Permission to bend
The accident, and the long hours that followed of ambulance, emergency room, labour and then waking from surgery to see our daughter, had obliterated the normal markers of daytime, nighttime or mealtimes. Time started again from zero—everything was measured in hours, and then days, since the accident. In rehab, I started reconnecting myself with ‘outside’ time, looking at the newspaper each day and marvelling that people’s lives went on regardless of our catastrophe.
One of the elephants at Melbourne Zoo was due to give birth to a calf any day now, and I followed the story, terrified that her baby too might die. The article recounted a statistic that made my heart ache for elephant mothers. For elephants giving birth in captivity, there was an extraordinarily high stillbirth rate, particularly for first babies. I thought of mother elephant eyes, weary with sorrow, and of a mother elephant trunk, searching out and touching on the still, hairy form of her baby, and wept my own elephant tears.
While I was eating my breakfast one morning, I drew rows of wonky boxes in my diary so that I could count the days. It was a double calendar. Each box had two numbers: the date and how many days since our own ground zero. Just writing the number ‘27’—the date of the accident—made me shudder and cry. I dripped strawberry jam on that box and drew a sad face beneath. It didn’t quite capture the violence of that day, but I couldn’t leave it unmarked. I’d had plans for these dates. These were to be days in a rented holiday house, lazy walks to and from the beach, with time to decide on a name for this baby, and to recover from the interstate move before we moved into our house and set up a nursery. By numbering those boxes, by stitching together these beautiful summer dates with our new messed-up reality, I inserted myself back into time, and was no longer in the suspended, timeless world of hospital.
I’d been discharged from Royal Melbourne with various letters (so much paperwork, getting hit by a car!), including one confirming that I had an appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon who had operated on my knee. That and my hoped-for discharge date were the only goalposts I could work towards at that moment.
I was so sick of rehab that the thought of an excursion, even if it involved more doctors, was vaguely appealing. Mum came with me, holding my hand in the back of the ambulance. Cars and traffic still terrified me, but the hovercraft delusion was holding up reasonably well. The ambulance driver was friendly, and I felt more like a well-treated parcel than an injured person by the time he delivered Mum and me to the patient transport lounge at Royal Melbourne. Appointment letter in hand, we followed coloured lines painted on the lino floor to find the right lift, the right floor, and eventually the right waiting room.
I sat in it with Mum and a variety of recently operated-on people, while the doctors and hospital staff moved around us. ‘I am a patient,’ I thought. ‘This is what we do: we wait patiently, we move slowly.’ I had a moment of horror when I recognised one of the surgeons. He’d been in the same year as me at college but studying medicine. I’d felt a tiny bit of pride on getting to Royal Melbourne without a major freak-out, despite the horror I still felt at cars, but suddenly I imagined how he might have seen me—as another patient on crutches, dressed in loud colours, or maybe just as a fairly standard knee injury. Thankfully, it wasn’t he who called out my name, but another young surgeon, with a dapper suit and piles of curly hair.
Before he would see me, the surgeon sent in a nurse to undo the staples that had held my skin together. She spent some time hunting around in drawers and cupboards until she emerged triumphant with what looked like a giant pair of plastic preschool scissors with the tips bent in sinister-looking ways. She angled a spotlight at my knee and, one by one, removed the staples, leaving little red dots either side of the thick pink scar that curved around my kneecap. I asked Mum to take photos. They came out more theatrically than I expected, a rubber-gloved hand hanging in the spotlight above my newly unstapled knee.
The nurse piled the staples in a yellow plastic kidney dish. I eyed them off and had visions of taking them to a jeweller, and asking them to make a short chain from all these wonky ‘W’s—maybe enough for a bracelet? They’d held me together for nearly three weeks. I wasn’t sure I was ready to let them go.
‘Is it okay if I keep the staples?’ I asked the nurse.
She wrinkled her nose slightly and smiled. For her, they were medical waste.
‘I don’t think so, but I can ask for you.’
She bustled out, and Mum and I sat there, waiting for the doctor.
I engaged in a short thought experiment, based on a popular reality TV show that I used to call ‘my life’. It involved not catastrophic injuries, grief and prodding by medical professionals but standing up in front of my contracts law class, talking to them about implied duties of good faith. How to bring colour and movement to the crucial High Court case of Hospital Products v United States Surgical Corporation? Why not show them some photos of my knee, with thirty-three surgical staples, just like the kind the defendant had promised to distribute on behalf of the US manufacturer but decided to repackage as his own product? There was something macabre about this thought, about plucking a teachable moment from the wreckage that the accident had wrought on our lives. At the same time, I felt ruthless. The accident took so much from us, why couldn’t I take a little back?
Suddenly, the surgeon was there, in his slim-tailored suit, the fabric creasing expensively around his own highly operational knees as he sat down on the swivel chair and riffled through my file. My leg was laid out on the bench, the velcro straps of the brace undone around it, but I had to swing it down so I could turn and face him.
‘There wasn’t a scan from before the surgery, was there?’ he asked, without introducing himself.
‘No, no … I don’t think so.’
‘Okay then; well, let’s have a look.’
He briefly examined my knee, made a quick note and pronounced he shouldn’t need to see me again.
‘And you shouldn’t need that brace anymore,’ he added.
‘But, um, will I be able to bend it again?’ I queried.
‘Yes, yes, of course—the physio will help you with that.’
And that was it.
As I gathered my crutches and bags and returned to the waiting room, I felt a little like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. ‘You mean all I needed to do all along was click my heels together and say, “There’s no place like home”?’
It was somewhere in another queue—after we’d taken a wrong turn down another winding corridor—that I wept. The lino changed colour here. Corridors of one building joined to an older building, with old-fashioned skirting boards. It was as though the new hospital had swallowed the old one whole.
I’d circled this day on the calendar. It had pulled me forward as some kind of marker, some way to differentiate one babyless week from another. I’d started the day chipper. This was a step on my way out of rehab, on my way home. I’d dressed smartly, felt like I was carrying off the pretence of being a normal, capable adult. Once these staples were out, I had reasoned, I would be able to have a bath or go for a swim. In rehab I had been able to put myself together each morning—piece new outfits together from my new ‘Crippled but Quirky’ collection and propel myself out into the thin simulacrum of the world that was rehab’s public spaces. And today we had braved vehicular transport, and navigated the long corridors of the Royal Melbourne Hospital to find the very dapper orthopaedic surgeon who granted me permission to bend.
I’d wanted the staples out, but the thought of bending, of walking unaided, of returning to this noisy, busy world that was so sharp with reminders of our loss, felt exhausting. My carefully gathered energy had brought me this far, but the lino corridors defeated me. I crumpled and wept. Mum held my hand, gathered me in a little, and then we went and found a wheelchair. We asked for directions, found another waiting room, and made it through the last appointment with the trauma consultant on the promise of a cuppa. I was relieved when Mum navigated us back to the caf. She went to buy the tea, and I looked around and realised that just over there was where we’d sat and drunk coffee after Z’s funeral; and there, just down that corridor, not 20 metres away, was the room where I’d pulled that small, solid box onto my lap and kissed her cold face.