Here she goes again…

Wrote this yesterday, didn’t get around to posting it until today. What can you do …

You know what I just realized? Today is my 2-month anniversary of waking up from the coma. That’s it – just two short months. I woke up on February 29th, which is kind of cool. Also, I woke up on day 18 of my coma. Eighteen is a very significant number in Judaism. The letters all have number values, and the word ‘chai,’ which means ‘life,’ has the number value of 18. So coming to life again on the 18th day is also pretty cool.

It is very, very hard to imagine that it has only been two months.

I remember how helpless I felt. The rehab nurses would come in every day to work on my muscles and would try to get me to move my legs – just lift the knee, lift the ankle – and my traitorous legs refused to move.

My hands were in claws, curled up. The times I was awake and no one was in fussing with something medical, I would go over the physio exercises I had been given for my hands and arms, over and over again. I wanted to be able to write again, to feed myself.

I remember the first time I fed myself all alone. The nurse poured my box of cereal into a bowl and put a cloth on my chest to serve as a bib. I dragged the bowl onto my chest and, ham-fisted, spooned the cereal in. A fair amount only made it onto the bib. I still got tired of eating it before it was finished. I hadn’t the energy or strength to put the bowl back on the table, though, and had to wait for the nurse, bowl on my chest.

When I got a little stronger, I would insist on eating dinner myself, slowly cutting off a small peice of meat and manovering it to my mouth. J and my SIL admitted later that it drove them both crazy to watch how slow and awkward I was, that they wanted to just grab the cutlery and feed me.

I remember that I always felt as thought I could not breathe properly, and that was partly because I couldn’t. For at least the first week, they’d put me back on oxygen for nights, and randomly throughout the day when my oxygen fell low. They tested me constantly, checking my oxygen level, blood sugar level, blood pressure. Four times a day, they stuck a needle in my fingers for the blood sugar. Three times a day, they stuck a needle in my belly to give me heprin ( blood thinner to prevent clots). Those burned like a match being held to my skin and the bruising lasted so long the last of them has only just faded.

I insisted on having a fan blowing at me all the time, because then I felt like I could breathe. My family quickly learned to stay out of its path. After a while, it didn’t have to blow directly at me, and then I graduated to not needing it at all. I still can’t breathe properly, though. I still have pleurisy, which means the lining of my lungs is inflamed. I cannot take a deep breath, but I can take a deeper one than I could a week ago. Hiccups feel exactly like a hard punch in the chest, so when I have the misfortune to get them, I sound like this: “Hic! OW! Hic! OW!”

The first time the nurses tried to get me to sit, they pulled me up into sitting position on the side of my bed, three of them surrounding me. I put my fists on the bed to steady myself and they let go. And, just like a small baby, I began to topple over even as I tried to hold myself up.

So they sat me in a chair instead. They took a harness, the kind one would use on a small whale and, rolling me to one side, they put in on the bed. Rolling me to the other side, they had it completely under me. The hooked the loops on each corner up to a machine hanging from the ceiling and lifted me off the bed, swung me over to the chair and lowered me. The first time I sat in the chair I stayed half an hour before I was exhausted, and was lifted back.

As soon as I got comfortable in the chair, the nurses insisted I get there myself. They were always upping the ante. They placed a walker in front of me and hauled me to my feet. As I stood, feeling excruciating pain in my calves and feet, I looked down. My feet were slightly curled under and looked exactly like my grandmother’s feet had and in that moment, I believed I would never again walk normally.

Once I got used to the two-step shuffle it took to get from bed to chair, the nurses handed me the walker, pointed to the hall and said, “Go.” I made it 25 steps the first time. They counted. I was as delighted as a small child and celebrated by buzzing around the ICU in my wheelchair, with the nurses cheering.

I made it 50 steps the next day.

Today, I walked the regular loop with Jasper at the dog park. I walked for half an hour, which means that loop took me about twice as long as it used to, but still, I made it through the whole loop. And that was after getting a few groceries and before picking up the kids and taking Asher to get a new fiddle.

Look at me – you’ll see no hint of what I’ve gone through. It’s all written on my body underneath my clothes, the deep red scars on my belly, my torso, under my left arm. They are my constant reminder of much I’ve gone through to get back here. That, and the looks I sometimes see on the faces of my parents and J. Two months clearly is not as long for them as it is for me.