confessions of a nonlinearmind

Latent Anger

You know how there are certain things everyone says they wouldn’t wish upon their worst enemy? That’s often true until latent anger sets in following a catastrophic loss. After I broke my neck, I felt the same way… for a while. The suffering and hallucinations I experienced in intensive care felt like torture, but it was at the hands of doctors who were ostensibly doing what’s best for me. I became sympathetic to people who had undergone actual torture, in war or domestically, at the hands of a sadist rather than in ICU. As I would lie in bed in recovery, I had high hopes of a full recovery. I could feel and move my feet, and I had an amazing woman who swore she’d stay with me through it all.

Six months later, she was gone, I wasn’t get much more function back, and was living in a nursing home. At first the anger took a seemingly benign form - I’d see someone else in rehab with an injury worse than mine and was glad it wasn’t me. Then I’d meet people with injuries not as bad as mine and I’d get jealous, maybe even a bit angry inside, when I’d learn they were doing something careless like driving drunk or diving into shallow water.

As time passed and hopelessness set in I began to think dark thoughts. Surrounded by suffering old folks at the nursing home, I’d think that I’d be willing to put any one of them out of their misery with my bare hands if it would get me my body back. I would see an injury on a football field or see a news report of an accident and hope the worst, that maybe there would be one more person in the world who would lose everything like I had. Out in the world, I’d see happy couples and wonder how happy they’d be if this had happened to them. I’d see kids doing tricks on skateboards and bikes without helmets and think about how I wore a helmet and didn’t rode over my head (although I always did as a kid).

But time passes, and the anger fades. Four years later, I was telling my therapist that I still sort of hoped to see a spinal cord injury when a pro football player was injured on the field for a while. Part of it is latent anger, but part of it has to do with wanting the world to be exposed to spinal cord injuries, wanting a second coming of Christopher Reeves, wanting the world to see that most times, a full physical recovery isn’t in the cards.

One of the things that has helped me resolve some of these issues is an 18 year old named Ricky. He worked in a bike shop I go to for wheelchair adjustments, and was everything I’d been looking for in a catastrophe candidate - he was young, attractive, reckless, had a beautiful girlfriend, and was taking a year off to goof around before college. A year ago, he was doing a rail grind down the railing of a flight of stairs on his bike. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, but that ultimately didn’t matter given the fact that, when he came down head-first, the crushing of his cervical vertebrae absorbed all the impact, protecting his brain, but leaving him a C4-C5 quadriplegic only able to move one arm, but not the hand. He’ll never feed himself, bathe, drive a car, proficiently use a computer, spend a day alone, or do many other things again.

I now think of him every day. Whenever I struggle to do anything, he comes to mind. It’s interesting, because I’ve never been able to embrace religion, never felt a daily presence of God in my life - I’ve wanted to, but have never felt it. But recently, the one thing that seems to get me though my struggles or appreciate what I have is thoughts of that poor kid. I’m for once able to step outside of my own circumstance and mourn and genuinely hope for someone else. So while I still, admittedly, have some issues, I consider myself a recovering quadriplegic - my heart and my mind continue to heal.