CHAPTER 7

One Day at a Time

Someone made a board for me on a giant orange piece of poster paper, writing the entire alphabet on it so I could spell out what I wanted to say, letter by letter. Visitors would touch a letter with their finger and I would nod when they got it correct. It took a little time getting used to communicating like this, which was rough, but once we had a system in place for pointing to letters, I could at least be understood. The first name I spelled out was that of the friend I knew would be having the hardest time with the accident. I wanted to know if she was okay. I would point out one name at a time, but almost daily, I returned to asking about her. No one had really asked me about who pushed me, even though the families all knew. No one outside of the core group was told. It was one topic that was left alone, maybe out of respect for us both. Everyone just knew not to talk about it.

I was able to communicate through this board that I wasn’t angry. And I wasn’t. Not at my friend or any of the girls there that night, not at myself, and not at what had happened. I didn’t cry and I wasn’t angry. We had a lot of laughs along the way as I tried to communicate all of this, but I was able to at least acknowledge how I was feeling, try to console everyone who was upset, and thank them for being there for me. I told them I was there for them, too. I wanted them to be okay. Even later when I could talk, I informed them over and over again, “I am totally fine.” I think they suspected I was more hurt than I was portraying, which is half true, half not true, but they were just trying to protect me. I was processing information pretty darn well in spite of everything.

After the whirlwind at the very beginning, where there was an urgency to my treatment, after everyone caught their breath and the initial shock began to subside, deeper conversations with the girls really began. Step one was obviously getting myself stabilized and knowing the physical challenges that were ahead of me. That was the most important element of recovery. Next, of course, was the mental aspect of it. Everyone by the pool had had some time to really process, at least to a certain extent, exactly what had happened.

We had a couple of group discussions. The girls wanted to be certain there was no anger. Once I could speak, I was clearer about this: I wasn’t holding back. I wasn’t angry at all. I think because I hadn’t really shown a lot of emotion, they thought I was repressing my feelings. Even at this point, when I was getting stronger, they were still crying. I’d heard they cried together in the ICU. They were extremely upset and traumatized. I had to help them, and this was the first time I realized it was up to me to be the spine for the group. Even though they were still quite emotional, they were there for me, really there. They visited a lot, they talked, they helped, and they were committed. It was a nice feeling to experience that kind of love from friends.

One of the girls told me she’d initially been worried that Chris might leave me, but after seeing us together, and witnessing how he had responded and cared for me, she wasn’t worried anymore. She saw our love firsthand and realized we were both strong individually and our love was strong, too.

I don’t think anyone doubted my strength beforehand, but it was never really put to the test until this accident, so it was never questioned. I never had anyone ask me to think about what would happen if my life took this kind of turn. Who thinks of those things? In this case, there was nothing that had happened to even compare it to. It was a bizarre situation. I couldn’t say how anyone else would handle it. Every day was one day at a time.

Whenever I felt my mind going into a negative place, I literally told myself to stop. I didn’t want negative thoughts to send me spiraling downward into a depression or rage. I never allowed it to get to that point, and it wasn’t just for all of my friends and family; it was for me, too. It was simply a fight-or-flight response for me, a coping mechanism, as if my brain told me not to cry because crying would be bad. Crying wouldn’t do me any good. I didn’t want to feel like crying or being close to tears, and so I would tell a joke or request that my friends come in and then talk to them constantly. I was never alone with my thoughts.

Looking back, sure, that might have been avoidance. Maybe. But at the time it still got me through it.

The tears eventually fell, but not exactly because of my situation as a whole. I cried about incidents that occurred but not where life had taken me. One time, I thought my fingers moved. I was always trying to move them, and I could have sworn that one finally did, and I remember telling my dad that it was the one thing that I wanted back. I had been in a hospital bed in the ICU for six days, and my dad was in the room. I moved my wrist, and it appeared as if my finger had moved. I said, “Dad, my finger moved!” I cried out of happiness then. If my wrist moved even slightly, it made it look like my finger moved. I saw what looked like a twitch for the very first time, and I gasped quietly with happiness because I thought movement and function were returning in my fingers.

Having movement in my fingers would have meant a lot, because small twitches like that are significant. From what I’d heard it would have been a good indication that I’d recover finger movement someday. I’d heard that if you started feeling your digits five or six days after breaking your neck, that was good. In the big picture it would have meant touch, and an ability to do my own hair, or to hold Chris’s hand back when he held mine, or a million other small things we take for granted each day.

It’s funny how even then everyone was saying, “She can’t walk.” Walk, walk, walk, walk. I wasn’t even thinking about my legs. In the beginning I didn’t even know what was moving and what was not. But by the sixth or the seventh day, I was trying to pick up things and use my hands, and I realized, All I want is my hands back. I began to understand how much regaining finger function would mean to my life and how drastic an impact it had on my day-to-day functioning. It was one of those things I hadn’t given any thought to before: my fingers and the importance they play in my life. Suddenly, they’d become almost everything, monumental.

A woman from physical therapy came in for an evaluation, and she held my hand to see if I had any twitches or flickers of the muscle. She felt something, too, and it reinforced the idea that I had in fact made my finger move. I got really excited, but I think I knew deep down that my fingers weren’t exactly working.

Sadly, she was wrong and I was right. I waited for my fingers to work again, desperately searching for a sign they would, but eventually I realized they weren’t doing anything at all. There were no more twitches. There really hadn’t ever been any. I learned about my wrist and how it was making my fingers appear to move. I was slowly relearning my body and realizing that there were muscles I hadn’t even thought about that weren’t receiving the signal from my brain to move. It wasn’t one heartbreaking moment or day. I just eventually realized over time that my fingers weren’t going to move.

It’s a toss-up between feeling sex and moving my fingers, but I think fingers would be all I would ask to have back if I could, more than anything else.