I didn’t know who my first visitor at Lyndhurst would be, but the last person I expected to see was one of Rich’s clients, barely more than an acquaintance of mine. Aaron burst through my closed curtain carrying a giant vase of flowers that fully obscured his face. As I pulled my blanket up to my chest—taking note of the lax security situation—he plopped the vase on my windowsill and then leaned both his hands on the end of my bed like he was giving his calves a good stretch.
“Rich told me you weren’t seeing any visitors, but I was in the neighborhood, so.” He shrugged. “I came by.”
As far as what visitors I would allow, it essentially came down to this: I would only see people I could fart in front of. From that perspective, the list was pretty long. But Aaron was not on this list. And because he was not, our visit quickly became exceedingly uncomfortable. As he talked, I writhed on the bed, my legs flopping this way and that, my fists occasionally pounding the mattress, trying to clench my bum, which was virtually impossible. Even with the tumor gone, I had to concentrate extra hard to figure out where my bum actually was.
“Aaron it’s been really great to see you thanks for the flowers they’re beautiful you have to go.”
As soon as he left, I called Rich.
“I need a bodyguard.”
“Oh, no. Who came?”
“Aaron.”
“What?!”
“Yeah.”
“I just got off the phone with him half an hour ago telling him not to visit.”
“It didn’t work, but I have some good news. I’ve been moved to a private room.”
“You got a private room and Aaron saw it before me? That’s just great.”
Rich had worked so hard with my actors’ union to secure me a private room in the (unlikely) event of a long hospital stay. If I raised my bed to a full sitting position, I could see perfectly out the south-facing window that looked onto a huge, dewy green lawn with a tantalizing glimpse of the ravine below. The grass was largely taken over by hyper dogs and their less-hyper owners. I have never been a dog person, but I made myself zero in on the movement of their quick furry legs as keenly as I studied the legs of their owners. My view would serve as an endless documentary on the mechanics of walking. It made me realize how much of my comic life, as both an actor and a civilian, had been tied up in the way I moved—with my hands and feet providing the bulk of my physical humor—but since my feet had gone rogue, try as I might, I could find nothing funny in their absence, so I looked out the window and took notes.
In those first few days at Lyndhurst, I was overwhelmed with visits from varying hospital staff. Dr. Zimcik, my new GP; Dr. Emm, the physiatrist who treated a variety of medical conditions affecting the spinal cord and nerves; the quiet, young resident chaplain; a social worker. They each had a very specific role to offer in my recovery if I chose to access their services. Because the only question I had for any of them was the only one I knew they couldn’t answer, I barely said anything at all.
When will I walk again? Will I ever walk again? When will I walk again? Will I ever walk again? When? Will? When? Will? When?
I met my primary nurse, Rumy, on my second day there. I assumed I was not the first patient at Lyndhurst to take gait-studying to a whole new level, but I might have been the first one willing to trade in my old, very serviceable walk for a new one, and the walk I wanted was Rumy’s. Her hips moved as if she were walking the shallow end of a pool—slow and languid—and she never rushed no matter how rushed she was. I wondered, if I learned to walk again, would my body naturally go back to the gait it had before or would the slate be wiped clean? I was concerned that the answer to that question was contained in my bum, which was now, as my son Joey so succinctly put it, a dumb-ass. My nervous system, from my belly button down to my baby toes, was firing madly but on different cylinders, my circuitry board having been rewired by a clown. I tried to picture my gait before all this happened, but I could only visualize myself in exaggerated moments: crouched low when my children were little, holding out my arms for them to come to me; affecting a model’s walk when prancing around the house in a new pair of heels; sliding across the tile floor, in socks, surfer-style, to answer the front door. I told Rich how my greatest wish was to somehow unearth a video of me walking the way I did before all this happened.
Joey was the first to let me in on a little secret.
“Uh, Mom? Haven’t you done like a few hundred episodes of TV? You think maybe you walked in any of them?”
Right! I could search YouTube, but it felt too soon. I wasn’t ready to see myself as I once was.
On our first meeting, Rumy asked if I could transfer from my wheelchair to the bed by myself. Every time I was asked a question that began with “Can you,” I felt a rush of petulance followed by a sour stream of anger. At St. Mike’s it was the same thing: Can you put your shoes on? Can you sit up? Can you tell me if your toes are moving up or down? My first thought before I opened my mouth was always: Are you people a bunch of fucking idiots? Or worse: Do you think I’m a fucking idiot? I thought Rumy would be different. What person couldn’t get from their chair to their bed without help? In the interest of starting off our relationship on the right foot, I swallowed my impulse to answer imperiously.
“I think so, yes,” I said, with just the right amount of shyness and deference. Now watch this.
I held on tightly to the arms of my chair for leverage, then pulled my weight up, shifted over (so far, so good), then collapsed right in between the narrow space between my bed and the chair.
“Oh dear! Hold on!” Rumy said, then ran to get help.
While I clung to the space between the floor and the chair, using all the strength I could find, I thought of the neurologist Dr. Shure’s fascination with my string-bean arms. When pressed into action, they proved stronger than the rest of my body put together. Rumy returned with another nurse and a four-foot-long wooden board to facilitate the transfer from my chair to the bed.
“I’m really sorry, Rumy,” I said, once I was safely on the bed, staring at my knees like a chastened child.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You’ll figure out how to transfer in no time.”
“I thought I could do it.”
“And you will be able to soon enough.”
“I keep forgetting why I’m here.”
•
Of all the people I met when I first arrived, the only name I really cared about was the one on my weekly schedule pinned to my corkboard, the one person I had no choice but to meet with five times a week for the duration of my stay: Amanda, my physiotherapist.
I remembered that the punky, highly pierced girl Rich and I had met outside St. Mike’s had told me her physiotherapist was Neil. She said there was another PT named Amanda, but that I should try to get Neil. I cursed my luck. The punky girl had told me how Neil made his patients walk up and down a steep hill in Sunnyside Park, behind the rehab clinic, as a condition of their discharge. I reveled in the image of me traipsing up a hill, my arms swinging, my legs steady and firm, sure of their place on the ground—Julie Andrews singing from the mountaintop, my whole face tipped toward the sky, triumphant.
My first few sessions with Amanda had an awkward feel to them, as if we were both trying to squeeze through a narrow doorway at the same time.
“I don’t understand how to walk,” I explained to her. “I can’t remember what body parts I’m supposed to be activating or in what order. I don’t know when to squeeze, when to lift, when to touch down. I don’t get it.” Then, I had an idea. “Amanda, would you mind walking across the room for me?”
Our bodies were very similar—both of us around five feet two, with the same smallish frame, but Amanda’s body was packed more tightly than mine. Her walk had a refreshing, clean feel to it—like a blade of grass. I was certain that studying Amanda’s gait would be easier than what I had been doing up to that point, which was watching YouTube videos of people walking around Manhattan, first at a normal pace and then in slow motion. I watched them over and over, pausing the video to take note of when a knee bent, where a foot landed, how the distance between the feet remained approximately the same after every step, how the walker looked around without veering off course. I was fascinated by each subject’s almost arrogant entitlement to space and of how easily he or she fit inside it. I would cross check what I was watching on my computer against the dog walkers and toddler chasers outside my window. Between my sessions with Amanda and my YouTube homework, I resolved to cobble my old walk back together again.
But I continued to feel as if I had been cheated somehow. Based on that one brief conversation with the punky girl, I was convinced that Neil was the best possible choice for me. I saw him in the PT room. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, even as I tried to absorb what Amanda was telling me. Neil was wiry and quick. I could practically feel the heat of his energy burning off him. That’s what I needed, I thought, someone who could whip me into shape in record time. Amanda’s energy, by comparison, felt too slow, too measured, too safe. I thought I might never get out of Lyndhurst if I had to work at her pace. So I started lying to her in order to jump-start my recovery.
“Can you feel the floor today, Ruth?” Amanda asked. I was sitting on the blue plinth, staring at my feet. They were complete strangers to me.
“My feet feel quite floaty at the moment!” I said, neatly sidestepping her question, too afraid to tell her that, no, I couldn’t feel the floor.
She was smiling at me, pleased—I think—that I could feel anything at all.
“That’s great, Ruth. Let’s get you up. I want you to hold on to my shoulders and I’ll hold your thighs.”
I watched as she gripped both of my legs with her small hands. “Can you feel that?”
“Sure!” I felt nothing.
“Great. Now I’m going to help you lift your right leg and place it on the plinth beside me so that you’re standing on just your left leg. Don’t worry, though—I’ve got you. Now, can you feel your left glute turn on?”
I squinted. “Wow! I think so!” My leg could have been wrapped around my head for all I knew.
Over the course of that first week, I realized something terrible: Amanda believed everything I said. Encouraged by my tone, which suggested my nerves were responding positively to all kinds of stimuli—touch, floor, fabric—she had an idea she thought might interest me.
“We’re going to get you down on all fours,” she said.
I felt a pressure in my chest, like I was being choked from the inside.
On a much wider plinth, one about the size of a queen-size bed, I got down on my hands and knees, swaddled on all sides by plastic-covered foam rectangles.
“So what’s going to happen here?” I asked in my most raring-to-go voice.
The goal was simple enough: to remain in that position without tipping.
Meanwhile, across the way, Neil was bouncing around like a pogo stick while his patient alternated between smiling as if he was watching a circus act and frowning because he was the next performer up.
“I just want you to lift your right hand off the mat,” Amanda said, carefully, so as not to frighten me. “Not too far, just a bit, and balance on your other hand and your knees. Can you try that?”
“Of course!” My heart beat wildly. I can do this, I thought. The problem is not in my hands. I can feel my hands just fine, I can lift my hands, I’ve lifted my hands a million times before. My knees were wobbling like mad. I stared at my hand, begging it to rise up, but my brain refused to let it happen. My hand was afraid to come up, knowing that the rest of my body could not balance without its support. Come on, I told it. Just come up a little. I smiled at Amanda. She was very still, watching me patiently, giving me the space I needed to figure it out on my own.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe we can start with something else?”
“Sure, Ruth. No problem. How about you try lifting your left knee only. Not too high! Just a tiny bit off the mat.”
“Good idea. I can do that.” But I didn’t know where my left knee was. I looked under my chest and toward my legs, but that made me dizzy. I started listing. The lump in my throat grew larger. I knew I could squeeze out only one more sentence so I wanted to make it worthwhile. “I want to go back in my chair!” I wailed, before falling over.
Amanda moved swiftly—the fastest I’d seen her move—to get me comfortably seated again. I wanted to be the best student she had ever seen—the best student Neil had ever seen, so that maybe he could poach me away from Amanda. I looked over at Neil. He was leaping up and down like a frog while his poor patient watched, utterly confused.
“This is all my fault,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I ask questions, but I don’t understand the answers—or my body doesn’t. I know you’re trying, but I’m really confused. I need to take little sips, not giant gulps. I feel like I’m choking on information.”
Amanda nervously played with her bangs while she tried to figure out how to respond. I could tell she was growing out her hair but was stuck in that middle stage where it was long enough to fall into her eyes but too short to tuck back behind her ears. She kept brushing her bangs aside anyway—her tiny act of futility somehow like my own.
“Amanda,” I said, once the lump in my throat had safely retreated. “Here’s what I think maybe we should do: just one thing at a time from now on, okay? I see now that it’s the only way this walking thing is ever going to work out for me. If we work on one tiny thing at a time.”
Amanda nodded her head, relieved. I suspected this was her plan all along before I decided to push my half-baked agenda on her. I looked at Neil and his patient again. He was bouncing on his toes. His patient looked like he had packed it in for the day.
“So that’s okay with you?” I asked.
She nodded again. I didn’t want her to think I was angry. I just needed to press the reset button. I smiled at her and she smiled back. We were now on the same team.
•
I thought that by the end of my first week at Lyndhurst, I had met all the staff members I was supposed to meet, but there was one more.
“Hello, Ruth! Can I come in?”
“Sure.” A man’s running shoes and wheels pulled up to my curtain as if my bedside were a parking spot.
He threw back the curtain with a ta-da flourish. He was younger than me, handsome, confident. I saw a folder on his lap, an official name in block letters across the top.
“I just wanted to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about the Canadian Paraplegic Association. I’ll listen to your story and maybe I can tell you mine.”
A silence followed while we sized each other up. His eyes darted over me like he was connecting the dots.
“You look really familiar to me,” he said.
Perspiration bloomed above his eyebrows as if I had called it forth.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Kellan.”
Instinctively, I thought: Be polite, don’t encourage, find the nearest exit.
I didn’t think my story was any of Kellan’s business and I resented his casual presumption that I had arrived at some sort of higher ground where I could look back with clarity on what had led me there. But there were steps I had to follow to get him to leave, so I did what was required of me, moving speedily from tingles to tumor to Lyndhurst. Then, sticking to my first rule—be polite—I asked with dread, “How did you get here?”
“Eighteen years ago, I started to have this recurring dream that a tree fell on me. I ignored it for as long as I could—after all, it was just a dream. But I found myself thinking about it too much during the day. It was affecting my school work, everything. So I told my mother, who reassured me that a dream is just a dream. My parents were building a cottage in a heavily forested area. We had a bunch of acres; it was going to be their dream retreat. My brother and I went up north with my dad to do some clear cutting. My dad and I hacked away at this one tree. The law of gravity dictates that when you cut it one way, it will fall the other way. I saw the tree falling toward me, but I wasn’t fast enough, even with my father screaming at me to run.”
The parts of my body that weren’t buzzing were shivering.
“Anyway,” Kellan said, “I’m paralyzed from the waist down.”
That could have been me. I could have been paralyzed from the waist down.
In spite of my rule not to ask any questions, I asked: Exactly how many times did you have this dream? Had you ever cut down a tree before? Did the doctors ever lead you to believe that you’d walk again?
I, too, had had a premonition of something bad befalling me, but I wasn’t about to admit that to Kellan. Before my very first appointment with Dr. Bright to discuss my tingly feet, I had become increasingly paranoid about two back-to-back raffles I had won. I didn’t even care about the prizes; I had entered both raffles on a lark. The first win felt fluky, the second like an omen. They made me consider the other lotteries in my life, all of which I’d won—the guy lottery, kids lottery, friends lottery, career lottery. I had had to work hard to shake the feeling that something horrible was about to happen to me. The last thing I wanted was for Kellan to think he could recruit me to his Paraplegic Association just because I was in a hospital, lying down, with a wheelchair next to my bed. I am not a fucking paraplegic! I wanted to yell.
Instead, I blurted out, “Do you date?” Since the surgery I had been known to blurt out sexual non sequiturs.
“Sometimes.”
“How does that happen?”
“What? How does that work?” His voice pitched upward and his face reddened.
“Wait, what? I didn’t ask that! I meant how do you meet people?”
At St. Mike’s one day, within seconds of my parents arriving for a visit, I had wailed, “Rich will never have sex with me again!”
“Of course he will,” my bewildered father had said, a laugh falling out of his mouth in spite of his gross discomfort.
“He won’t he won’t he won’t!”
My mother had jumped in, maybe to save me but probably more so to save my father.
“Honey,” she said. “Nobody has ever loved someone as much as Rich loves you.”
“It doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter! I’ll never have sex again!”
“I would never ask a person that,” I mumbled to Kellan. Now we were both staring at our laps, as if we were praying, or working through a really tough math problem.
Then Kellan clutched his agenda tightly in his hands. Using the embers of his embarrassment to stoke his cause, he told me with great fervor about the Canadian Paraplegic Association. As he talked about the benefits and hidden joys of his club, I had a bone-chilling thought: Did he know something about me that I didn’t? Did he have access to my files? Was Dr. Ginsberg’s French-press vote of confidence at the hospital merely a way of delaying the truth—that my wandering legs would never ground themselves, that I would never walk again?
“Kellan!” I said, cutting off his spiel. “I appreciate you coming in . . .”
Rule number one—be polite.
“. . . but I don’t want to know about your services. I’ve got enough on my mind. I have no room for this, not one tiny scrap of room, Kellan.”
“I hear ya, Ruth. I understand. But would you be interested in membership?”
“Membership? Membership in what?”
He held up his folder like it was exhibit A. “The CPA.”
“No.”
“Can I ask you a few questions from my questionnaire?”
“Fine.”
He placed the folder on his still legs as if his lap was his de facto desk.
“Your date of birth.”
“Pardon?”
“June 7, 1965. Why?”
“Your address.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your address,” he said, evenly.
“Why on earth do you need my address, Kellan?”
“So we can send you material when you make the transition home in your wheelchair.”
I felt sick thinking of the words home and wheelchair in the same sentence. “No! Enough!” I turned away from him and looked out the window, where my people walked and laughed and chased dogs. “I’m not answering any more of your questions.”
He put the package on my bed and I swung back on him. “And by the way, I’m on TV, okay? That’s why I look familiar to you. I would normally say, oh, maybe we went to high school together, maybe we met in line at Costco, maybe we this maybe we that, but let’s face it—none of those things happened. You were watching TV and you flicked past my face scolding Billy Ray Cyrus or or or being some kid’s mother on some kid’s TV show and that’s where you saw me, okay? We don’t know each other.”
I turned back toward the window and instantly felt like an idiot. Maybe he had seen me at Costco. The second I heard the curtain whoosh closed, I flung Kellan’s folder onto my windowsill where the CPA logo landed faceup.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. The following day, a new nurse tended to me. Young and super eager, her hands shook as she tried to attach the IC to empty my bladder. While she poked around looking for the right hole (“This has never happened to me before! I’m so sorry!”), she told me a feel-good story about a quadriplegic who had walked out of Lyndhurst.
“If he was a quad,” I asked, “what would I be considered?”
I said nothing.
“An incomplete paraplegic.”
I looked steadily at her, preparing to fight her on this ridiculous assessment, but she was smiling at me with such unreserved brightness, I wondered if maybe she was a bit off.
“I have to tell you something,” she said, unable to hold it in any longer. “I’m a huge Degrassi fan!”
And then, perhaps to emphasize her point, she rolled me over and shoved a “magic bullet” up my bum.
•
“Touches.” In my previous life as an actress, “touches” were what you had right after lunch, and before you started shooting again—a quick go-over in the hair and makeup chair to ensure that you were camera-ready. But in this new context, “touches” meant a nurse squatting next to you while you sat on the commode, her face level with your thighs while you read, or tried to read, or played with your phone or wrote lists or otherwise made busywork to distract from the latex-gloved finger wrapped in the blue plastic square, like a finger ice cream cone, twisting up your bum to fish out a poo. It was a well-known fact (although I didn’t know this until months later, having stubbornly avoided all Internet searches regarding this subject) that for those with SCIs, walking is only slightly less difficult than regaining bladder and bowel function. My physiotherapy was rarely scheduled before eleven A.M. because “touches” sometimes required a full morning’s labor to produce results, if any. It was also why I forbade anyone from visiting before noon. Morning, I would tell people with a forcefulness no one dared question, was not the best time.
My rehab bathroom was three times bigger than my own doll-size one at home, and tricked out for even the most disabled resident’s use. Once “touches” were over, I would remain on the commode and then roll up next to the bathtub without actually getting into it. The bathroom floor sloped gently toward the center of the room so the water could run toward the drain. There were hand railings on all walls, a harness hanging from the ceiling over the toilet for patients who needed to be lowered onto it, emergency pull cords reachable from any place one might slip, a shelf beside the toilet that housed not just toilet paper but also the ubiquitous beige latex gloves and oversized squares of blue plastic.
Showering consisted of me sitting naked while Rumy washed my back, calves, and feet with the handheld showerhead, then passed it to me so I could wash all the body parts I was able to access on my own. I didn’t even try to pull in my stomach or sit up taller to make my breasts look less swingy—I couldn’t be bothered. Rumy would poke tiny holes in the silence with gentle chatter.
“My son got a job at the grocery store.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sobeys.”
“Ah. Which one?”
“Off Marlee.”
“Oh. I know that one.” In fact, Rich had developed a new routine since I’d been gone. He would take Henry to that grocery store a few nights a week to buy the boys all the things that I wouldn’t: sugary cereals, bacon, ham, Asian pears, Oreos.
“Henry loves that store,” Rich told me. “I love it, too.”
“I’m really glad,” I said, and I was, but it also made me miserable. Did anybody in my house miss me as much as I missed them?
Rumy wasn’t the kind to affect false cheer or to buoy me up with overly large smiles and useless platitudes. She gave me unspoken permission to be my miserable self when I wanted to. But the shower was an elixir. My feet, despite their lack of understanding in the up/down department, could still feel the difference between hot and cold, a lucky break that was rare among SCIs. The heat and the rush of water awakened all my joyous cells, cells that lay dormant until activated by very specific stimuli. They couldn’t always be accessed by visitors or by my kids or by unexpected gifts delivered to my room in elaborately bowed boxes, but the whoosh of water against my skin never failed to make me feel happy to be alive.
One morning, my occupational therapist, Heidi, made a rare trip to my room.
“Looks like Amanda is going to be away today,” she told me. “So I thought we could do something in the OT room instead. Sound good?”
“Fine. You might want to sit down.” I was in the middle of a battle with my shoes. “This could take a while.”
I always wore shoes to physio, although never during physio. I could barely reach over, reach down, grab the shoelaces, and then, once I had finally gotten my drunken left foot down and into the mouth of my shoe, I simply had to go on faith that it had hit bottom. The whole futile exercise frustrated me to the point of tears, but I had made the decision, many days earlier, not to cry in public anymore. Instead, I more or less panted like a porn star.
“There!” I said. My floaty feet were in and my laces tied. Heidi nodded her head slowly, impressed.
In the OT room, I transferred onto the plinth while she rigged some MacGyver-type contraption to help get me back on my feet. I thought occupational therapy was just for figuring out how to access your stove from a sitting position, or for introducing one to the wonders of long-handled back scrubbers, but not today. There was a pointer, a felt pen, a huge whiteboard, the plinth, and a chair. I felt like a contestant on a new game show: Wheelie of Fortune. While Heidi and her assistant set things up, I sat quietly. I rocked back and forth a little, stopped, rocked back and forth again, stopped. I thought: There’s something stuck on the back of my pants. It wasn’t painful or overly uncomfortable, but I wasn’t sure I liked it. I shifted, but the thing attached to my bottom shifted with me. I was growing increasingly aggravated. I slid my hand under my right butt cheek, but turned up nothing.
After watching me grope for a while, Heidi asked, “What’s going on?”
“I think there’s a pen in my pants,” I said. It felt long, narrow, kind of hard.
“I think it’s your bum,” she said.
“But it’s under my bum.”
“No, I think it is your bum. I think you just found your sit bone.”
She waited.
“I think your right butt cheek just turned on,” she said, spelling it out for me.
My right butt cheek was back! It felt weird, it felt foreign, but it was back. I rocked one way, then the other, giving my bum a hug from above. One butt cheek down, one more to go.
•
Each morning, I called home and spoke to Rich and the kids, got up to speed on the shape of their days, got off the phone and cried, endured my “touches,” and—depending on the results—cried again. After that, I would wheel around my room loading up my purse with supplies to ensure I wouldn’t have to look at any of the other patients: two pairs of sunglasses, a notebook and pen, a pencil for my Globe and Mail crossword puzzle, and an entertainment magazine. Packing my purse was easy; parking it on my lap, not. I would wheel a few feet and the purse would slide off. I would bend down (carefully, carefully), swipe it off the floor, then slap it back on my lap, then wheel a few more feet before it would slide off again. I would do the same thing over and over but expect a different result until I noticed one day that the strap on my purse was long enough to wind around the handlebars at the back of my chair. So that’s what I did, twisting painfully behind me to the right, then to the left, to sling my purse over the curved rubber knobs. But the strap was too long and the wheels of my chair rubbed up against the leather, which both slowed me down and gave my bag wheel burn. I unslung the bag from the handlebars and slammed it back down on my lap, then held it in place with one hand while I wheeled forward with the other, switching hands every few feet to steer so that I didn’t end up spinning in half-baked circles like a dog chasing a squirrel. It was five weeks before I had my lightbulb moment: I needed a knapsack.
After enlisting Rich to purchase one for me, I realized I had another problem: My hands had become raw and blistered from pushing the wheels of my chair. A very good-looking staff member, who also happened to be a paraplegic, found me in front of the elevator one morning rubbing my hands. He had a suggestion.
“Get the leather gloves with the little balls on them. They have maximum grip.” He held out his gloved hands for me to see.
I was reluctant to ask Rich to find some for me—buying them felt like cementing my fate. I asked him what he thought a good alternative might be.
“What about Henry’s batting gloves?”
“But he’s going to need them.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Here, Mom,” Henry said on his next visit. “Try these.”
“Yep.”
They were his tiny white batting gloves with the snap enclosure around the wrist. They fit me perfectly. I wore them every day after that, and the blisters disappeared.