• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to do this,” I said. “I’ll help you clean it up.” The words had no sooner left my mouth before I realized I couldn’t help her. I felt terrible, helpless, and loathsome.

I started to cry.

“No, no, no, don’t worry about a thing. We’re just so happy that you did it. This is good because it means your system is beginning to work again.”

In humiliation, I could only lie there and watch the poor young woman change everything. It must have taken her at least half an hour to clean up and then at least twice that long for the odor to vanish.

My embarrassment didn’t leave me, even though my mind tried to tell me differently. I had barely taken in any food for twelve days and this was a real breakthrough. I, however, could only think that this was one of the most embarrassing events in my life.

As awful as it seemed to me, more embarrassing, helpless experiences caught up with me. I had to have a urinal; I couldn’t wipe myself; I couldn’t shave. I couldn’t even wash my hair. They had to bring special devices to lay my head in and pour water over my hair and then drain it down a tube to a garbage can. In yet another act of incredible kindness, Carol Benefield, who had cut my hair for years, came to trim my hair several times while I was confined to my bed. For these sixty-mile round-trips, Carol would accept no money whatsoever.

Friends, family, and medical personnel found ways of providing for all of my physical needs, but I could only think of myself as being completely, utterly helpless. My right arm, the one that hadn’t been broken, had so many IVs in it that they had a piece of wood taped to me so I couldn’t bend the arm.

I had IVs everywhere. They ran into my chest and entered the tops of my feet. They lined up in a major tube that went directly to my heart through my chest. Many of my veins collapsed. I was so completely incapacitated they had to lift me off the bed with chains to change my bedding or do anything else that required moving me.

I was losing weight at an alarming rate, which scared the doctors. I just couldn’t eat anything and atrophy had set in. During the nearly four months I stayed in the hospital, I lost about sixty pounds. Before the accident I had weighed 210, and I got down to less than 150. The only way they could determine my weight was to put me in a sling like a baby to lift me up off the bed and weigh me. They tried to coax me into eating and tempted me by preparing my favorite foods, but nothing tasted good. Just the smell of food nauseated me. I had no appetite. I tried to eat, I really did, but I couldn’t handle more than a few bites.

I assumed that depression stopped me from eating, although I don’t know if that was the cause. I do know that when I tried, I couldn’t force myself to chew anything. I didn’t even want to swallow.

They attached me to a morphine pump they called a PC. Whenever the pain was really bad, I pushed a button to give myself a shot. I had to have pain medication constantly. At first I tried to resist taking more painkillers, but the doctor rebuked me for that. He said that my body was tensing from the pain and that retarded my healing.

At night they gave me additional medication to try to make me sleep. I write try because the additional medicine didn’t work. Nothing they did put me to sleep—not sleeping pills, pain shots, or additional morphine. I had no way to get comfortable or even to feel relieved enough from pain to relax.

I’ve tried to explain it by saying it this way: “Imagine yourself lying in bed, and you’ve got rods through your arms, wires through your legs, and you’re on your back. You can’t turn over. In fact, just to move your shoulder a quarter of an inch is impossible unless you reach up and grab what looks like a trapeze bar that hangs above your bed. Even the exertion to move a fraction of an inch sends daggers of pain all through your body. You are completely immobile.”

Because I began to break out with bedsores on my back due to