Rehab
By Chris Norris
I was on the roof of the College Townhouses in Boulder, CO at about 1 AM. A
friend was with me. We considered whether or not to jump into the pool forty feet
below, twenty-five feet from the building’s edge. It looked more difficult than had
been described to me. And it occurred to me that if I missed the pool, I would
probably die. But I was twenty-one, in the midst of what would later be called a
clinical manic episode, and fascinated with the prospect of death, to go from
burningly alive, to zero. Snuffed out. Then, because I didn’t want my friend to
jump, because I knew that my jump felt a little like my own destiny, I jumped
without saying even, “Here I go.” I raced across the roof and jumped. I missed.
Evidently, it can be difficult to kill a strong, healthy, drunk young man.
Over the first few days in the hospital, I woke up, was informed of my
situation, then fell back to sleep. When I woke up again, I had to be told again
because I couldn’t yet form new memories. At some point in one of my awakemoments, my sister gave me a little mushroom that she’d made from sculpting
wax. She handed it to me, and I put it in my mouth. There was pandemonium in
the room. And terrible despair on the part of my parents, I imagine. While semiconscious, I’d been asked about my history of drug use. I was incapable of lying,
I suppose, because I answered everything that was asked of me, something I
normally would have spared my parents. Alcohol, pot, LSD and psilocybin
mushrooms were my sins. That I would attempt to eat a wax mushroom during
one of my first moments of consciousness only confirmed the fear that I had a
serious drug problem. While I don’t remember the incident, I am confident that I
thought food was being offered to me. But, given that a doctor had just informed
my family of my habitual use of “hard” drugs, they had to assume the worst.
Even though the hardest drug I ever used was the legal one, alcohol.
The first day in the hospital that I remember was the fifth. I was in terrible
pain and in the midst of a panic attack, unable to catch my breath. Looking
round the room, I saw my father and mother, my sister Joanne, her husband
Howard. They had terrified expressions on their faces, something on the order of
trying to suppress a scream. (This was the inspiration for my refusal to receive
any visitors but my family.) Their expressions told me all I wanted to know about
my predicament. Someone gave me a sedative, and I passed out.
When I came to again, a doctor introduced himself, asked if I knew where I
was, what had happened. No, and no. He said I was paralyzed and would likely
never walk again. And, keep in mind that I was barely conscious. When the
doctor spoke those words, I immediately asked him, “But will I run?!” Such was
my passion for running. Maybe, I thought, I would only be able to run, but never
be able to walk. This would have been fine by me, I thought; I hated to walk. To
run made me feel so damn good, and it helped me to corral my racing thoughts.
I had always been an antsy kid. When I was seated, I endlessly shook my feet
and tapped my fingers. Anyway, walking felt like resisting-running. Why bother?
The doctor looked at me like I was joking. “No, you won’t ever run.” He
smiled and went on to tell me about my feet. They’d been crushed by the impact
of my landing several inches shy of the pool. He told me that many people with
such injuries, even without any paralysis, choose not to walk anyway, because
the pain is that terrible. And, my god, my feet did hurt. (At some point in my
hospitalization, I asked the doctors why they couldn’t just cut my feet off. It
wasn’t like I was going to be using them, I reasoned. I also asked why they didn’t
cut my legs off, since they were heavy and useless anyway. The doctors
informed me that they would never cut my legs off, but, maybe, far down the
road, I might consider amputating one or both of my feet.)
So, I was paralyzed. I was also wildly depressed. So much so that I couldn’t
read. Actually, I could read words, but I couldn’t make the words into sentences,
or the sentences into paragraphs. The doctors told me I had no head injury, that
I was just upset from the trauma. They were right about that. I told people that
were I not in a hospital for rehabilitation of my body, I would certainly be in a
hospital for rehabilitation of my mind. I had a kind of anxious terror of everything,
but especially people. I felt that people could see my disintegrating mind. The
best I could do was to go into a full retreat from feelings of being alive. I was
alive, but it was alive in the way I imagined a zombie to feel.
About a year before my leap, I was very suicidal. I’d taken one hallucinogen
too many, I guess, because the last time I took LSD, I never quite came back. I
was ridiculously miserable. I felt, I thought, the way an avocado must feel when
all that is left of him is the rind. Due to my extraordinary misery, I considered that
if life has no intrinsic meaning, if life is simply one’s experience of it, well, I was
having a pretty bad time of it, and I wanted out. So, in the effort to understand if
life had some intrinsic meaning, I went on a search for the supernatural! I read
anything I could find, because I believed that if I found nothing, I would die.
Though none of the books resonated with me a whole lot, I was struck by an
experience with Shamanism. A woman from India performed a Shamanic
healing on me. (“The forest people,” who taught her to be a Shaman had
kidnapped her as a child. Her parents considered it a great honor. Fucking
cool!) Through a translator, I told her that I felt I was losing my mind, and that
this terrible thing had started with my taking a hallucinogenic drug. She told me
that my problem was that too much had been revealed to me by way of the drug,
and that I collapsed under the weight of it. She said I was to become a “hero.”
To whom, I didn’t ask, figuring that maybe, towering over her and sporting long
blondish locks, I looked the part to her. Maybe something was lost in translation.
She then performed the healing. I felt a little better, but it may have been
simply from the attention I received from this exotic old woman. She sang at me,
rolled a hard-boiled egg around my body and threw rice at me in order to suck
the sickness from me (the egg) and chase it as well (the rice). The song, I
suspect, helped to create atmosphere.
About three days after, I noticed that for maybe 5 minutes, I hadn’t thought
about how desperately I needed to die. For a few minutes, I didn’t think about
running into traffic, or cutting my wrists, or hanging myself. I was on the road to
recovery! I went to a therapist who worked very well for me. I came to trust her,
and she listened to my thoughts and didn’t seem to think they were too bizarre.
Maybe four months later, I was feeling really, really good. To be alive felt
exquisitely painful, but good, like plucking one’s nose hairs. Sometimes, I’d be
biking around town and would have to stop because I absolutely had to write a
thing down; to get a handle on whatever it was I’d been thinking. And then there
was this strange feeling I had that I could see through walls. Yup, I wrote “see
through walls.” I didn’t think I could read a newspaper on the other side of a wall,
but I felt that I knew what was going on in all the rooms of a house. I knew this
wasn’t possible, but that was how I felt.
. I remember telling my friends I felt incapable of having anything but a great
time, no matter what I did. I remember telling my friends I felt like a god
incarnate. When out at a party or a bar, I wanted more than anything for total
chaos to ensue. Fighting and fucking was what I hoped for. It seemed to me the
most honest thing that could happen, like that was what was just below the
surface of society, so why not get to it.
For a week after I woke from my slumber in the hospital, I wasn’t even all that
concerned with being paralyzed. What I really wanted was to regain control of
bowel and bladder function. It is awful to need someone to clean up the shit from
your body, to change the filthy sheets. I suggested that they let me go a few
times before cleaning me up, because by the time they’d cleaned me up, I was
just about ready to go again. They said that was not a good idea, because to be
left in one’s excrement for long periods of time often leads to one’s skin breaking
down. And I would be a long while recovering, so...
What I really wanted was to stop feeling so much pain. If I’d thought about it
at all, I thought that I would pass out from pain that blinded me. It’s not true.
What I really wanted was to stop hallucinating. I hallucinated quite a bit,
because, I imagine, I couldn’t sleep and was on a lot of morphine. All of the
hallucinations, as one might expect, were nightmares. One pretty funny one was
set in the restaurant where I’d worked as a server. In the nightmare, I was given
five tables to serve, all at once. I was new to waiting tables and not very
proficient yet. five tables was four tables too many. I was immediately “in the
weeds,” as they say in restaurant parlance. I was freaking out, when I became
aware that I was paralyzed. But instead of thinking, “Well, hey, I’m paralyzed! I
can’t possibly be expected to wait on these five tables,” I thought, “How am I
going to make salads for all these people. Maybe I can get Peter to make them
for me...” In the hallucination, I dragged myself across the carpeted floor to my
tables, introduced myself and fumbled with my notebook. (I decided I should lie
on my back while taking people’s orders.) I was mortified. The people at my
tables looked appalled.
“What shitty service,” I imagined them thinking.
Then the hallucination began to fall apart. I might have noticed the TV in
my hospital room, or maybe the bed next to me, and I would begin to wonder
where I was, what were these things doing at The Café Gondolier? Finally, I
would see that I had an IV in my arm and the hallucination dropped away
entirely.
At about fourteen days out (that’s how we marked time. Fourteen days out
means fourteen days from the injury), my brother, Jimmie, arrived from PA to
visit. He said he was sure I’d walk again, that he and I were special people, and I
shouldn’t expect to have a regular person’s outcome. I love him for saying this,
though I didn’t believe it. Jimmie might be special, but I was not. Jimmie was a
phenomenal runner, one year even qualifying for the world championships.
Jimmie was a very smart, good-looking, confident man who could entertain
everyone with his wit. The world really is his oyster. I was something wholly
different, though I couldn’t have said what.
Jimmie went on to tell me that he had spoken with his friend, Gerry O’reilly,
the great Irish distance runner. Upon hearing of my injury, Gerry told my brother
that he would consult his Great Aunt, a fortune-telling Catholic nun in Ireland, to
see what my future looked like. I had no idea there were such things. And she
wasn’t the only one, either. I know this because Gerry said that she and her
soothsaying peers would look into it. Hearing about these nuns, I imagined a
map of Ireland on which little LED lights blinked. (The lights represented the
nuns, and the blinking was their conversation with one another.) I imagined the
weird sisters of Macbeth. I imagined spent cartons of Chinese takeout and
unopened fortune cookies. All of these images were vivid in my mind, though I
can’t say I enjoyed them. Not like today. I love these images now. Irish Catholic
nuns who tell fortunes? Hysterical! The nuns concluded that I would certainly
walk, though they couldn’t say if I would run. I didn’t believe the prediction, but I
thought I would like to tell my friends about it some day.
Every morning in the hospital, a doctor came into my room to ask if I'd had
any erections in the night. I would tell him, “No, I’m not, uh, feeling very horny.”
A few days later, I was still not able to report any erections. I was told the
doctors had a “skin flick” for me to watch. I thought, “This boner-thing must be
pretty important. They're gonna show me porn… God, I hope they don't bring me
gay porn.” (I was a little uncertain about my sexuality then, and I hated to think
that total strangers had me pegged as gay. Or, I cringed, maybe, while I was
revealing my drug history, I identified myself as gay. What a way to find out
about such a thing, eh?)
The nurse pulled the privacy-curtain around my bed, started the video and
left. The video was, in fact, about skin, the largest organ in the human body.
Paraplegics face significant risk of skin sores, caused by pressure from being
seated for long periods of time, loss of muscle through atrophy, and, for many,
the loss of sensation due to the spinal cord injury.
The sores can be horrible, rotting-flesh lesions that may require months and
months in a hospital to heal. So the film introduced habits I should develop and
showed footage of the sores of people who failed to adopt these habits.
Sometimes the sores went down to the bone, which one could actually see in the
video. I guess I’d looked forward to the porn, because I was a little disappointed
with the video. I was also curious, and decided that I would try jerking off later. I
was able to get a small, awkward little hard- on. I fantasized about women in
order to get it, by the way. I was a bit relieved to be turned on by female imagery
(This even though I wasn’t very concerned with the prospect of lifelong
impotency. I remember saying to my father that I would trade the hard-ons for
the ability to run if I could. Again, such was the role running played in my life.).
About two or three weeks out, I began to think about how I would deal with
being paralyzed. I thought, “I could get used to this… if only I wouldn’t shit my
fucking pants every twenty minutes.” And it really was that frequent. Bowel
obstructions are a major concern for the newly paraplegic because peristalsis
may not be functioning at all, and there’s no way to determine this before a
problem may develop. A person can get pretty sick from a bowel obstruction
pretty quickly I guess. So patients are given lots of strong laxatives. Nothing
stays in your bowels waiting to be moved out. It just runs on out. Things that
feel like a fart are actually shit. The nurses stayed very busy.
When I learned I was being given laxatives, I insisted they stop. After some
debate, they agreed to this. But I continued to shit my pants (actually, “my bed”)
all day long. Nights too. It turns out there were laxatives in some of the vitamins
they fed me as well. Doctors know best.
At about the same time that I was coming to terms with paralysis, strangely, I
was also regaining some muscle movement. Even within a few hours, I might
notice, for example, my flexor muscles on my right side coming back a little.
Every day, I saw some improvement. I’d thought paralysis was unalterable, but it
turns out everyone improves at least a little, because a bruise of the spinal chord
diminishes over a few weeks, just like any bruise. As it does, a person’s level of
functionality increases. But my recovery was better than that. I was getting
recovery of muscle strength far below my point of injury. The doctors said it was
uncommon, but not unheard of. They said I shouldn’t get my hopes up, that I
might not improve one iota more than I had. They told me the most I could
reasonably hope for was the ability, with assistance, to stand in my own kitchen.
You know, to reach a dinner plate or something. Fine.
But I didn’t stop improving. Every day I got better, and every day I was told
that I might not get any better than I was that day, so I shouldn’t get my hopes
up. I stopped asking about my prognosis. If I did, I framed the question in a
particular way. I would ask, “Has anyone ever, even once, done this or that after
having been injured as I have been?” My doctor would begin, “Yes, but –“ And I
would cut him off. “Your answer is yes. Thank you.”
My doctor thought I was an amusing, plucky thing. I didn’t mind. I could
understand his reluctance to give people hope. Hope could delay someone from
dealing with the fact of his malady. “There is not hope. Let’s move on.” But
everyone hoped they would be the exception to the rule, that they would be a
case of full recovery. (After all, everyone had the many prayers of their friends
and family, right?) The hospital had a research library devoted to its specialty,
brain and spinal cord injury. But they didn’t keep a single story of any significant
recovery. Nothing. I asked the librarian about it.
She said, with some regret, “No, we don’t carry anything like that. Just the
biology of your type of injuries. Sorry.”
I did, however, stumble upon one inspirational account of recovery. It was on
TV. Dumb luck had it that I was watching the news program “20/20” when the
program did a story about the former NFL player, Mike Utley, who was paralyzed
while playing football. He’d been paralyzed from the neck down, but made a
near complete recovery. I cried watching it, thinking what a special person he
must be, to recover so well. Maybe it was his athletic background, I wondered.
I’d been an athlete, I thought.
At about six weeks, I was walking, though very awkwardly. People marveled
at my progress. Also, I began to notice certain resentment on the part of the
other patients, which I understood. We’d talked endlessly about our progress
and the things in our bodies we suspected were improving. We talked about the
new things we learned to do that day, like to hold a pencil or cigarette, to get out
of bed by ourselves, or to use a toilet. After not too long, I wanted to be able to
run again. How could I talk to them about that?
At two years out, my recovery was nearly complete. One doctor describes my
function as about eighty percent on my left side, ninety-five percent on my right. I
wasn’t able to run, but it wasn’t because of the paralysis. It was, and is, due to
severe post-traumatic arthritis in my feet. The doctors were quite right about the
persistent pain in my feet.
I took up bicycling in my third year out. In the hope of restoring my withered
body, I biked from Olympia, WA to Telluride, CO. The bike trip was very painful.
All of my pressure points -- my hands, ass and feet -- hurt terribly and/or went
numb. At one point, after a particularly long day, I went to pee and found that my
penis and scrotum were completely numb. Had I re-injured my back? No. I had
injured the nerves in my crotch. I don’t know that I cared. I was still so
depressed that sex was about the last thing on my mind. Feeling returned over
the following few days. I never did fall in love with biking the way I did with
running. But, “if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”
People ask me to what I attribute my “miracle” recovery.
“Was it God? You must have prayed, right?”
But I never prayed. I didn’t believe in god. On one occasion, I tried to
pray, but I felt so silly I stopped.
“Maybe it was the many prayers of your family? “
I don’t think so, but I did tell my family I appreciated their thinking of me.
“Was it steely determination that led to your recovery?”
Maybe a little. Once I was told that the only thing I could do to help
myself to recover was to work with the various therapists, to work very hard, I
settled into what I looked at as training. My having been a runner made me very
familiar with hard work and pain. I was well suited to their strategy for me.
But, really, I think it was just luck that I recovered so well. Several other
people who were paralyzed and recovering at that hospital had long histories of
athleticism, and they didn’t recover much at all. The doctors told me that about
one in every 25,000 new paraplegics have a recovery like mine. Which is to say,
it happens sometimes. My recovery is certainly far less amazing than, for
instance, winning the Lotto. And no one -- well, not many -- attributes winning
the Lotto to prayer. So this tale is nothing like that of a miracle. It is just an
anecdote, something I can finally write about.
As times passes, I find myself considering my leap more often. As I
mentioned earlier, I was manic when I jumped. For years after I jumped, I
refused to accept that I have bipolar disorder. I didn’t want to take drugs
because, well, who does? And, because I aspired to writing or filmmaking, I
worried that my perspective would be compromised. After all, how strongly could
my convictions be about anything, if I knew that my experience was strongly
influenced by pharmacology? But after one more intense manic high, following
by another 3 years of pretty severe depression, I decided to give the drugs a try.
They make me a little dim-witted, I think. But I persevere! Now 10 years has
passed since that last manic episode. I no longer miss it, no longer yearn for it.
Because, of course, I no longer remember it so well. I remember the analogies I
made to the experience of god-like existence, but I don’t remember the feeling so
well. I am content with this. My version of bi-polar disorder was a bad trade
anyway. Six months of near constant elation followed by years of abject misery?
No, thanks.