Above me, through the barren webs of tree branches, the evening stars glowed more than they twinkled against a gray flannel backdrop of the January night sky. Below me, a doubled-over industrial orange tarp carried by a team of EMTs cradled me. I’d never see my yard, my sky, my trees from this angle again—god willing—suspended above crumbling front stairs as one of my carriers barked, “Shit! There’s a hole!” I braced for an impact that never came.
The team threaded into my front door, folding the tarp around me to squeeze between shelves packed with books and records and the home office that became a part of the living room in 2020 while being informed that this is how EMTs get hurt in emergencies.
I wasn’t an emergency. This time. I was someone with two knees that the Russian physical therapist informed me were “full of crap.” One new, buried under hundreds of fresh stitches that traverses layers of muscle, fat, and skin. One old and full of the spurs and dust caused by years of bones grinding together. Both painful enough to make a week of post-op physical therapy not nearly enough to give me the skills to use a new walker to get from my driveway and up the five stairs into my house when the hospital finally told me to go.
When I was in the hospital I thought about writing a piece of fiction about a patient who, despite the opioid haze, concocted a plan to never leave the hospital. The social work and medical and orthopedic and nursing departments that didn’t have great lines of communication could be used in an infinity loop to keep her safe for as long as I wanted. Or maybe I was trying to write that story as non-fiction for myself and that’s how I didn’t get the word that I had been deemed medically ready for discharge on Friday, while physical therapy tsked tsked at my lack of progress and social work only left voice mails when I was sleeping and unable to understand that I needed to choose a home health care company or rehab facility from their list. Reality gets fuzzy in institutions.
But when it did become clear, I wanted to make a clean break from the comfort and predictability and exceptional level of skill that came with institutional care. Cancel the rehab facility, I’m going home, riding four hours a week post-op with my swollen leg wrapped in ACE bandages and wedged into the passenger side. I’d unfurl it with a sparkler burst of pain to sit, wrapped in a blanket like an abandoned old woman in a chair in my driveway. One step onto the rippled sidewalk was enough to know the walker was wider than the sidewalk and I was beyond my skills with no one to save me except the folks at the non-emergency number.
A stair-jumper chair would have been the easy and dignified way to go, but it was missing a strap. They called in the fire department with the gurney and the tarp and, after one hour of sitting in the cold driveway under the starry sky, I was tipped and lifted, and I let myself go limp, not allowing myself to think of the humility of being carried, the orders being barked, the remarks about my home.
I just looked at the stars from their new perspective and wondered how the hell I’d gotten to this place.