Here's an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, Walking Through Snow, about my journey back from Quadriplegia, Brain Damage, and PTSD. The moral of the story? Never give up!
P.S. There's a FREE download of a song about this experience at the bottom of this entry!
P.S. There's a FREE download of a song about this experience at the bottom of this entry!
Pain is the road back
So there I was, in the Neuro Intensive Care Unit, awake at 3AM. Just another long scary night like all of the
others; the monitors screaming, signaling my imminent death every time I did manage to
duck the feeling of electrocution long enough to drift off into a morphine sleep of shallow
breaths and dreams of running, threading needles gleefully, of feats of athleticism and
coordination. Another psychotic fear-filled night full of alarms, and murmurs from
Robert, the comatose ex-cop somewhere near my head. Another night of seizures, alarms,
and close-calls for Adnan in the bed somewhere near my feet.
This night, the pain was really bad, and Cleve and the other staff had been just too busy
to get to me. Not that there was that much they could do, but at least they could turn me
over and stretch me, and change my smelly diaper. And then of course, there was
Morphine, which couldn’t kill the pain, but could sort of distract me from it into those
exultant denial dreams of playing sports and guitar.
My arms were stiff blocks of burning wood. I was repeatedly convulsing in a feedback
loop of vicious clonus(1) spasms. I was sweating from the convulsions, exhausted, and
feverish too. I felt that my whole body below my neck was a mass of smoking, burning,
crackling, arcing wires, all plugged right into my brain’s pain center. The new pain in my
foot was starting to compete malignantly for my attention, another unbearable burden to
bear. If I’d been sane, I’d have marveled at the body’s sheer unexcelled power to produce
pain. But I was buried within it, not intellectualizing about it. The exhausted staff seemed
nowhere to be found. There were no crises, no emergencies now, and it was almost dead
quiet, just the subdued howl of my monitor whenever I breathed too shallowly. Just the
chirps and beeps of the alarms of the others around me, as they also danced their own
little pas de deux with death, advancing, then retreating from his arms.
I guess because no one was around, I finally gave myself permission to cry hard. I mean
really, really hard and loud. I felt like one of those soldiers who has been tortured to the
point that he’s completely broken, that he’ll do anything, say anything to stop the pain.
Up to then I’d largely been joking, superficially confident and almost ‘inspirational’ to
my friends – telling them that this accident meant something, and that if it didn’t, I’d
make it mean something. And I’d been somewhat stoic when alone, always hoping for
things to ‘ease off’. When I did cry, it was quietly, discretely, kind of a controlled little
letting off of steam. But now, my defenses were down, the pain had cut through all hope
and the abandoned ward gave me some license. I started weeping powerfully and praying for death.
I found I couldn’t stop. A howling wail arose from somewhere and it took me awhile to register
that the sound was coming from within me. It seemed that my whole body was weeping,
that the clonus was my body’s way of weeping.
I don’t know how long it lasted, but suddenly heard a quiet voice near me. I opened my
eyes and saw a very old-looking, gray-haired doctor in a spotless white jacket, leaning
over my bed. “Why are you crying?”, he said. I remember thinking “oh boy, here’s Mr.
Macho, reproving me for crying”. It reminded me of a time in a park when I was a little
boy and skinned my knee. I was crying, inconsolable, when an old man came over to me
and said “big boys don’t cry” to me, contempt written all over his face. I’d never
forgotten it, and perhaps that’s why it’d taken so long to finally let totally go and cry like
a baby. I felt my gorge rise in righteous indignation and defensiveness. “because I can’t
stand the pain, because it doesn’t stop, only gets worse!”, I spat back petulantly. “No one
else is crying here”, he said quietly, in a soft, measured voice. “Do you know why that
is?” Again, I thought he was going to disparage me like that old man in the park for
somehow lacking courage. “No!” I shouted “Why?” “Because their wires are all broken.
They will never walk again. Some of them will never use their arms again. Some will
never breathe without help again. Take that woman over there:” (He pointed off into the
darkened unit at someone I couldn’t see) “She’s 22, fell of a barstool drunk, broke her
neck. She’ll never move anything below her neck again and will probably be on a
ventilator for the rest of her life. If she’s lucky, she’ll get to the point that she can blow
into a tube to move her wheelchair around. She keeps saying it’s not true, keeps praying
to God for a miracle, but there will be no miracle, no escape for her. You’re the only
person crying from pain in this ward.”
“You’re the only one who feels anything at all. And you’re the only person who will ever
have a chance of walking, of using his limbs like a normal person again. Your pain shows
that your wires, even if they’re crushed, still carry some signals. Those signals are chaos
right now – that’s what the pain is – chaos – under-sensitivity, over-sensitivity –
everything out of proportion, some sensations numbed to the point of disappearance,
others amplified to the point of distortion. But you can push yourself through those wires
and reestablish contact and recalibrate the sensitivity. Go into your pain. Use it. Your
pain is your way back to the land of the living”, he said. And with that he left.
To this day he has some of the qualities of a hallucination, and I’m not sure he wasn’t;
what the hell was an elderly doctor doing in the NICU at 3AM anyway? But I somehow
do not think he could be a construct of my mind, because his description of my situation,
though absolutely correct, was totally antithetical to any opinions I myself had about my
predicament; I don’t think I could have dreamed up his line of reasoning because it was
utterly counterintuitive to my own at the time.
So he was either real, or perhaps he was a visitation from an angel, or God. I’ll never
know. I only know that he gave me courage, and he did it in the only way that could have
worked: he challenged me while acknowledging my pain, validated my suffering and yet
imbued the experience with a positive healing connotation. In a complete reversal of my
own mind’s sense of natural order, he managed to bathe the darkest coldest most
implacable pain I’d ever suffered with an almost divine power to heal. He also washed
away a large part of my self-pity, my petulance, and my rage at my predicament with his
empathy, understanding and inspiration.
others; the monitors screaming, signaling my imminent death every time I did manage to
duck the feeling of electrocution long enough to drift off into a morphine sleep of shallow
breaths and dreams of running, threading needles gleefully, of feats of athleticism and
coordination. Another psychotic fear-filled night full of alarms, and murmurs from
Robert, the comatose ex-cop somewhere near my head. Another night of seizures, alarms,
and close-calls for Adnan in the bed somewhere near my feet.
This night, the pain was really bad, and Cleve and the other staff had been just too busy
to get to me. Not that there was that much they could do, but at least they could turn me
over and stretch me, and change my smelly diaper. And then of course, there was
Morphine, which couldn’t kill the pain, but could sort of distract me from it into those
exultant denial dreams of playing sports and guitar.
My arms were stiff blocks of burning wood. I was repeatedly convulsing in a feedback
loop of vicious clonus(1) spasms. I was sweating from the convulsions, exhausted, and
feverish too. I felt that my whole body below my neck was a mass of smoking, burning,
crackling, arcing wires, all plugged right into my brain’s pain center. The new pain in my
foot was starting to compete malignantly for my attention, another unbearable burden to
bear. If I’d been sane, I’d have marveled at the body’s sheer unexcelled power to produce
pain. But I was buried within it, not intellectualizing about it. The exhausted staff seemed
nowhere to be found. There were no crises, no emergencies now, and it was almost dead
quiet, just the subdued howl of my monitor whenever I breathed too shallowly. Just the
chirps and beeps of the alarms of the others around me, as they also danced their own
little pas de deux with death, advancing, then retreating from his arms.
I guess because no one was around, I finally gave myself permission to cry hard. I mean
really, really hard and loud. I felt like one of those soldiers who has been tortured to the
point that he’s completely broken, that he’ll do anything, say anything to stop the pain.
Up to then I’d largely been joking, superficially confident and almost ‘inspirational’ to
my friends – telling them that this accident meant something, and that if it didn’t, I’d
make it mean something. And I’d been somewhat stoic when alone, always hoping for
things to ‘ease off’. When I did cry, it was quietly, discretely, kind of a controlled little
letting off of steam. But now, my defenses were down, the pain had cut through all hope
and the abandoned ward gave me some license. I started weeping powerfully and praying for death.
I found I couldn’t stop. A howling wail arose from somewhere and it took me awhile to register
that the sound was coming from within me. It seemed that my whole body was weeping,
that the clonus was my body’s way of weeping.
I don’t know how long it lasted, but suddenly heard a quiet voice near me. I opened my
eyes and saw a very old-looking, gray-haired doctor in a spotless white jacket, leaning
over my bed. “Why are you crying?”, he said. I remember thinking “oh boy, here’s Mr.
Macho, reproving me for crying”. It reminded me of a time in a park when I was a little
boy and skinned my knee. I was crying, inconsolable, when an old man came over to me
and said “big boys don’t cry” to me, contempt written all over his face. I’d never
forgotten it, and perhaps that’s why it’d taken so long to finally let totally go and cry like
a baby. I felt my gorge rise in righteous indignation and defensiveness. “because I can’t
stand the pain, because it doesn’t stop, only gets worse!”, I spat back petulantly. “No one
else is crying here”, he said quietly, in a soft, measured voice. “Do you know why that
is?” Again, I thought he was going to disparage me like that old man in the park for
somehow lacking courage. “No!” I shouted “Why?” “Because their wires are all broken.
They will never walk again. Some of them will never use their arms again. Some will
never breathe without help again. Take that woman over there:” (He pointed off into the
darkened unit at someone I couldn’t see) “She’s 22, fell of a barstool drunk, broke her
neck. She’ll never move anything below her neck again and will probably be on a
ventilator for the rest of her life. If she’s lucky, she’ll get to the point that she can blow
into a tube to move her wheelchair around. She keeps saying it’s not true, keeps praying
to God for a miracle, but there will be no miracle, no escape for her. You’re the only
person crying from pain in this ward.”
“You’re the only one who feels anything at all. And you’re the only person who will ever
have a chance of walking, of using his limbs like a normal person again. Your pain shows
that your wires, even if they’re crushed, still carry some signals. Those signals are chaos
right now – that’s what the pain is – chaos – under-sensitivity, over-sensitivity –
everything out of proportion, some sensations numbed to the point of disappearance,
others amplified to the point of distortion. But you can push yourself through those wires
and reestablish contact and recalibrate the sensitivity. Go into your pain. Use it. Your
pain is your way back to the land of the living”, he said. And with that he left.
To this day he has some of the qualities of a hallucination, and I’m not sure he wasn’t;
what the hell was an elderly doctor doing in the NICU at 3AM anyway? But I somehow
do not think he could be a construct of my mind, because his description of my situation,
though absolutely correct, was totally antithetical to any opinions I myself had about my
predicament; I don’t think I could have dreamed up his line of reasoning because it was
utterly counterintuitive to my own at the time.
So he was either real, or perhaps he was a visitation from an angel, or God. I’ll never
know. I only know that he gave me courage, and he did it in the only way that could have
worked: he challenged me while acknowledging my pain, validated my suffering and yet
imbued the experience with a positive healing connotation. In a complete reversal of my
own mind’s sense of natural order, he managed to bathe the darkest coldest most
implacable pain I’d ever suffered with an almost divine power to heal. He also washed
away a large part of my self-pity, my petulance, and my rage at my predicament with his
empathy, understanding and inspiration.
Footnote: (1) Clonus is an instant spasming or rigidifying all or part of the body (in my case, all or
part of the parts below my shoulders) Typically, I'll stretch in the middle of the night and my
arms will shoot up rigidly into the air, and sometimes my legs will shoot straight out on the bed.
It's a symptom of spinal cord damage. It also happens when I yawn: my arms rise up of their own
accord and I look like I'm motioning an orchestra to silence. It's scary, of course, because it's
involuntary. I actually feel like an umbrella operated by a malevolent (or at least mischievous)
god. He slides the umbrella open and the fabric of me becomes taut. Sometimes he opens it partly
(my arms only) and sometimes he opens it all the way (arms legs, trunk). He never really closes it
all the way, which accounts for the rigidity or 'tone' in may arms and shoulders. The tone is a
constant stiffness that makes parts of my arms and hands feel like they're made of wood.
Clonus is worse when I'm tired, and (except for yawns or stretches) active mostly
at night. However, the first hour or so after waking - especially the first time I stand up
in the morning - is full of clonus. I'll have the very scary sensation of my arms and legs
becoming rigid as I stand up, which makes me feel that I'm about to topple over.
part of the parts below my shoulders) Typically, I'll stretch in the middle of the night and my
arms will shoot up rigidly into the air, and sometimes my legs will shoot straight out on the bed.
It's a symptom of spinal cord damage. It also happens when I yawn: my arms rise up of their own
accord and I look like I'm motioning an orchestra to silence. It's scary, of course, because it's
involuntary. I actually feel like an umbrella operated by a malevolent (or at least mischievous)
god. He slides the umbrella open and the fabric of me becomes taut. Sometimes he opens it partly
(my arms only) and sometimes he opens it all the way (arms legs, trunk). He never really closes it
all the way, which accounts for the rigidity or 'tone' in may arms and shoulders. The tone is a
constant stiffness that makes parts of my arms and hands feel like they're made of wood.
Clonus is worse when I'm tired, and (except for yawns or stretches) active mostly
at night. However, the first hour or so after waking - especially the first time I stand up
in the morning - is full of clonus. I'll have the very scary sensation of my arms and legs
becoming rigid as I stand up, which makes me feel that I'm about to topple over.
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