For the better part of the day, I drift in and out of consciousness while Erica tackles some of the many important administrative tasks necessitated by the accident, intently tapping emails out on her BlackBerry and occasionally leaving for the ambulance bay, where cell phone calls are allowed. She keeps me briefed on her progress with a constant, cheerful patter.
“Mom and Dad should both be here by the time you get out of surgery,” she reports. We have delayed notifying our parents until now, partly hopeful that the news will be less worrisome if delivered with a diagnosis and treatment plan, perhaps also reluctant to set in motion events that will bring them together for only the second time since their acrimonious divorce five years ago.
“How did Mom take the news?” I ask. Fiercely loving, Mom had been deeply concerned by lesser threats to her children’s health and happiness when we were growing up.
“Fine, so I knew it hadn’t sunk in,” Erica replies, scanning incoming emails. Then she looks up, frowning. “But when she called back with her flight plans, she told me she almost threw up when it hit her how seriously hurt you were.”
While Mom’s response to this particular trauma seems perfectly appropriate, her distress in any situation pains Erica and me greatly, and our lifelong desire to preclude it must have contributed to the development of our ability to remain calm and competent in a crisis.
Erica smiles at the BlackBerry. “My friend Adam Googled Dr. Vargas for us.” I suspect she has a crush on Adam, and hope his support means the feeling is mutual. Maybe once her own divorce is further behind her, she can marry him.
“OK, here’s what he found out.” She reads aloud: “Licensed in New York State . . . good, no board certifications . . . don’t know what that means . . . graduated from med school in 2001. So that makes him . . . early thirtysomething. Wow.”
“Huh, quite the spring chicken,” I say. “Seems like he knows what he’s doing, though . . . right?”
“Yeah,” Erica says, looking up, “and when I talked to your internist this morning, he said Bellevue specializes in injuries like yours, and that it sounds like you’re getting excellent care.”
“Well, that’s good, since I don’t have a whole lotta choice at this point,” I respond, momentarily sobered to think of how much of my future rests, literally, in the hands of strangers. “I’m going to start a foundation,” I proclaim, to chase off darker thoughts, “to help victims of toilet accidents around the world overcome their embarrassment. I’ll call it . . . the Toilet Emergency Association. TEA!”
Erica laughs. “And to raise money, you can sell white rubber bracelets with little dangling toilet charms on them.” We are both laughing loudly now, and I wonder what “the neighbors”—a couple of guarded prisoners cuffed to gurneys nearby—think of our unlikely exuberance. Bellevue is the designated hospital for people incarcerated at New York’s Rikers Island jail complex, as well as officers of “New York’s Finest” police force. Presumably the two parties don’t share rooms.
Removing an elastic band from her wrist, Erica stands up and steps forward. “Here,” she says, gathering my long, heavy hair into a ponytail on top of my head. “You’re getting tangled in it. Better?”
“Much,” I reply gratefully as she returns to her seat. “I just wish I didn’t look so bad.” Physically incapacitated and stripped to my underwear beneath the sheets, I feel uncharacteristically self-conscious.
“Is it the morphine talking, or is there an inordinate number of ridiculously good-looking doctors around here?”
“Yes!” Erica yelps in agreement, rocking forward and slapping her knee. “It’s unreal—like a Hollywood rom-com or something.”
Sensing my genuine discomfort, she rummages in her purse for some makeup and stands up again. Dotting concealer under my dark-rimmed eyes and smudging a bit of gloss on my lips, she adds, “But hey, your pedicure looks hot.”
At 3:00 p.m., a doctor we’ve not yet met rolls me and my bed, followed by Erica, through a labyrinth of corridors and up in an elevator to a curtained bay outside an operating room. There, Erica and I construct a long list of questions to ask Dr. Vargas about the imminent surgery while I clumsily sign legal authorizations for the procedure with my nondominant left hand. Suddenly, he and his three assisting residents appear in a crowd of slate-blue scrubs at the foot of my bed. Their matching shower caps look both comical and foreboding.
“Do you have any questions before we go in?” Dr. Vargas asks, eyes darting upward to the clock on the wall behind us.
“Yes,” I reply emphatically.
He folds his arms across his chest and listens intently as I launch into a series of inquiries about the procedure, the decisions he would need to make in its course, the best and worst possible outcomes. His responses are measured, detailed, and in terms I can grasp despite the foreign subject matter. When he does not know the answer to a question, he says so.
Finally, I ask the question that weighs heaviest on my mind: “And, uh, how many times have you guys done this?”
“I lead a team of surgeons that performs about eighty tendon or nerve repairs a month.”
“That’s great! Now, please don’t take this the wrong way, but . . . how many have you personally done?”
Dr. Vargas pauses just a beat. I think I notice him draw a small breath and wonder if he is calculating the many qualifying events or, realizing his response will inspire either fear or confidence, picking an impressive number to cite. “About a hundred.”
My internist has advised that any number above twenty is favorable, so I’m satisfied by this response. Then it occurs to me that I didn’t ask how many spaghetti wrists he’s operated on, but I push the thought aside. Time is of the essence. “Awesome. Let’s do it,” I exclaim, as if I have a choice. The team promptly wheels me into the operating room, where I dutifully count back from ten and succumb to general anesthesia.
I awake that evening in a silent, white recovery room, shrouded by a gray curtain drawn partially around my bed. The large, empty space amplifies my sense of estrangement, and my chest feels as though someone has been jumping on it. I find my right arm propped over my head, hand and forearm dressed in lightly plastered gauze that covers the surgeons’ tracks, hinting at nothing of their success or failure. Thankfully, Erica soon arrives.
“Hey . . . how’re you feeling?” she asks, pulling back the curtain and hugging me gently.
“Crappy,” I croak. “How’d it go?”
“Dr. Vargas says there was more damage than they thought, so it took longer than expected—about three and a half hours. But they were able to do everything they needed to.” I want to know more but am too exhausted to ask questions, too mentally hazy to digest more information.
Presently, two dark shapes obscuring the distant doorway come into focus, revealing my approaching parents. I can tell from their screwed-up faces that I look as awful as I feel.
“Oh, love,” Mom says, teary-eyed as she leans down to kiss my cheek.
“Wow, kid, that’s an impressive cast,” Dad says, reaching in to smooth my hair. His eyes shine, too. I receive my parents’ greetings with a smile, relishing their unexpectedly reassuring presence, and forgetting to worry about how they will tolerate each other, or how Mom will stomach the story of the accident, which Erica begins to tell as I hover on the edge of sleep.
I next awake an hour later, in a room in the surgical recovery ward where I will spend the night. Dad has gone to meet my stepmother, Kate, at their hotel, and Erica prepares to head home for some sleep after her fifteen-hour shift of vigilance on my behalf. Both will return in the morning, and Mom will stay in the empty bed next to mine, though I haven’t asked her to. Chronically independent, I don’t like to ask for help, nor does it often occur to me that any might be available. But I don’t want to be alone just now, so I’ll let Mom mother me, at least for the night.
We don’t sleep much. Rather, I muse aloud in a semi-coherent, stream-of-consciousness monologue about my hopes for a strong recovery, trying to convince myself that I can live a good life even without one. Mom, always indulgent of my philosophical jaunts, follows along, occasionally interjecting practical encouragement I desperately need to hear: “You’re a hard worker, love. You’ll do the best you can, then you’ll adjust to whatever happens.” Twice she fetches nurses to shoot me up with more morphine when its efficacy begins to wane. When we see the sun rising—a neon, pink-orange flood through Queens—I note with satisfaction that I have survived the day of the accident.
Erica arrives just after 7:00 a.m. with giant cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and several chocolate honey-dipped doughnuts, my favorite naughty breakfast. After we’ve eaten, Mom calls my stepfather, Charlie, while Erica escorts me to the unit’s only shower, a few steps down the hall. Light-headed and unsteady, I hold her arm as we walk. Once inside the yellow-tiled, curtainless room, complete with plastic guest chair, she helps me remove my hospital gown, then watches protectively as I fumble in excruciatingly slow motion with the faucets and soap, trying to lather and rinse all six feet of me while maintaining balance and keeping my plastic-wrapped forearm elevated. Inept and embarrassed, I imagine I know how my eighty-year-old grandmother felt when she unexpectedly needed me to haul her withered body out of the tub one time when I visited her during high school. Like a male doctor performing a breast exam, Erica chats about superficial topics—the cold front moving in, what she’ll make for dinner that night—in a vain attempt to defuse the awkwardness of the situation.
Dad arrives just after Erica and I return to the room. “Hey, folks! How’s everyone doing?” As Mom gingerly extricates my arm from the plastic sheath I’ve worn in the shower and Erica styles my hair into a French twist, Dad, a talented amateur photographer, darts around us snapping candid black-and-white photos with his professionally outfitted digital camera. His seemingly blithe attitude clearly annoys Mom, but I know the camera gives him a needed sense of purpose in this most disturbingly uncontrollable situation, and that the resulting images will be a testament to his watchfulness.
Around 11:00 a.m. Dr. Matthews, one of Dr. Vargas’s team members, comes to discharge me. “You look ready to go,” he says, flipping and signing pages on his clipboard.
“Was it the updo or the lip gloss that tipped you off?” I say. He laughs, then instructs me to return for a checkup in one week—or immediately if my fingers turn blue, indicating insufficient blood flow to the hand—and cautions me against moving the muscles of my hand, as the repaired tendons will be at risk of rupture for six weeks or so.
As Erica helps me wind myself up in a couple of wool wraps she’s brought, a coat sleeve being too narrow to fit over my bulky dressing, she informs me she’ll be taking me to her Upper East Side one-bedroom apartment to stay for a while. Though I haven’t thought about where I’ll go from the hospital, the plan surprises me because Erica, an exacting person, does not share personal space comfortably. However, my apartment lacks a functioning toilet, and the difficulty of my morning’s ablutions have made it clear I can’t care for myself, so I appreciate her foresight and sensitivity.
At her apartment that afternoon, Erica ushers me straight to her inviting, pillow-laden bed for a nap. While she doles out my prescribed cocktail of pain medication, anti-inflammatories, and antibiotics onto the bedside table, I try to find a comfortable position for sleeping with the outsize foam elbow rest the nurses have supplied to keep my hand elevated, which we have dubbed “The Guggenheim” for the thick straps that encircle it, like the floors winding around the famous New York museum.
Dad kisses me goodbye before catching a train back to Rhode Island with Kate. “You can do this, kid. I’ll call you every day,” he promises. I suspect they are cutting their stay short to give Mom space, since she plans to stay in town awhile to help Erica care for me, and Erica will take some time off from work to do so. Neither Mom nor Erica circumscribes the scope of her assistance with specific dates, and I can’t think far enough ahead to see a problem with that.
After my nap, Erica, Mom, and I have an evening snack, then Mom leaves for her hotel and Erica and I retire early to her bed. Every three hours and forty-five minutes throughout the night my burning hand awakens me, and assisted by Erica, who wakes the instant she feels my body shift on the mattress, I take another couple of pills to assuage the pain. Between doses, I sleep fitfully and dream of violence. Dining out with friends in one dream, I am disgusted but not surprised to find the restaurant’s bathroom strewn with severed limbs and smeared with layers of blood, both fresh and dried. “So this is how it’s going to be,” I mutter, eyeing the filthy toilet seat.