Just before
eleven o’clock Wednesday morning, a nurse at the Emory Clinic in Atlanta took
my blood pressure – 124-over-75. Forty-five minutes later I’m sure it was in
the oh-my-god-you’re-having-a-stroke range. Finding yourself on the floor of
the handicapped stall in a hospital restroom will do that to you.
I was at Emory to have my baclofen pump
refilled. Russ and I had started toward Atlanta at quarter of eight and all had
gone smoothly. There were no backups of note on I-85; we arrived in plenty of
time; my fifteen minutes with the doctor ended just about the time it was
scheduled to begin.
The less than smooth aspect of the day was
my tolerance for travel. Getting in and out of the car, going long distances in
the car, and spending several hours in my manual wheelchair invariably cause my
already stiff, uncooperative legs to become stiffer and more uncooperative. And
there are the bathroom issues. I’d drained
the bladder before we left Columbus and hadn’t had anything to eat or drink
since. The need wasn’t urgent, but tending to urinary matters before we left
Emory seemed to me the wiser choice.
Russ pushed me into the men’s room, and I
made my way to the handicapped stall. Alas, the handicapped stall in the
patients’ restroom in the Emory Clinic Department of Neurology is about the
size of a handicapped stall in your average bus station. Once I got the
wheelchair and me into the stall, there was very little room to maneuver. And I
must maneuver in order to take care of business.
After a struggle, I stood up, dropped my
pants, sat back down on the chair and used the catheter. Then I stood in order
to pull up my pants. I need two hands to get my pants up and around my ample
rump, and to get them adjusted and buckled. In the crowded restroom stall I was
unable to safely let go of the bar with two hands. My efforts to move my legs
into a position more likely to allow me to use both hands long enough to get
the pants back up only made matters worse. My legs were getting tangled and
tired, and my bottom was no longer aligned with the chair. The choice: continue
trying until I fell, or let myself down easily. I chose the latter, and plopped
down in the tiny space between the wheelchair, commode and the wall. To do
that, my legs had to bend and contort into positions they hadn’t been in for
years.
Thank God for cell phones. Mine saved me
from the embarrassment of sitting on the restroom floor and yelling for help. I
called Russ, who came to my aid, crawled under the stall door, moved the chair
back, stood me up, hiked up my pants and set me in the chair. He’s my hero.
I spent the rest of the day fretting. I fret
every time something happens that seems to say, “You’re days as a functioning,
reasonably independent human being are numbered, Buster.” Lunch at Five Guys
helped some, but getting in and out of the car there was yet another reminder
of how difficult simple things have become for me.
Back at Covenant Woods, I took a short nap,
which didn’t do a thing for my mood, scrounged up something to eat rather than
go up to the dining room, and pondered what seemed to be a terribly dim future.
All that changed during Jeopardy’s first
commercial. Now, if I’m tired and stiff, which I was in spades Wednesday, I
have a difficulty getting my butt up when I move around in my chair in order to
get more comfortable. As a result, every time I scoot back in the chair, my
pants slide down just a little bit. By seven o’clock Wednesday evening, they
had slid down more than I realized.
When Alex said, “We’ll be right back . . .,”
I decided it would be a good time to stand up for a minute or two. My walker,
which these days I use mostly to brace myself against when I stand, was over by
the sliding glass door. Hey, I could stand and take in the breathtaking view of
the parking lot. It took some effort for me to stand, but when I did, two
things happened at once: my pants fell down and Amy, one of the servers, drove
by on her way home. With a dogwood tree and assorted other flora between my
apartment and the parking lot, no one save the most determined of perverts
would notice me standing there in my BVDs. But in a flash, the images of me as
a complete invalid disappeared from my mind and were replaced with thoughts of
the smiles the story of my pants falling as Amy drove by would elicit from her,
Isabell and Al at dinner the next night. A strange way to get an attitude
adjustment, but it worked.
Say what you will about Burt’s son, he is
entertaining – in a weird sort of way. Al and I were chatting in the hall
Monday when he came by. After the pleasantries were exchanged he went into his
monologue.
“You guys ever eaten at Country’s Barbeque?
Nice place, isn’t it? Well, I was over there one day last week having lunch,
and some guy started choking. He made the sign, you know, put his hand up by
his throat, and everything. A man at the next table got up right away, went
over, got behind the guy who was choking, put his arms around him and lifted
him out of the chair. I thought he was going to start . . . you know how they
keep squeezing the person’s chest real hard. But this fellow put the guy who
was choking up against the table and pulled down his pants. Then he starts
rubbing his tongue on the butt of the guy who is choking. Two seconds later,
the guy coughs up whatever it was he was choking on. Everybody in the
restaurant is giving strange looks to the guy who saved the choking man’s life.
‘What’s wrong with you people?’ he yelled. ‘Haven’t you ever seen someone do
the Hind Lick Maneuver?’
“Did you see the story in the paper this
morning about the guy who had to have his leg amputated? Well, he’d gone up to
Alaska to hunt bear or something. The day after he gets there, he gets out his
knife and somehow accidently puts a huge gash in his left thigh. All he has is
Duct Tape, so he dresses the wound with it. And he’d been looking forward to
this trip for months and he doesn’t want to just turn around and go home; so he
just stays out in the wilderness for two weeks. When he got back here to
Columbus, though, his leg was in real bad shape. He went to the doctor, who
told him gangrene had set in and the leg would have to be amputated. So he goes
to the hospital. When he comes to after the surgery, he’s feeling around and
realizes both legs are gone. ‘Hey, Doc, what happened to my right leg?’ The
doctor tells him that he took the right leg off by mistake. But when he
realized what happened, he went ahead and took the left leg off, too. The guy says
he’s going to sue him for everything he has. ‘Go ahead,’ the doc says, ‘but you
don’t have a leg to stand on.’
“Well, I better get down there and check in
with my dad. I really enjoyed talking to you guys.”
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