13. MAX
MAX
Three weeks later...
PT with a clunky prosthetic on one leg and a walking boot on the other was an adventure and a half.
The therapist had been having me walk using the parallel bars, but it was an awkward process of thump-step-wobble-almost-fall.
She kept urging me on enthusiastically, but by the time our session ended, I was exhausted and frustrated and my arms were trembling.
Why couldn’t I balance? I knew recovery was a process, especially with both legs fucked up, but I couldn’t help always expecting that this time, I’d be able to walk; this time, I’d be able to proudly tell Lucas I could stand and do things for myself.
It hadn’t happened yet, and the likelihood was that it wasn’t going to begin to happen for a month or more. And I fucking hated that.
I made my way out to Lucas’s car in my chair with my prosthetic in my lap; my stump was sore from therapy, and I wanted to give it a break.
He was playing taxi driver around town today; now that I was out of PT, I was heading directly to the limb loss support group I’d started attending for their evening meeting.
“How was it?” Lucas asked a few minutes later, glancing away from the road at me for half a second as he merged onto the highway. “You look exhausted.”
I sighed. “I am. I just want to be able to fucking walk and get out of this stupid chair every now and then. Doesn’t even need to be 24/7; I’d settle for occasionally at this point.”
Grimacing sympathetically, he reached out to pat my thigh.
“I know it’s frustrating. And I know you know what I’m going to say, but I’m going to say it anyway: you are improving.
I know it doesn’t feel like you’ve accomplished much, but you’re getting the hang of your new leg and from what you tell me, you’ve actually been able to use it a little bit in PT. That’s huge, Max.”
I grunted a noncommittal reply. I knew he was right and that I should be proud of how far I’d come, but I wanted to be at the end of the road instead of still slowly rolling halfway down.
At least I had my job and wouldn’t be completely dependent on Lucas for much longer; I got paid at the end of the week, and I intended to buy groceries for the apartment with at least part of that money, since he still wouldn’t hear of me paying rent.
For all his sweetness, the man could be damn stubborn when he wanted to be.
“I know that grunt,” he said with a playful smile. “That’s the ‘I’m ready to punch a wall, but I don’t want to tell Lucas how upset I am’ grunt.”
“Fuck you,” I grumbled. The man had come to know me too well; at this point there was only one secret I’d managed to keep from him, and that, I was pretty sure, was because he didn’t know it existed.
He switched lanes and stole a glance at me as he was checking his blind spot. “Any time you want, sweetheart.”
He’d started dropping little endearments in our conversations.
Always playfully, never in a way that let me convince myself that he was totally serious about them, and usually when we were so deep in a topic of conversation that it would be an obvious subject change if I asked what he meant.
I liked to fool myself that he meant them, though.
It made me happy, and by god, I was going to cling to the little bits of happy I could find in this life.
“How about tonight, my darling?” I quipped back saccharinely.
“Darling?”
I raised my eyebrows. “I could stick to ‘sweetheart’?”
He gave in with good grace. “Touche. And yes, you’re welcome to fuck me tonight if you’re up for it after group.
” He knew I probably wouldn’t be; I’d found my first session of group so mentally exhausting that it had turned into physical exhaustion and I’d fallen asleep in the car practically before I had my seatbelt buckled.
It was overwhelming, sitting in a room with twenty people in the same or similar situation as me, most of whom had also lost their limbs to trauma and pretty much all of whom wanted to take the opportunity to chat about the challenges they were facing.
I couldn’t even manage my own challenges most days, let alone support anyone else through theirs.
No one seemed to expect me to jump too deep into things, to be fair; the group’s members were sympathetic and understanding when I gave my short self-introduction at the first meeting, not to mention warmly welcoming.
Despite that, and despite Lucas’s obvious belief that group would help me lay down some of my mental burden, by the end of the session I’d been just as frustrated as at the start, because these people were all so far ahead of me on the road to recovery.
Some of them were past that road entirely.
And none of them had a broken leg to deal with on top of an amputated one.
“Max?” he asked, and I realized I’d been sitting there in reflective silence for a few minutes.
“Yeah, sorry.” I rubbed my forehead, where I was developing a tension headache. “I might just take you up on the offer.” I tried to sound teasing, but I was pretty sure it came out sounding dull and lifeless.
He put his hand back on my leg and rubbed the knee above my stump. “You ok?”
Turning my face away to look out the window so he couldn’t see my expression, I sighed. “Fine. Just thinking about what we’re going to discuss in group tonight.”
“Oh? What’s the topic?”
“Self-confidence and feeling like we have value.” That one was going to strike close to home for me; I was still struggling with feeling like I’d lost some of my value and usefulness along with my leg.
Some days were better than others, but what with feeling like I’d failed at PT today, I knew this was going to be one of the bad ones.
I hoped the other group members couldn’t read me as well as Lucas could.
He exited the highway and I knew we were minutes away from the clinic whose spare room the group met in. “That’s one you can definitely use,” he commented.
I stiffened. “What does that mean?” It was one thing to judge myself for things; it was another to hear him judging me. I wanted Lucas to see me as strong.
Looking startled by my sudden ire, he shook his head placatingly. “I just meant that you feeling devalued was one of the main reasons I wanted you to do therapy in the first place. I think tonight could be good for you.”
“Yeah, I guess.” I didn’t look at him, even though I knew he was focused on the road and wouldn’t be looking at me.
That made for a change; it seemed like Lucas was always watching me.
Sometimes his expression would be concerned, sometimes intrigued, and sometimes just warm, but his eyes were nearly always on me when we were together.
He squeezed my knee as he pulled into the parking lot. “You want help with your chair?”
I grunted a negative. “Just get it out for me and leave it. I need to practice doing it myself.”
He did as I asked, placing the chair on the ground next to the passenger door after I opened it.
I leaned over and started unfolding it. I had the hang of it now, but every now and then I still pinched my fingers and cursed out the inanimate object of my frustrations.
Finally, I was able to transfer into the chair; no cursing this time.
I looked over my shoulder at where Lucas was watching me patiently. “See you in two hours?”
He nodded. “I’ll be here. Call me if you can’t find the car.”
Giving him a wave and a nod, I turned and rolled into the clinic.
***
“... and so,” Caroline said an hour later, “that’s how I busted my first prosthetic by punching a wall in frustration.
I don’t recommend it, if any of you are wondering.
” A ripple of quiet laughter swept the room.
“Though it did let me confirm that my prosthetic can make a pretty good fist, in case I ever need to defend myself with it.”
“I think we’ve all been there,” Javier, the group leader, said in his quiet way. “It can be really anger-inducing to feel like you’ve lost a part of yourself and your body will never work the same way again.”
“So how do you get over it?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking, a hint of desperation in my voice. I wanted to get over it. I wanted to feel whole and like I wasn’t limited. But it was so damn hard. “How did you all get so comfortable with losing a part of yourself?”
Javier paused thoughtfully. “I don’t know that I ever completely ‘got over it’,” he finally said. “It was more a process of making peace and realizing that things were different, not necessarily worse.”
“It’s like any kind of grief,” threw in Michel in his French accent.
“It will always be there, because you lost something of value to you. But you learn to find value and happiness in other things. Contentment in the loss.” He gestured to his leg, which had been replaced by a prosthetic at the bottom of his thigh.
“After my accident, when I couldn’t walk, I kept thinking, ‘who wants a doctor who can’t walk through the ER to get to a patient?
’ I thought my career, or at least the useful part of it, had to be over.
” He patted his artificial knee. “But eventually I could walk on this, and even if it wasn’t the same, it was still good.
I can still do my job—even on days when my chair is easiest—and I can still help people.
Every now and then it will hit me all over again that my leg is gone, and sometimes I’ll even cry over that, but the cries come less and less often and last for fewer and fewer minutes as time passes. ”
I swallowed heavily. “So what you’re saying is there’s nothing I can do but wait it out?”