The Zombie Life

The first year after I became a paraplegic was spent, at first, recovering from surgery and trying to recover my senses. I spent a long while in a fog, not knowing where I was, and often unable to speak intelligibly. While I was in that fog, I later learned, someone had gotten into my purse and copied down my credit card information, then charged a lot of stuff on the internet. This, was, I believe, done by a lower life-form, somewhere below pond scum, possibly by a single-cell organism of dubious origin. It was all straightened out later and the charges were, of course, reversed. But still.

Once I was sufficiently recovered, I was sent to the rehabilitation floor of a hospital. I spent 3 weeks there and it was the happiest time in this interminable journey of paraplegia that I have had. They worked my butt off. Sweat was my friend. By the time I left, I was able to transfer myself from my bed to my wheelchair with only two helpers, was able to sit up by myself and balance myself, alone, on the side of my bed. I was developing my upper body strength. And I spent hours creeping up and down the halls in my wheelchair. When people came to visit me, we would go to the visitor's lounge. I ate my meals at a table in the dining room. It was great. I had hope that my life, though different, would get better and as time went by I would gain independence.

Then I was transferred to a nursing home. A skinny little guy from physical therapy came to assess me. I told him I used a transfer board to get into my wheelchair so he left, then came back with one. He leaned it against the wall and didn't touch it again. Instead, he positioned a wheelchair next to the bed after I had sat up and was balanced with my legs hanging down the side of the bed. I expected him to get the transfer board. Instead, he wrapped his arms around me and attempted to pick me up and put me in the wheelchair. At the time I weighed almost 300 pounds. Did he think he was Superman? He almost dropped me twice. I ended up kind of lying down in the wheelchair with my head resting against the back, clutching the arms of the chair for dear life to avoid sliding out onto the floor.

He quickly disappeared and just as quickly reappeared with a lift.  He awkwardly pulled me up with it and returned me to my bed. What a frightening and baffling experience! He left then with the lift and never came back. I later learned that he reported that I was "incapable of sitting in a wheelchair."

I was a nursing home newbie then. I had never been the kind of person who stuck up for myself. As a plump child I was tormented mercilessly at school starting in 4th grade, all the way through high school. I never let on that it bothered me or fought back. I just endured.

So I didn't make a fuss. When I tried to complain at the nursing home I was ignored, anyway. So I endured. Thus began my long confinement to bed. My days were empty except for the 35 tv channels the home provided. So I just lay there, watching tv and waiting for my little girl to visit.

Except I wasn't just lying there. I was developing a bedsore on my bottom. The aides spotted it. I had no idea, since I was numb from the tops of my thighs to the tips of my toes. They alerted the physician's assistant who looked at it, said, "hmm" and prescribed antibiotic pills so huge that, even when halved, made me upchuck them and everything else in my stomach, including all my other meds.

Meanwhile, the wound got worse and worse, since I couldn't keep down my antibiotics. The P.A. continued to look, say "hmm" and nothing else. Until the day my wound smelled so bad that my roommate left and refused to come back. By that time I had developed the inability to keep anything at all down. Even seeing food on tv made me want to throw up.

I was beginning to catch on by then that if I didn't advocate for myself, nobody would. So I demanded intravenous antibiotics.

I had to be transferred to the specialty hospital, in the same building, for that. An actual doctor there took a look at my wound and exclaimed, "Oh. No. No. No."

This paragraph is kind of gross, so skip it if you get queasy easily. The wound, while the P.A. said "hmm" and did nothing had progressed to a stage 4 wound. The flesh had progressively been necrotized, or eaten away, to grainy black, stinky goo, all the way to the bone. And it was all infected. The doctor thought maybe even the bone underneath was infected.

It was debrided, I was given heavy-duty antibiotics, and I stayed there for several weeks, watching tv while I waited for the wound to recover enough so I could be scheduled for plastic surgery. Eventually I did have a flap taken from my hip grafted over the wound because it was much too large to heal otherwise.

Now, with the wound, getting up into a wheelchair was utterly impossible.

And I lay there like an utterly depressed zombie, watching tv and waiting for my little girl's visits.