REHAB

REHAB

A Friday early in February I tripped and fell doing the laundry.  A badly turned ankle, shaken up, but was able to get up the stairs.  OK.  Toes, ankle works, nothing broken.

Saturday my lower back started to hurt. By Sunday night I couldn't move without stabbing pain shooting from by lower back up to my neck like someone plunging a knife into me.  I took Advil which enabled me to hobble around.  The pain got worse. Aleve, double the dose my doc advised. Still debilitating pain. 

Unable to walk much beyond hobbling, Don drove to me to my chiropractor. Dr. Keith is  of the most caring, hopeful and upbeat guys you could ever meet.  He couldn't mask his amazement at how completely I was crippled. He had me sit and told me that my spine was completely 'frozen', as it does to protect itself after a fall, an accident and the like. It took me minutes to even lie down on the bench.  He only worked on me 5 minutes because, he said, that's all you can take. 

I'm not good at being a cripple in so much pain.  I mostly ignore illness. But this was possible to ignore.  Sleeping was impossible.  I woke up many times during the night with stabling pain each time I moved. Almost as bad as the pain was what this was doing to my mind.  I was dizzy, I couldn't think, I couldn't read or even concentrate watching television. And I was scared.  So scared.

So chiro every day.  Until we got to 10 minutes, 20.  And a bone here and there in my back began to move.  Finally just a week and a half ago the left side of my spine released its paralysis with an audible snap.  I felt instantly better and actually got off the bench on my own.

Now to rehab.  Chiro continues, and now I am to go for therapeutic massage to loosen those muscles that have bunched up to hard knots. A friend said go see Ryan.  Ryan.  I  got a scrip from my regular doc and then  got an appointment at the Rehab Center.

Walking in was like going into an old gym you see in movies.  Small, kind of shabby, machines of all types lined the room, and 5 or so massage benches against the far side of the room. 

They took my information.  And a lady in the waiting section began to talk to me.  People don't talk to each other in doctor's offices in my part of the country.  She began to tell me the story of why she was here with her husband who needed rehab for an injury. 

Well, I think. This is different.  I tell her why I'm at rehab when she asks me.  Soon a young Filipino man introduces himself.  Hello, I'm Ryan.  Come this way.  I pick my way around devices and chairs all manned by staff and occupied by people of various ages.  Legs and arms in wraps, supported by walkers, canes, cocooned in warm packs, ice packs.  A room of pain and trouble, I'm thinking.

Ryan leads me to a bench I'm to lie face down on.  It's too  high to comfortably get up on even in the best of circumstances.  Ryan gets me a footstool.  I gingerly step up, every muscle in my back screaming.  Ryan helps me to finally sit on the bench.  He sees my pain and tells me to take a deep breath, and again.  He takes my glasses and says, These are really thick!  What power are these?  I tell him I don't know. I tell him about the MS at age 33 in the 70s, losing the sight in my right eye, right side of my body numb. Then hyperthyroid crisis in the 80s, then Graves disease.  But life is good, I say, and mean it.  I've had a miracle. I was so afraid because my mother's brother died at age 52 of complications of MS.  Ryan says, You had the milder form of the disease.  But he's amazed when I tell Ryan what my doctors said, that I  had a spontaneous regeneration of the optic nerve when one morning driving to school I could suddenly see out of that right eye.  What is that spontaneous regeneration?  I asked the doc.  Something that doesn't happen. Claim the miracle, my doctor said.  I told Ryan I did.

The lady on the bench beside me is listening.  Oh! She says. That's amazing.

Ryan tells me that a senior in high school he had a brain tumor.  Two years later, radiation, and therapy he was healed.  A miracle.  He decided that he wanted to help people and enrolled in physical therapy classes.  Now in his twenties, he has healing hands.

Now I have to begin the painful task of lying face down on the bench.  Each movement is agony.  Once down Ryan asks if I can hang  my arms down off the bench.  I can't.  The pain is just too much. 

So he begins to work.  Gentle, then gauging my comfort level he applies more pressure telling me all the while to say when it is too much.  How many minutes go by?  I find myself beginning to relax.  I find to my amazement that I can let my arms dangle off the table with no pain.  Ryan talks all the while.  He asks me why I'm at rehab now.  I tell him about the fall and frozen spine.

The lady on the next bench has bad knees and legs.  She begins to tell her story.  She uses a few Yiddish words.  I tell her I was a language teacher and ask her if she knows Yiddish.  No, just a few words.  But I'm Jewish, she says.  I ask her if she has read the Torah.  She says no.  She has some stories and some books, but she's never read the Torah.  I say it's so full of wisdom and that she should read it. 

Another man propped in a chair, Black, in obvious pain, has been injured in an accident.  He's smiling now.  And is listening and nodding, enjoying the conversation.  A old man, very frail,  step by painful step makes his way to a bar where he is to balance on a rubber half ball to strengthen his legs.  He's had a stroke.  He's worried, pain written all over his face.  I smile at him, he's trying so hard to do what the staff asked him to do.  He looks up and smiles back.  A miracle of a smile from a person who moments ago had nothing but misery on his face.

Here a muscled athlete with a shattered ankle.  Here a young girl studs in her eyelids, lips, ears, bright purple hair, and pain from who knows what she never dreamed she would suffer.  And she's trying not to smile but losing that battle. 

And so in this place, at first glance so full of hurt and misery becomes a colloquium of sharing. And we, the injured, and the staff, become a community of helping hands, of sharing, of the triumph of hope over adversity.  It's as though the room is humming with it. 

The message of the goodness of life, God's loving care for each of us no matter what our situation is so powerful.  So real.  I have no idea what the religion or beliefs of these people are.  Religion was so far beside the point.

The point is: God was in that room.  Rehab!