What do you do when you suddenly
find yourself a cripple? What prepares you for that? How do you let your life
change around you and still hold on to the illusion of control?
February of 2007, the pain started.
To say the least, I wasn’t ready for it.
There are no classes in dealing with
what happened to me. There are probably support groups for the newly broken,
but I never learned of them. Who could I look to in order to navigate this complete
shift in my life?
I’m an American, so I could only
look to television.
Every handicapped person on
television is a fucking champion. Every last one of them has a huge smile and a
can-do attitude. They sit in their wheelchairs and play basketball like goddamn
pros, proving that the world will never get them down, that limitations are all
in the mind. If they do experience hardship, they’re only a montage away from
becoming well-adjusted and whole; one short sequence of grimaces during
physical therapy, finding new ways to reach the top shelf in their kitchen, and
suddenly our hero is the little cripple that could. Every single one of them
seems indomitable.
I did not feel indomitable.
I felt highly fucking domitable.
After only a few months, I felt my
brave face slipping. Shit started getting real. Really real. Time after time,
doctors told me that they didn’t know what was wrong and it felt like a fresh
piece of me was lost. My emotional stability was eroding and I simply didn’t
know how to cope. Not one of these goddamned heroes on TV had any answers for me.
They exemplified these ridiculous standards of bravery and composure that I
simply couldn’t maintain. They were like the happy, smiling black people; the
ones that comfort an audience by showing that, hey, that guy is having a good
go of life, surely there aren’t any problems we need to deal with. These angels
on crutches were the model minorities made to comfort the masses. They are made
to seem happy and totally fucking fine, because disabled people are frightening
reminders that at any passing moment, you can suddenly find yourself one (like
I did!)
I whined. I cried. I snapped at
people. I wished my pain on others. I began to hate people who took their
bodies for granted. I withdrew from people who were close to me. I stopped
going out. I started becoming a boring recluse. Every event had to become
planned, every outing plotted and considered. Bar crawl? Anything with the word
“crawl” in it went right out the fucking window.Then there were the pills and
everything they did to me.
Everything they do to me.
I grieved for the life I had thought
I would have as I slowly came to realize that unrelenting pain was my new
normal. It would be with me, as far as anyone could say, for the rest of my
life. It became A Fact.
Then I start watching House, M.D. Here
was a brilliant man who suddenly found himself broken and was dealing with it just
about as poorly as I was. It helped that our afflictions were almost identical,
though from different causes. For the first time, I started feeling like maybe
I wasn’t a shitty, weak wuss who couldn’t effortlessly tap into the
irrepressibility of the human spirit to surmount every challenge I faced.
Maybe it was okay that I sucked at being a cripple.
The story arch in which he has the Ketamine
procedure and the pain goes away for a while hurt to watch. There is a scene in
which he’s running on the treadmill, trying to power through the return of his
pain, and it’s getting more and more apparent that his relief was just
temporary – I fucking bawled.
The episode in which he makes a big
deal about going on vacation to Vancouver Island, just to spend a week alone on
his couch with his Vicodin without anyone calling – God, I fucking get that. Why
hassle with striving against your limitations just so you can get a photo or
three? Better to slump into the furniture that you know you can find some kind
of okay position in and stay there for as long as possible.
His anger, his bitterness, his
frailty – I needed it like nothing I’d ever needed in my life before.
House was the one realistic
representative that I got in the media, but he was the only one I needed.
He saved my fucking life.
