A Twist and a Swirl
It happened so quickly. I was just stepping out of the car with my cane, and suddenly I was on the pavement. I guess I just lost my balance. But I went down fast, and I turned my knee as I went. The leg braces I wear hold my foot at a right angle. So when I do fall, unfortunately the brace often forces my knee to turn, because as I am going down, my foot is in the way--if you can picture that.
So there I was, sitting on the ground next to our rental car with the car door open, trying to catch my breath from the sudden blast of pain coming from my knee. If I had been at home, I could have sat there until I calmed down enough to assess the damage. But I was at the Orlando airport.
My husband and I had been to see my ailing parents for a couple of days just before Christmas. We had masked up and flown to Florida, with my hubby pushing me in my wheel chair through the airport, rented a car, put my wheelchair in the back, and driven to my mom and dad’s home. The wheelchair had lived in the back of our rental car for two and a half days while we visited my parents. I can get around with just my cane most of the time.
Then, that morning we drove back to the airport, planning to use my wheelchair again for the journey from the car to the plane. We had just pulled into the parking garage to leave our rental car with the attendant. My husband stepped out on his side and was handing over the car keys to a woman wearing a badge, when I decided to go ahead and get out so that I could sit down in the wheelchair when he brought it around. I donned my mask, opened my car door, and . . .
A nearby employee saw me go down and shouted, “Oh, Señorita! Cuidado, cuidado!” He and two others came rushing toward me. All of them were speaking Spanish and trying to help me up. But my knee. My knee was like a nova burst of white, hot pain that took my breath away. I couldn’t speak. I could only pant and hold my knee and shake my head. I didn’t want them to help me up.
My husband knows that to pick me up, you have to get behind me and lift from under my arms, because I don’t have the strength in my legs to push up. I searched in my brain for some Spanish vocabulary to somehow communicate this with them, and finally, in-between breaths I managed, “Esposo (husband).”
One of them went around the car and said to my husband, who had somehow not noticed the commotion, “Your wife.” He looked back into the car and didn’t see me. My seat was empty, and my car door was open. But he couldn’t see me because I was on the ground, out of view. He came around the car, puzzled, and saw the employees leaning over me. Before long, he had the wheelchair out and me in it, rolling me across the pavement while pulling our suitcase behind him, traversing the crosswalk, the elevator, the sidewalk, and into the airport terminal.
Fortunately, I did not have to stand up out of the wheelchair to go through security. The last few times I have flown, I have found it easier to stay in the chair and let the security officer call out “Female assist!” A uniformed woman will come and give me a full pat down while I am seated. They always ask if I am wearing any metal devices, and I explain about my leg braces. They swab them, and my shoes, and my hands, and my chair. It’s a whole process, and my husband stands there and waits, holding my purse and my cane.
When we got to the gate, I was finally able to prop my foot up while we waited to board. I could see that my knee was swollen, and it felt warm through the fabric of my pants. I wondered how it would feel when I had to walk to my seat on the plane. Would I be able to put weight on it? My husband wheeled me down the jetway and parked the wheelchair, like we always do, at the door to the airplane. From there I had to stand up and walk.
My husband handed me my cane. I grabbed his elbow with one hand and steadied myself with my cane in the other, while the airline personnel folded up my chair and took it away, out a door and down some steps to the belly of the plane.
The first step confirmed that this trek to my seat would not be easy. My knee was a rubbery strip of raw bacon that sizzled like it was being dropped into a hot frying pan. One step into the plane. Two more steps to the first row of seats where I let go of my husband’s arm and grabbed the blue leather headrest. With each step a new raw egg was cracked into the hot grease and hissed.
A few hours on the plane, a second painful limp back to my wheelchair on the jetway, a roll through that airport and out to our car, and another agonizing walk from the garage finally brought me into our house and into bed.
The next morning, before I even got out of bed, my husband went to our local drugstore and bought me a walker. A beautiful, ugly, gray metal, necessary, extremely helpful, depressing, frustrating walker.
I needed it. I couldn’t just use my cane to get to the bathroom. I had to have the walker. I leaned on it when I stood up, and I was able to walk without putting too much weight on my knee. It worked.
For the next few days, I sat on the couch with ice on my knee and my trusty new walker by my side. I hated it. I sarcastically told my husband it was the worst Christmas present I had ever received. But I was grateful for it.
There is a strange combination of emotions whenever I have acquired a new piece of equipment for helping me with my disability. It’s a chocolate/vanilla swirl of hope and sadness that churns around in my heart for a while. I’m extremely disappointed that I’ve reached a level of weakness in which I need such a device. I’m angry at myself for not being more consistent with physical therapy exercises, while not knowing if that would have helped anyway. I’m swallowing covetousness of those who can still go on hikes and ski and swim. But at the same time, I am grateful that such things have been invented. That I can still spend days on my own at home with these things to help me. And I am thankful for the reclaimed abilities that these tools have brought back to me.
As my knee has healed over the past few weeks, I’ve continued to use the walker. I’ve found that I am actually walking better with it than I did with just my cane, even before the knee injury. I didn’t realize how bad my balance was before, and how much I was using the furniture and door frames inside my house to grab onto for stability. So maybe I should keep using the walker.
Still, I claimed a little triumph yesterday when I walked—pain free—into the church just holding my husband’s elbow and my cane. No wheelchair, no walker. I sat at the piano and led our live-stream congregation in singing praises to the One who has continued to walk by my side.
And then when we got home from church, I walked victoriously through my kitchen with just my cane. To be honest, I decided to try it because I couldn’t figure out how to carry a bowl to the table while using my walker. Using just the cane, one hand is free. And getting around without the cumbersome walker felt so good. So now I can’t decide. Should I try to go back to just using my cane, or should I keep using the walker? Perhaps I will use the cane when I’m feeling strong, and the walker when I’m a little unsure of myself—a sort of cane/walker swirl, if you will. At least for the time being. As long as I can get to the ice cream.
Suzanne Rood is the author of A LIMP OF FAITH (Credo House Publishers, 2019), her story of daily life with CMT, a hereditary neuropathy that challenges her walking, her music, and her faith. Here’s a link to purchase the book on Amazon.