The next six days pass indistinctly. Befuddled by medication and the lingering effects of trauma, I am perpetually exhausted and in pain, eat little, and have difficulty concentrating on stressful but necessary tasks that Mom and Erica can’t execute for me, like handing work projects off to colleagues and submitting health insurance claims. I live underwater, swept along by a slow current past sights that used to be familiar—Erica’s apartment, city sidewalks, the few close friends who visit—but look strange from my new perspective. Why aren’t I in my home, going to my job every day? Didn’t I used to be able to walk outside without fear of bodily harm? Have my friends ever wept for me before now? I observe, rather than participate in, this alien world.
Searching for a mental landmark that will help me find my bearings, I assess my situation for a similar challenge I’ve surmounted before, a requisite skill I’m confident I possess. I find none. Instead, I worry whether the searing pains in my hand signify life or decay, what it will take to wean myself from the powerful pain medication, how to tell my boss I don’t know when I will return to work.
Most unsettling, I have no vision of the future. Will I be able to hold a pen and write? Or write but not type, or type but not without looking at the keys? Will I feel closer to loved ones, or lonelier for having had an experience they may never understand? Having been violently forced to confront my mortality, will I find “normal” life a blessing, or stupid and superficial? Overwhelmed by these unanswerable questions, I sorely feel the lack of a mentor to spot me through my trial.
One night as I lie in bed trying to fall asleep, I remember that a business school classmate, Scott, survived a terrible accident two years prior. We’re not close, so I only learned about it through a chance meeting with him at our class reunion a few months ago.
At the time, I hadn’t fully grasped his explanation of the damage done to his hand and arm, which looked normal to the untrained eye, only that it had been extensive. Now, replaying the hazy fragments of conversation I can retrieve from memory, I realize that we must have suffered similar injuries. If so, he could surely tell me something of what to expect from my body in the near future.
I go to the living room, kneel in front of the side table where Erica keeps her laptop, and flip it open. It’s password protected, so I have to get creative to bring up the password prompt, pressing the Delete key with a pencil I clench between my teeth, while holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys with two fingers of my left hand. Success! I spit out the pencil and enter the password Erica has written for me on a Post-it note stuck to the desk. Once I’ve tracked down Scott’s email address on our school’s alumni website, I open up a new email message, paste the address in, awkwardly type a brief note, and compose a subject line I hope will cut through any clutter in his inbox: Advice and encouragement for a fellow hand-injury sufferer? Then I go back to bed, spent but hopeful.
The next morning, I see that Scott has already responded, offering warm wishes and help. He proposes calling me from his home in London as soon as our schedules jibe, which turns out to be a few days later.
“I have lots of good, practical advice for you,” he begins. “But first, I have to tell you something. And you’re going to think I’m crazy for saying this, but someday you’ll know it’s true.” He pauses. “You’re lucky this happened to you.”
Like so many words of late, these make no sense. I do feel lucky that the ballistic shard of porcelain slashed my wrist instead of, say, piercing my jugular vein and ensuring a quick, ignoble death in a blood-soaked negligee. But the suggestion that the accident has been a good thing . . . well, that strikes me as pretty radical. Then again, flying high on hydrocodone, I lack the mental agility to wrap my head around subtle concepts, so maybe I’m missing his point.
“Uh, OK. Why’s that?” I ask cautiously.
“Because you’re going to learn and experience things that you couldn’t any other way,” he replies. “Amazing, wonderful things that most people go their whole lives without knowing.”
I can’t deny the truth in the cliché that tough experiences often teach useful lessons. But at that moment, in bed and bone-tired at 7:00 p.m. because I can’t stay awake for more than three hours at a stretch, contemplating my total loss of independence, ambition, and ability to make the most basic decisions about my immediate future, I still can’t imagine what benefits the accident might yield that could possibly justify the pain, anxiety, and dilemmas it has caused. It just feels like a brutal exercise in grit. But I want to believe it will prove as . . . worthwhile . . . as Scott has predicted, so I promise to reconsider that possibility when I’m feeling stronger.
Turning to the subject of rehabilitation, Scott and I determine we’ve both suffered severe damage to tendons and nerves serving our hands, which threatens their long-term functionality. He tells me I can expect months of occupational therapy (OT), and predictably preaches the importance of adhering to the exercise regimen my occupational therapist will design for me. I don’t expect his ensuing advice, however, which is essentially “Play doctor.”
“Learn everything you can about the hand—the anatomy, mechanics, everything,” he urges. “That way you know what the hand is trying to do in healing. Then when it reaches a big milestone, you can appreciate just how hard it worked to get there. And when it’s progressing slowly or not at all, you understand why and won’t be so demoralized.”
I’m skeptical about the value of learning so much about my hand when the surgery has already taken place and I don’t have any treatment decisions to make. But I need little excuse to indulge my curiosity and have no better ideas for coping at the moment. So I decide to trust Scott on this point, too, and hit the internet with resolve the next day.
I have my first chance to test the efficacy of Scott’s prescription when I see Drs. Vargas and Matthews the following week for the postoperative checkup. Mom, Erica, and Charlie, who has flown in for a few days, come with me, and they crowd into the corners of the small clinic room like a celebrity security detail, while I perch myself on the end of the examination table. Dr. Matthews sits at the computer, ready to take notes.
Once Dr. Vargas has examined the surgical site and checked blood circulation in my hand, I ask some of the many questions I’ve prepared. Which of the severed structures did the surgeons repair in the surgery? Six of the seven tendons, and the sheath of the nerve. What about the artery? They tied it off. Blood flow to my hand was sufficient without it. Why has the skin on the palm of my hand become disgustingly thick, scaly, and flaky? One reason could be because the cut nerve used to moderate the hand’s temperature by activating sweat glands in the skin. Now that it can’t, those glands are inactive, and the skin has dried out for lack of moisture. It will return to normal once the nerve grows back. Will I be able to type again? Maybe, but probably not without looking at the keys, because I won’t be able to feel them. Will I be able to play violin? Had I played violin before? A long time ago, but I always hoped to get back to it. Again maybe, if I can do it without being able to feel the bow.
The surgeons answer my questions thoroughly, if dryly. But their tone is lighter than that of our previous interviews, for while the situation remains serious, the crisis has passed. Dr. Vargas reinforces that the surgery went well, inspiring cautious confidence I will regain some basic nerve sensibility and individual finger motion. He qualifies his positive assessment of my status, cautioning, “Never say ‘never,’ never say ‘always,’ they teach us,” but even his well-practiced poker face doesn’t completely disguise some cheer.
Finally, I tell Dr. Vargas I am having difficulty conveying the severity of my injury to people who can’t see it for themselves. The phrase “cut to the bone” too often elicits the response “But they stitched you up, right?” as if the surgery were the end of the story.
“Can you give me some analogy that anyone could relate to?” I ask. “Like, how serious is my injury on a scale from, say, planned C-section to emergency coronary bypass?”
Dr. Vargas regards me with cocked head and furrowed brow as I admit particular concern that my boss and colleagues understand the justification for the indefinite medical leave for which I’m applying.
“Tell them it’s a partial amputation,” he snaps. “See if they understand that.”
I tuck my list of questions back into my bag. Our business concluded, Dr. Vargas bolts toward the door so quickly I have to call out, “Wait, stop!” He turns, eyebrows ever so slightly arched, and takes a couple of steps back into the room. “This is the thank-you portion of our meeting,” I explain.
He leans up against the doorframe, looking mildly impatient but curious; Dr. Matthews turns from his post-appointment documentation at the computer to listen. I warmly express my gratitude for the care the surgeons and their colleagues have provided: Miles, who held my hand during the ambulance ride to the hospital; Dr. Goldstein, who kept me from being sent home to await surgery; the one nurse who removed a bloody ring from my swelling fingers and washed it before stowing for safekeeping; the other who told me I was brave; the anesthesiologist whose gallows humor kept me laughing right up to the moment she put me under.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal for me,” I say, pausing to steady my voice, “but you do what you’ve done for me every day, for so many others. I just hope you know the incredible impact you have on your patients’ lives. I’ll never forget it.”
The surgeons look down momentarily, fiddling with papers, shifting their feet. “Well . . . we . . . like our jobs,” Dr. Vargas finally replies. As my family and I say goodbye to Dr. Matthews, who has turned back to the computer, Dr. Vargas lingers at the doorway. On our way out I hand him a card, laboriously scratched out in my unpracticed left hand, and ask him to show it to all the people I’ve mentioned. Wordlessly taking my left hand in both of his, he holds it for several seconds and stares at me.
Before leaving the hospital, I have to go to the hand-splinting room down the hall to meet my occupational therapist, Beth. So Erica accompanies me there and takes a seat outside, while Mom and Charlie head back to their hotel. Beth beckons me to sit down and prop my right elbow up on a small table resembling the manicure stations in a nail salon.
As far as my murky understanding goes, her job is not only to get my hand moving again, but to help me regain the ability to perform essential activities like eating, dressing, and typing. Sitting opposite me now, she carefully clips the plastered bandage off my hand and forearm with a pair of surgical shears. Bruised yellow-green, swollen several glove sizes, and studded with scores of prickly black stitches that trek across the blood-traced wound like a parade of spiders, the hand is difficult to recognize as my own, or as having the potential ever to be useful again. It looks grotesque and menacing, yet naked and imperiled, an infant born desperately premature. Acquainting myself with my new hand, I feel a mixture of revulsion and affection, like the heroine of Rosemary’s Baby viewing her demonic progeny for the first time.
“Wow, it looks great!” Beth says, gently turning my wrist back and forth. “The wound’s knitting well. There’s a lot of swelling, but that’s totally normal, we can work on that. How long’s it been, just a week?” With her smooth skin, Puma sneakers, and numerous ear piercings, she can’t be more than twenty-five, but she speaks with the reassuring confidence of one who has seen limbs and lives much more grievously damaged than mine.
Beth spends the next thirty minutes custom-fitting me with a removable hard-plastic splint that will hold my hand in a “neutral” position—fingers aligned and bent ninety degrees to palm, thumb outstretched forty-five degrees from palm—that puts no strain on the healing tendons. She tells me to wash the splint every day in warm, soapy water. “Otherwise it’s going to get really stinky really fast!”
Finally, she assigns exercises to keep my joints supple for the next six weeks, during which I won’t be able to exert my healing flexor tendons. These entail using my left hand to crimp the fingers of my right hand down to my palm, then slowly allowing the right fingers to extend back to the neutral position on their own. “Let’s say, ten reps of these three times a day. It’s really important that you do them all, or your hand will turn into a block of wood and it’ll be a lot harder to get good movement back,” she warns with the tough-love tone of a big sister. Obviously she doesn’t know my work ethic yet. She sends me off cheerily, instructing me to return the following Tuesday to begin our regimen in earnest. I leave the hospital excited to begin participating in my recovery.
Returning to Erica’s apartment, she and I find Mom installed in the living room behind the A-section of the New York Times. I head straight to the sofa for a nap, and Erica briefly sits at the dining room table to finish my medical leave application, then goes to the kitchen to bake a pan of brownies. Concerned about my uncharacteristically poor appetite, she has tested the appeal of various dishes over the past week, finding that only brownies or scrambled eggs drizzled in truffle oil consistently induce me to eat.
Half-awake a little later, I hear Mom and Erica whispering sharply, apparently disagreeing over the priority of the afternoon’s care tasks—getting a prescription filled, buying a big sweatshirt whose right arm I can push my splint through, others I can’t quite make out. It’s unusual for them not to get along; the stress of the whole situation is obviously getting to them, too. I hope it’s “only” that, anyway. My internist has told us that my trauma could cause my loved ones to reexperience distress related to adverse events in their own lives. The tension soon eases, though, and after Mom has collected my medication, we all cozy up on the couch to watch British comedies on BBC America, a shared favorite indulgence.
The next day the building management company calls to tell me that my bathroom has finally been repaired. At dinner that night, I am attempting to wind strands of pesto pasta around the fork in my left hand when Erica blurts out, “Hey, you guys can go to Becca’s apartment now, right? Because I . . . really need to get my life back.” I’m stunned. I didn’t think I’d be staying with Erica for months, but I certainly hadn’t expected to leave after just over a week. I’m not ready to do without her help, and I fight the urge to leap out of my seat and yell, “I want my life back, too, but it’ll never be the same, and I don’t even know how I’m going to get through the next week!” Instead I look down at my plate, blinking rapidly to stem welling tears, and respond, “Yeah, we can go in a couple days.” Erica has done all she can. It’s time to move on.