Written For You With Love
Like any other workingman, I woke to greet the day. April of 1994 came. The beginning of spring and the month signifies life itself. On this Nashville Tennessee morning I had my lady and life was not too bad. Hurriedly I climbed from my nice warm comfortable bed and wiped the slumber from my eyes. I stumbled a little at first and looked around to grab my clothes and that first cup of coffee. My future dreams and plans were all ahead of me and not even the slightest doubt crept into my mind that they would not be for long. I drank my coffee and the warmth of it went down nicely. I planned out my trip in my mind and was ready to go. Slowly I climbed into the truck and was ready to work, same as always. I manoeuvred down the highway and admired the scenery and cursed at the few disruptive drivers on the road. I picked up my load and was off again to my destination in PA. Hmm, destination, now there’s a word with meaning. I arrived on time and backed my truck cautiously for unloading. I climbed out of my seat and stretched my legs and felt the satisfaction of a good long stretch. While waiting for a forklift to come and unload my haul I decided to shoot the breeze with a buddy driver for a few minutes. We talked about our jobs and a few jokes. Life was good.My buddy turned to walk towards his truck as I watched him. No one caught sight of the other guy coming. The forklift driver was unloading a truck trailer on the other side of us. He was in too much of a rush that day and not paying attention. He came backing out of that trailer too fast and backed into my trailer spinning it around. In a split second of time my thoughts were disassociated from my body as the forklift pinned me forcefully against the steel pole filled with concrete. There is that moment in time that hopes, beliefs, dreams, and all thoughts are gone…a moment in suspended animation. In one instant completely isolated from the entire life force. That one moment that intellect does not comprehend…..at least until the pain sets in. Pain the only thing that advised me that I did not die. Then I felt the sting and I tried to grasp the circumstances but I couldn’t. One part of me felt the anguish and another part of me rejected the truth. Crushed between a pole and a forklift in one instant. Then the pain wrapped around me like an octopus its victim. I felt asphyxiated, I could not breathe. I fell to the ground. Gradually sight came back to me and I saw people around me but I didn’t recognize them; they were only faces without any names. I could perceive sound but could not perceive the words. Then I felt arms carefully holding and lifting me so I would not collapse into unconsciousness. Gradually I was accompanied towards a car. Every step I took was like Jesus carrying the weight of his cross to the Mount of Olives. Then unexpectedly on the way to the hospital I lost all feeling in both my arms and legs. I could not move. I felt like a rag doll tossed into the trash. Barely cognisant of my body and my thoughts I saw the nurses and doctors moving around me in hectic activity. Somewhere in time I disappeared into a void of darkness where nothing existed except the darkness itself.
Waking in my hospital bed, my thoughts started to flow like snow thawing from the highest mountain into the stream flowing into the vast ocean then again merging with the deepest part of silence. I tried to recall every detail of the day before but my thoughts were chaotic at best. I drifted in and out of consciousness. I had no sense of time or space. I was like an empty space. I did not exist.
I don’t know how long before I grasped some consciousness and my mind allowed some rational thought. I still remained detached to some point not desiring to understand truth. Then the doctor approached me with his placid features and I recognized that this was the time that he would give me my diagnosis. Sentence may be a more suitable word to use. A fleeting moment of nausea and fear welled up inside the pit of my stomach. I wanted to know but yet I didn’t. The apprehension was overwhelming. He pulled up a chair next to my side and tried to break the stillness that hung like a heavy fog in the room. The smell of the hospital was now beginning to make me nauseated. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t hide. My body allowed me no choice but to remain and to hear the words that I had avoided. He looked at me and tried to show his compassion but it was not compassion that I wanted. He told me that every muscle was torn from my spine. The response in my mind was easy: Just fix it. The doctor recommended immediate surgery but warned me that there was only a one in a hundred chance of ever regaining the use of my arms and legs again. I could feel the nausea coming back. Denial was a good option at the time. I would not allow myself to believe what he was saying. I refused the surgery. Why bother if this was their best offer. I wanted to go back to Nashville. Maybe if I were home it would be different. I needed to be home. I wanted to be home. Thirty days passed on in endless agony. An eternity. Finally, they moved me home without killing me.
When I got back to Nashville the panic set in full force. I realized that I might not be any better than I was at that very moment. I believed it didn’t matter if I lived or I died. What was the use of living a life as a crippled man? I lost all reason to live. Depression and anger set in. I could not change the way I felt. I hated life itself. I was devoid of hope. My lady tried to comfort me and care for me. It was not comfort or pity I wanted it was death itself. I prayed for death to swallow me whole. I longed for death not pity. This was hard on my lady and I knew it. I think I pushed her away deliberately. I was not a man. I was a nothing. I tried to do what was right for her but things just didn’t work. Counselling wouldn’t change the way I was. She couldn’t be my mother and I didn’t want her to be. It was only a matter of time before she left me. The day came in January when she did leave me and I had no regrets.
The first two years were the hardest. I had lost all reason to live. Why live in a wheelchair? Anger was all I felt. I was a deep abyss of nothing. I like the rag doll that could do nothing on its own. That’s were I remained for the next two years.
Then it happened, if things could get worse, they did. Things definitely got worse.
I had a massive heart attack. I had just finished eating dinner alone in the living room. I began to feel chest pains. I thought I was having indigestion or it was something I had eaten. I took some antacid and it didn’t help. It got worse. It felt like a fist in my chest. Then the pain travelled up my neck and down my arm. I was living alone so I had to phone the Assistant Chief of Police who lived two doors up the road from me. The pain increased so I called 911 before the Chief arrived. The pain got so bad I passed out. The ambulance arrived and they had to inject medication directly into my heart to jump-start it. After about fifteen minutes they were able to transfer me to the hospital. It almost brought my wish of death come true. I had open-heart surgery with 4 by-passes. Thirty-three percent of my heart was now officially dead.
I went into a deeper depression. God, why have I been so cursed? I thought about my life. My childhood was not a happy one. I had a failed marriage. I felt useless as a man since given a sentence to live in a wheelchair. Now this. Why God? I had no reason to live and thought I should have just died. I wanted to die.
There was a nurse that would come and sit by my bed in the middle of the night and she would just sit and talk. She would talk about anything at all. Then she would tell me that there must have been a reason I was saved from death and that it was up to me to make myself better. Only I could do it. This was something that I always knew in the back of my mind but in my time of distress I had forgotten to try to live. She was my angel in disguise. From that night on I made a plan, a goal, and set out working on it.
When I returned home I called my friend who worked on horses that had bad legs. My friend would take me up in a harness and lower me into the water just to the point where my feet would just touch the bottom of the pool. A machine would pull me round and round in the water. We continued this for a long time. Eventually I got to the point where I could touch my legs on the bottom of the pool and then slowly my legs began to support more and more of my weight. I stuck to my plan and as the endless days went past I began to regain strength. Gradually, I began to take small steps and then moved to a cane and today I walk without a cane. As for my heart, well, I may have only a few years left: only God can answer that.
The Moral of the story: make a plan, a goal, and work on it. You can do or be anything you want to be no matter what rotten hand life gives you. You can make it happen.
Written by Beverley©
Music: "Power of Love"
