Gratitude
My weak leg cramped after seven hours in the airplane seat, I walk bedraggled
and haltingly, in the hallelujah moment of safe arrival as the kind steward helps
me off the plane; much younger than I, he pity-flirts with me, then urges me
to use a wheelchair. “I’d rather walk after sitting for so long,” I say, as I pass
through a gauntlet of a dozen wheelchairs lining the hallway with porters
standing by. “Do you need help, ma’am?” they chorus. I repeat my explanation
remembering my slow pilgrimage through the stages of survival after the stroke:
how I began in the ICU, flat and immobile within a maze of life-giving tubes,
then moved to a bed, where I pulled myself up to sit by grasping the “monkey bars”
suspended above me, until I gained strength enough to be pushed in a wheelchair;
I trembled the first time, sensing prison between its aluminum rails, felt like an infant
on a potty as I use a commode chair and a shower contraption with a hole in the seat.
After months crawling across therapy mats like a penitent at Lourdes, my limp leg was
encased in a hip to ankle cage for the slow lurch between metal bars; next, a walker,
then a four pronged cane, then a standard cane, until finally, I walked unaided.
How would the people who offer help in the airport know that to me the apparatus
of disability has all the appeal of the electric chair?
As I limp past the stations of empty, waiting wheelchairs, my eyes fill as I picture
one that may someday again have my name on it. After the long passage through
customs and baggage, the cool air touches my face and, although it is midnight,
I am still on my feet.
**
Published in The Examined Life Journal of the University of Iowa,
Carver College School of Medicine, Issue 3.2
My weak leg cramped after seven hours in the airplane seat, I walk bedraggled
and haltingly, in the hallelujah moment of safe arrival as the kind steward helps
me off the plane; much younger than I, he pity-flirts with me, then urges me
to use a wheelchair. “I’d rather walk after sitting for so long,” I say, as I pass
through a gauntlet of a dozen wheelchairs lining the hallway with porters
standing by. “Do you need help, ma’am?” they chorus. I repeat my explanation
remembering my slow pilgrimage through the stages of survival after the stroke:
how I began in the ICU, flat and immobile within a maze of life-giving tubes,
then moved to a bed, where I pulled myself up to sit by grasping the “monkey bars”
suspended above me, until I gained strength enough to be pushed in a wheelchair;
I trembled the first time, sensing prison between its aluminum rails, felt like an infant
on a potty as I use a commode chair and a shower contraption with a hole in the seat.
After months crawling across therapy mats like a penitent at Lourdes, my limp leg was
encased in a hip to ankle cage for the slow lurch between metal bars; next, a walker,
then a four pronged cane, then a standard cane, until finally, I walked unaided.
How would the people who offer help in the airport know that to me the apparatus
of disability has all the appeal of the electric chair?
As I limp past the stations of empty, waiting wheelchairs, my eyes fill as I picture
one that may someday again have my name on it. After the long passage through
customs and baggage, the cool air touches my face and, although it is midnight,
I am still on my feet.
**
Published in The Examined Life Journal of the University of Iowa,
Carver College School of Medicine, Issue 3.2