A Mighty Push

   

A Mighty Push

    My high-profile lawyer suddenly stopped calling. No more daily pep talks. After a couple of weeks of this absence, I pushed through a call to ask about the progress. His assistant pretended to not know who I was… after multiple ebullient conversations based on the original records I had sent them. 

    A seed had been planted. A vision was emerging unlike any the world had witnessed.

    Have you had a great, mighty push? I'm not talking about childbirth, though that may count. What’s different is that people cheer you on when there's a baby involved. 

    I'm talking about a mighty push created from a desperate, even mortal sense of necessity. There comes a point of no return. Our tolerance is exceeded and the outcome is not bearable if we proceed without severely adjusting course. It's the kind of push one tends to make alone.

    Have you seen that movie in which a solo hiker is caught days from anyone with his arm pinned by the same boulder which had first knocked him unceremoniously into a crevasse? It's called 127 Hours and it came out more than a decade ago about a real person named Aron Ralston. Aron knew no one was privy to his whereabouts, he had nothing with him but a scant bit of water, and no way to get help. He could not continue the way he was.

    Aron wanted to live. He determined without a doubt that dying alone was far worse than the pain of cutting off his arm. He saw the fruitful life he wished played out unfold before him. Aron gave a mighty push for that abundant vision of life, cut off the arm with the only dull camping knife he had, and hiked out. 

♦♦♦

    I’ve found myself entrenched in this sort of mind triage before. I think of it in terms of survival. It can come crashing in or it can have a stealthy entrance.

    Several years ago, I lost my ability to walk one day. My knee simply gave out after hanging on by a thread from a hellacious car crash five years prior. While it might have been fixed then, the knee was the least of my doctors’ concerns at that time in which I went in and out of life. It had stabilized while laying about in the hospital for many months. Once I gratefully regained my life, I slowly started a process of biking, hiking, and skiing that built muscle around the threads that were my ligaments.

    So five years later, when my knee could no longer sustain my lifestyle, I agreed to a surgery that had only been performed a few handfuls of times before. The good news was that it would be performed by a doctor who had done his thesis on the procedure. 

    We delayed a couple of times as my doc continued to do more research. I had a good rapport with him. While I had the option to wear a big brace for the rest of my life, I trusted my doctor’s intent to fix the ligaments in my knee flawlessly without the need to do it again. I’d just been placed as a finalist in an international music competition only held for my instrument every ten years. My perfectionism fostered a hope to perform without a gigantic brace!

    On the operating prep table, half drugged, a new anesthesiologist walked in and piqued my intuition with distrust. I underwent anesthesia regardless. I awoke and a nurse said, "I’ve never seen a tourniquet left on that long." The surgery had been 11 hours. I was badly nauseated. My leg was the size of a football field.

    It took two weeks for the swelling to go down. 

    It took only two weeks for my leg to atrophy down to the bone. 

    The pain was unimaginable and strangely specific: like long, cold, thick, wet steel being thrust up through the bottom of my foot all the way up into my calf, over and over again. I could feel the diameter and temperature of the “phantom steel”. I was tortured by water dripping on my foot and electrical shocks that weren’t there. I didn't sleep for weeks. My boyfriend at the time brought me lots of movies to watch but I don't remember any of them. If he walked near the end of the bed, feet away, I could feel it through my foot. 

     I couldn't sit up and play my horn, much less hope to be ready in time for the finals of the competition. I took a leave from school.

    What ensued was an incredible amount of jumbled time in clinics trying to “figure out what was wrong” - giant needles, nerve tests, epidurals. Yet it was pretty obvious to some professionals who finally came clean: I had total nerve death from the hip down. My brain believed that I had no leg and was screaming “May Day”. The pundits continued to profess: nerves don't grow back fast enough. I would never be able to walk again. And there was no way to effectively stop the pain, they told me after prescribing all of the Percoset for the entire year at the University of New Hampshire to no effect.

    I hired a lawyer who was all over the case against this anesthesiologist and had a great body of evidence of malpractice. I had lost out on a major competition for which I’d be too old the next time it came around. Also, the nurse who spoke up after the surgery came out to report that the tourniquet had been loosened appropriately to allow for blood to re-enter the leg after two hours of surgery but was re-tightened and left on at the end for the duration. 

    About two weeks following our daily conversations based on the original records I’d sent, this lawyer suddenly stopped calling. After another two weeks, I reached a human at the law office and asked about our progress. People at the law office, including the lawyer’s assistant, pretended to not know who I was. They then feigned remembrance, saying there was “no case due to inadequate evidence.” Next, they sent back my medical records - altered. 

     Lesson learned - don't trust anyone with original records! That was a difficult one to overcome! Trust and creating mutually protective contracts and copies are a specialty of mine now.

    I tried to locate the nurse who stood up for me. She could not be found. There was no record of her ever having worked at that hospital. Friends and family were outraged and demanded I sue the lawyer and anesthesiologist now. Not only should I sue, but it was my duty to do so to take this anesthesiologist and the rest of the racket out of commission!

    My boyfriend at the time wanted to help me commit suicide. He believed the doctors that healing was well nigh impossible. What use was a life of pain? He looked to freedom.

    I had heard enough. It was all unacceptable, mortally unacceptable. I took a different approach from everyone: I declared myself well. I said that there was nothing wrong with me. Mind over matter. Dogged determination.

    I began a mighty push then and there with a vision of myself whole and in the garden. That vision led me to a terrific physical therapist and I worked HARD. I worked constantly. I made myself walk. I cried and screamed and told myself that I could do it. I ate a LOT of raw eggs. I had steady acupuncture without having any reason to believe it would work and there, got the first sleep I'd had in weeks. And I grew back those nerves: sympathetic, sensory, and motor, and their sheaths. Three feet of nerves I grew in a hot mess of a year and a half.

    As for the lawyer and anesthesiologist? I left it. I chose not to haul that burden for years and years. Honestly? I have forgiven the weak. I am strong. Consequences happen regardless. I changed my consequences.

    There's one thing in common with everyone I know who makes a mighty push. They are in a much better place now! Aron Ralston travels the world as a motivational speaker. He hikes all over the world with a prosthetic arm. I have a normal-looking leg with real nerves, and I can bike up hills, ski free-heel down mountains, and hike freely! Even women everywhere giving birth - we love our children, we watch them grow, regardless of the birthing pain, right? 

   We are meant to move on if we get through the event in the first place. How do I know? Because we do every single time. People who make that mighty push don't sadly talk about their lives later, because they pick themselves up and make things better. 

    So if you aren't there yet, if you aren't over the rough spots, have faith. You will be. It's not that things don't get us down. Sometimes a low must get really low before it becomes intolerable. People are strong, after all.

    So here's another thing about a mighty push. You don't need to lose a limb to make that push. I'm rethinking my medical bias of this because I'm making a mighty push now. My finances have been a red wreck for a while. Since some legal stuff, a divorce-style credit train wreck, work to keep me local after a national life, then a pandemic with a sketchy immune system, my credit is riddled. I've forgiven yet here I am, just surviving with a lot of fees. I've had it. It's mighty push time. Mind-over-matter. 

      I've declared myself prosperous. The good that I'm doing in the world is raining down in abundance. See it? All things are aligning and connecting. The mighty push will set things right.

Until next time...