a guy who flipped lamb
shanks for a living. I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone and had started singing Liz Phair’s “Extraordinary” aloud to reassure myself about myself:

I am extraordinary / if you’d only get to know me

And then a stranger rode past me. And heard me.

Singing Liz Phair to myself about myself was a raw and private moment, and I would’ve preferred to keep it that way.

So. That all had been the worst thing. Until the time I rode full-speed into a car.

It was late spring of my thirtieth year. I had to commute from my apartment in Bushwick to this book club I was in that took place in Park Slope. We’d read
Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel, and I had struggled with it to the point of having no idea what had happened. I had planned to spend the book club meeting alternately going, “Good point. Wow. Right.
Yes
,” and then hiding in the bathroom for five-minute stints at a time.

I put on my helmet and rode to the meeting. I made it halfway there without incident. But then, there was … incident. Or rather,
an
incident. I made the mistake of riding the wrong way down a one-way street. I barreled through a stop sign, and there, like a screeching one-ton bullet, was a livery cab. It came to a halt, but not before my body crashed against it with the force, I was later told, of someone hitting the ground after falling off a two-story building.

In the second before the crash, when I knew it would happen but could no longer try to avoid it, I remember thinking, This’ll hurt. But in a funny way! I thought it’d be like Lara Flynn Boyle in
Wayne’s World
, when she crashes
her bike over the hood of that car. It looks violent, yes, but Lara Flynn Boyle is fine. She’s fine! She’s up and she’s primping in no time.

Sadly, the same could not be said for me.

I stayed conscious only so that I might land on my back, on my bike. The pain was too severe to lift my head, so I strained my eye sockets instead. And that’s when I noticed my ankle. It was flopped over like a dog’s ear. A right angle had formed between my foot and my leg.

Imagine the most breathless you have ever been from exercise. I was that breathless, but from pain. It was so intense, I shot past any of the beginner reactions—grumbling, swearing—past any of the intermediate reactions—yelling, crying—to a place of being so instantly, thoroughly consumed, I was struggling to breathe. Someone called an ambulance to take me to the hospital. While en route, I called my mom. The EMT had found my phone, called the number, and held the phone against my ear. It was in this fashion that my mother and I could review the progression of events. Then it was mostly:

“Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”

“I need you to breathe.”

“I can’t!”

“Yes. You can. Were you wearing a helmet?”

“Yes!”

“And are you bleeding? Are you losing any blood?”

Weirdly, I was not. I had demolished large parts of myself without getting so much as a scratch on me. The fact of this calmed my mother down, but only until she thought to consider whether or not I might be bleeding internally. Then it was all, “Are you bleeding internally? SARA: ARE. YOU. BLEEDING. INTERNALLY?”

My mother asked this repeatedly, and with an increase in volume every time. Eventually, she got so loud that the EMT could hear my mother through the phone. The EMT
then took the phone. She told my mother, “We don’t know yet. What? Yes. Tests. Yes. Bye.”

As it turned out, there was no internal bleeding. There were, however, bruised kidneys, an anterior dislocated shoulder, and a shattered right ankle. The bruised kidneys would heal themselves. The dislocated shoulder would take one surgery to fix. The shattered ankle would take another two.

The first of these two would take place my second day in the hospital, and would involve an orthopedic surgeon attaching to my lower leg a series of large metal poles that pierced through my skin and into my broken bones for the purpose of stabilizing my leg. The surgeon would then wait for the swelling to go down. When finally it did, I’d have the second operation. It would take place one week after the first, and would involve two foot-long incisions made along either side of my right calf: from just above my ankle, to just below my knee. They, the incisions, would facilitate the installation of four five-inch titanium plates, and twenty-four half-inch titanium screws.

After arriving at the hospital, someone or other shot me up with a large quantity of morphine. The pain did not abate, however, and this is really saying something when you consider my aforementioned susceptibility to all manner of alcohol and drugs. A large quantity of morphine should have left me unconscious until it was fun to be conscious again. But my pain was too assertive for all that. A saucy RuPaul, she was. All like, “
Snap
, bitch. Mama’s here … to
stay
.”

I would like to tell you that I stared her down or argued even the littlest bit, but I did not. I just looked at her, helpless.

You’re too much, I thought.

Death is preferable.

I mean it.

Let me die.

I was both worried and surprised by this instinct to capitulate. By the marked absence of a fighting spirit. I was so quickly willing to check out forever, if it meant no more pain for now, and the fact of this bodes poorly, I think, for my apocalypse survival. Fantasies of natural childbirth went straight out the window, and speaking of windows, I had this vision of myself hanging off a ledge, and thought, I just
know
that I’d let go. My arm would cramp up, I’d be like, “Nope. I can’t take it,” and that would be that.

I shared this revelation with my friend Maggie. She was the first person who came to meet me at the hospital. After several hours and the eventual implementation of a more effective drug cocktail, I lay more calmly in a gurney. Maggie sat beside me in a folding chair.

“Let me tell you something dark,” I said. “When I was
in
it, I wanted to die.”

Maggie, in response, made the point that my wanting to die might be the byproduct of my knowing that I
wouldn’t
die; a sort of perverse luxury, if you will, that came part and parcel with knowing instinctively I’d live.

“In other words, maybe try not to be scared of the feeling. Maybe try to be, I don’t know, appreciative, I guess, for having experienced a dark emotion from a safe, if painful, place.”

“The word ‘appreciate’ is hard for me right now.”

“I know. Of course, I know. What I mean to say is just that it’s a little less dark to have wanted to die if, in point of fact, you wanted to die
because
you knew you wouldn’t.”

Maggie had arrived at the hospital a mere twenty minutes after I’d arrived; I’d called her from the ambulance after
I’d called my mom. She had come to stay with me until my parents could come to stay with me themselves. She stayed through the night, into the next morning. Then she left for work.

My parents, for their part, booked the next available flight from Chicago to New York.

Maggie and my parents doing as they did required generosity and effort. I knew this, and appreciated it.

Nonetheless, I’d been left with a ten-hour gap between visits. Over the course of those ten hours, I’d have to occupy myself.

I did so in my newly assigned hospital bedroom. The pain was more manageable by this stage, but still too intense to be ignored. So I didn’t sleep, really. I watched the nurses come and go. I practiced the art of self-pity, and regret. I watched a lot of TV. A television set hung above my new little hospital bed, and thank God, too, since without it I would surely have figured out a way to drown myself in the toilet in the bedroom. I watched
The Golden Girls, Legally Blonde, Legally Blonde 2, Law & Order, In Her Shoes, The Silence of the Lambs
, and, for the first time, a horse race. I learned to use a bedpan.

The use of the bedpan was especially upsetting. I’d always loved the idea of a bedpan, but what I learned from the reality of a bedpan is that they’re not nearly as decadent as you might think. They require quite a bit of abdominal strength, and that’s to say nothing of the angle guesswork involved. Talk about a small margin for error! If you aim right, you’re good. If you aim wrong, though, you’re soaked in your own urine, forced to wait for whatever length of time for a nurse to clean you up.

I met my roommate, Terri. Terri I took to be a heroin or methadone addict, and our medical situations were
different insofar as, well, Terri was on heroin or methadone. Also, Terri could sit up, stand, and walk, whereas I could not lift my sternum without the help of a motorized bed.

Terri put her surefootedness to good use by wandering over to hug me. There had been a dividing curtain between us, and she threw it back the first time she heard me roll in.

“Oh. Hi,” I said.

“You okay?” she said.

“Not really,” I said.

“Well, you
gone
be, girl. Someday soon, you
gone
be A-okay.”

Then she waddled over, stroked my hair, and hugged me.

It was a caring and sensitive action. However, my ability to appreciate it was curtailed by the fact that Terri smelled of shit-strewn barn, and looked—she
always
looked—like she was on the verge of throwing up.

As for appearance/aroma combinations, this one is never my favorite.

I had pictured myself in a hospital before I wound up in a hospital. Involved in the fantasy were floral bouquets and sympathy cards detailing how much I meant to the hundred different people who had sent them. I’d pictured a chenille blanket at the foot of my bed so that visitors could come and sit comfortably beside me. They would sit and ask questions, while I, generous of spirit and heart, doled out the wisdom afforded to me by my illness.

The piece I’d failed to account for, however, was the physical pain. Mine had stabilized at a more manageable level, as I said, but every inch of it—every second—was still mortifyingly oppressive. What came with it was a profound sense of isolation. What went with it was my
appetite. Pain and stress are known as effective appetite suppressants, and so perhaps the loss should not have been surprising. To me, though, it was. Because I
am
my appetite. I eat like clockwork: once an hour, every hour, provided I am not asleep. And so to not eat at all? To not foresee a time when I would want to eat again? The whole thing seemed as strange as the precarious way my foot had dangled from my ankle. As strange, but not as traumatic. For as any daughter of any Jewish mother will tell you: There is always a destructive modicum of joy involved in weight loss.

So it was that I asked one of the nurses for a hand mirror. I looked in it twice a day to see if my collarbone looked more pronounced.

The first day in the hospital I met my surgeon, Dr. Dean. The first thing I noticed about Dr. Dean was that Dr. Dean was very handsome. He had hair that looked plucked from a Ken doll, and his shoulders were so, like, erotically broad I’d have licked my way across them if given the chance.

Dr. Dean was the director of the hospital’s orthopedics department, and this meant that wherever he went—whenever he went there—a gaggle of medical residents trailed along behind. These medical residents were also very handsome. I hadn’t known I had a thing for doctors, but now I realized this was only because I’d never seen a slew of handsome ones together. The cumulative effect suggested I’d died and gone to Vegas heaven, to a place where the showgirls were not showgirls at all, but rather Harvard-educated, scrubs-clad show-boys.

Except, of course, they weren’t. They were not Vegas show-boys, and I was not in Vegas heaven. I was in a hospital, and I had a question for my surgeon.

“Will I walk again?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“Oh, good,” I said.

“But not like before,” he said.

“Then how?” I said.

“With marked limitation,” he said, “to your ankle’s range of movement.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I said.

“It means ‘with pain and discomfort,’ ” he said.

“Forever?” I said. “Or just, like, for a while.”

“Forever,” he said. “Or until there are advances in the field.”

“
Will
there be … advances … in the field?” I asked.

“It’s hard to say,” he said.

There was a moment of silence between us.

“Well. Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you on my evening rounds.”

And after that he left. His residents trailed behind him.

It was a depressing prognosis, and because Dr. Dean was an orthopedic surgeon—a style of individual who’s chosen of his own volition the most violent of surgical fields—it was delivered unto me with the sort of emotional sensitivity you’d associate with a waiter telling you he’s sorry but the kitchen’s out of steak.

Not that I’m complaining.

An orthopedic surgeon needs a bedside manner like a fish needs a bicycle. If you’re dead in the eyes and robotic of voice but you keep a steady hand while sawing human flesh, that’s fine by me, and it only gets more fine when you’re central casting handsome.

To distract from my prognosis, I decided to obsess on this, the fact of the central casting handsome. It seemed strange that every orthopedic surgeon and/or surgeon-in-training would be in possession of such a particular quality.
I decided to ask the nurse about it the next time she rolled through. I said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but may I ask a question about the doctors?”