Unreasonable haste is the direct road to error.
— Molière
Helpless and hurting on the casino floor, I was party to an instructive incident. I had barely landed when a virtual army of earpiece-equipped security personnel appeared out of nowhere. One of their number stooped down and proclaimed to me, “We’re going to lift you up now.”
“No, you’re not,” I responded. “I’m staying right here for now.”
In a matter of milliseconds, another official leaned down and intoned, “We’re going to lift you up now.”
“No, you’re not! I’m in more pain than you’d care to know.”
Soon after, but what seemed like an eternity, the rapidly enlarging circle of security personnel parted and I caught sight of a wheelchair, pushed by an attractive young lady.
“You can lift me up, now!”
Note that the two security people who had addressed me didn’t say, “Are your hurt? Can I help? Just a minute, a nurse is on the way.”
They had other things on their mind: This klutz is bad for business. He’s making the place look untidy. Let’s get him out of sight as fast as we can.
A compassionate casino! Now, there’s an oxymoron.
I had no shoes, and I complained . . .6
I sat in a wheelchair in a crowded hospital emergency waiting room late on Valentine’s Day. I had just been told, at ten o’clock at night, that there would be a five- to six-hour wait to see the doctor.
Why me? How come this had to happen to me?
Wallowing in self-pity is pointless and counterproductive. Yet, for an unguarded moment, Why me? had become my mantra. A gruff voice shouted from behind, “Get out of the way.” Which I did. As the speaker came into view, he was pulling the only other wheelchair in sight. I glanced at the male occupant. He had no legs. My troubles seemed suddenly a whole lot less serious. In time, I would get to discard my wheelchair. He may never get to abandon his.
My normal buoyancy reasserted itself, as did my well-honed skills at procrastination and compartmentalization, traits that have often brought me to misery’s inner sanctum, most notably in a headline-grabbing shemozzle where my many imperfections got generously supplemented by the significant flaws of others. More about that later.
Suffice it to say that my late-night visit to the Gatineau emergency clinic was brief. I decided there was nothing wrong with my leg that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. Back to the hotel I went, pigged out on Motrin, and (painfully) crawled into bed. My priority next morning was to keep a commitment to a colleague whose speech I had promised to monitor.
A bionic coup
Nearly twenty-four hours after my unplanned rendezvous with a steel bench, I checked myself into an Ottawa hospital and learned I had sustained multiple fractures of the right tibial plateau, the top of the front leg bone, requiring the implantation of a titanium plate, followed by weeks of being unable to put weight on my wounded appendage.
The wait time for my surgery was mercifully short. I was told that my encounter with the surgeon’s scalpel was at the top of the list, barring a more pressing emergency. Sure enough, a highway accident bumped me down a notch. Nonetheless, I was in the operating theatre just thirty hours after my condition had been diagnosed.
My son Mark came by right after I came out of intensive care, helping me to settle in and pass the time. The BlackBerry was humming non-stop with inquires from colleagues and other well-wishers. I was faced with the tedium of answering a torrent of emails. And I had to distract myself. Mind over matter is a credo I live by. Rather than respond individually to all those emails, I would take my mind off my shattered appendage by crafting a “news release” on the events of the previous couple of days and send out an all-points bulletin. It spoke of intrigue in the cause of one-upmanship while conveying the facts of my circumstance:
“Gowlings Goes Bionic: Canada’s largest and, clearly, most creative law firm has assembled the latest weapon in the escalating legal services marketing war—a bionic marketer.
In a dramatically executed coup, a seven-inch titanium plate has been implanted in the right knee of recovering politician-turned-diplomat Roger Simmons, senior policy advisor at Gowlings.
North America’s only bionic marketer will soon graduate from wheelchair to airplane seats and pitilessly exploit his bionic leg-up on the competition!
I soon learned that my discharge from the hospital stay hinged mainly on my mastering the ability to safely navigate on crutches. That was good news. I’ve had a lifetime propelling my physique on dual walking aids tucked under my armpits, thanks to several previous stunts that had also ended badly. The physical therapist at Ottawa General gave me a thumbs-up as soon as she confirmed my touted expertise on crutches.
There was one more hurdle. Since I proposed flying to BC, my surgeon had concerns about blood clotting. A little rat poison took care of that and, three days after surgery, I was on my way.
The therapy of busy-ness
Back home in North Saanich, BC, I was obliged to adapt to the new reality, armed with crutches, a wheelchair, and two four-point walkers, placed near spots the wheels couldn’t go. With the help of Jeff Millar, a resourceful friend and former colleague, my home office was transformed into a command centre, complete with television and bunk, since the upstairs bedroom was inaccessible to me. With two phone lines, a cellphone, a BlackBerry, and a computer as my umbilical cords, I was able to keep in touch, indeed catch up on the backlog.
Nevertheless, the wheelchair, the inevitable dependence on other people, and the limitation on my activities took their toll. Within a week or so, my wanderlust kicked in, and with son Paul as chauffeur, I hit the road, first to Vancouver, then Seattle and Bellingham, WA, for meetings and a couple of previously confirmed speeches. The next month was a blur of airplanes, hotels, and wheelchairs as I honoured commitments in Denver and Dallas, Miami and Memphis, and elsewhere.
The view from down here
It was a time of altered perspectives, mine and others’. Sitting in a wheelchair, you quickly gain a heightened awareness of the special challenges faced by the wheelchair-bound. I find that the room at the SeaTac hotel labelled accessible has a bathroom threshold that cannot be crossed unless I lift the wheelchair while standing on my “good” leg—which works only because I have a “good” leg. Elevators are a special challenge. Ninety per cent of the time it’s impossible, without help, to enter the lift before the door closes.
You learn all sorts of other things sitting in a wheelchair. It defines you in the eyes and minds of others. People make decisions for you. And you get used to being spoken of in the third person. It says much about the human spirit that so many persons are not defined by their disabilities but by their inner strength and achievements.
Ed Smith, my late dear friend and cousin, ranked among Canada’s best humour writers and speakers. He was also quadriplegic, the result of a tragic car accident when he was fifty-eight. Time, but more significantly, Ed’s incredible will, made mincemeat of his daughter, Jennifer’s, prognostication that his wheelchair occupancy would be “the way he’ll be defined forever.”7 Written just a couple of days after the accident, it was obviously her deep despair, not her father’s never-say-die stubbornness, that pushed her pen. Less than a month later, she recorded a more upbeat and accurate appraisal: “Everything I love about my father is still intact.”8
Mobile people and those confined to wheelchairs live in vastly different worlds. Surprisingly, the former often includes the very people whose employment is with the wheelchair-bound.
It was Ed Smith who recounted an unbelievable litany of faux pas and de facto insults sometimes perpetrated by front-line caregivers. His initial efforts to obtain a pass for travel on Toronto buses equipped for persons with mobility problems is a good example. He’s told he must apply in person at a downtown office before he can use the service. The trouble is, the only way he can get there is on one of those buses. When he does find a way to present himself downtown and references his quadriplegia, his interlocutor, reading from her template script, persists in posing a series of dumb, tactless questions:
“How far can you walk?”
“How many steps can you walk on your own?”
“When do you expect to walk again?”9
Mercifully, there is a huge upside to wheelchair confinement. You find it in the many kindnesses of onlookers who open doors, hold elevators, and otherwise proffer much-needed assistance. The occasional aggravations are easily outnumbered by the many smiling faces and gestures of kindness, not to mention the numerous empathetic stories from those who themselves have spent time in a wheelchair.
Creative genius, biting wit
Ed Smith left us in September 2017. It’s agonizing to know that he’s no longer with us, he who loved life so much, he who inspired untold legions of friends and strangers to live life to the nines, as he certainly did.
Ed Smith was one amazing guy. As education superintendent, I hired him as a school principal in my education jurisdiction, where he enhanced his well-deserved reputation as a progressive and caring educator. Subsequently, he headed a community college complex. But his heart was in writing, which eventually became his full-time passion and income source.
When the car accident dramatically altered his circumstances, there were those who opined that Ed’s writing and speaking days were over. They didn’t know Ed. Even before his rehabilitation was behind him, he was wrapping his agile mind around new endeavours: a syndicated newspaper column, speaking gigs, and several books. Prior to his wheelchair confinement, Ed had published seven books. In the following two decades, he wrote a dozen more, among them a poignant and instructive account of his life-changing ordeal and the road back. From the Ashes of My Dreams is a must-read. You’ll need to peruse it at least twice. First, you’ll find yourself racing through the pages, gripped by fate’s cruel lottery, flummoxed at the mindless inflexibility of some caregivers, the empathetic grace of others, and, above all, spellbound by the indomitable spirit of Ed and the entire Smith clan. A second reading will allow you to relish the precision, succinctness, and beauty of the language, the apt imagery, the gallows humour, and the ingenious, seamless manner in which the voices of Ed, his marvel of a wife, Marion, and daughter, Jennifer, spell off each other, giving the reader a fast-paced, lucid portrayal.
Marion Smith is no mean wit herself. She told me of being in a restaurant with Ed. Once Marion had made her menu choice, the waitress tucked the menu under her arm, signalling the end of the ordering routine. A furious Marion, in a shaking voice saturated in sarcasm and disgust, scolded, “He eats, too!” The waitress had seen the inanimate wheelchair but missed the obvious. In the chair sat a real live human being.
Two peas in a pod
My self-inflicted immobility gave me a fuller appreciation of the mettle of those whose movements depend on wheelchairs and/or the assistance of caregivers. Long-time wheelchair users are amazingly adept at being masters of the conveyance rather than its prisoner. For an upcoming visit to Seattle by Rick Hansen10, I was tasked with finding a US champion for his fundraising initiatives. A friend suggested John Kucher, who, like Hansen, had a life-changing accident as a teenager. I tracked Kucher down, only to find he and his late wife, Linda, resided in my neighbourhood.
I love to watch John make his lightning-fast transition from his collapsible wheelchair to the driver’s seat of his Saab convertible. In a near-simultaneous series of moves, his arms catapult him off the wheelchair; while he’s in mid-air, his hands collapse the chair behind his back; his left hand throws it behind the seat as, with his right hand, he jabs the ignition key into position and the engine roars into life.
Seattle, 2002, with Rick Hansen
(Author photo)
Hansen and Kucher are two peas in a pod. The similarity of their physical situations seemed incidental to the bond they quickly forged. Their agile bodies brook no barriers. Their focus and love of life, their humour and humanity are what define them. After Rick’s Seattle Rotary speech, we all debriefed over Kentucky Fried Chicken at John and Linda’s place. The rapport between John and Rick was a symphony. Hansen’s insatiable curiosity and attention to detail and John’s aw-shucks demeanour made for a memorable afternoon.
Life in the fast lane
John Kucher is the proud owner of a sailboat. Most every Tuesday, he competes in the craziest of all water sports, Seattle’s Duck Dodge Race11, listed in Fodor’s as one of the “Top 100 things to do in North America.” With as many as 250 craft entered in a race to the finish, tracking a zigzag course across the harbour in every conceivable direction, the experience is not for the faint of heart. I’m always game to try anything once, though, not being suicidal, bungee jumping is my one no-no. So, when John suggested I go along for the ride, I did just that.
The two-hour, heart-stopping event was a bigger adrenalin rush than I had thought possible. Harrowing, yes, but thrilling! We survived with nary a nick on gunwale or crew. Some other daredevil was the victor, but we finished the course, and respectably so, doing justice to John’s more modest objective—“No DL, no dead last.” While I busied myself with heartfelt paeans of thanksgiving, John calmly secured the sailboat till next week’s race. A standing invitation, recently renewed, will shortly see me back on the water with John, hanging on for dear life and gratefully admiring his impressive sailing skills.