Chapter 9 Mickey
Every morning I try to move my legs. It’s become a ritual.
The same way I used to start every day by reaching for my phone and checking dispatch reports before my feet hit the floor.
Now I start every day lying in a hospital bed staring at my legs under a thin cotton blanket and sending a signal that goes nowhere.
The brain says move. The body says can’t hear you.
The blanket stays flat and my legs lie underneath it like they belong to someone else.
This morning I don’t just try once and move on. I stay with it. I stare at my right foot and concentrate the way the physical therapist told me to, picturing the signal traveling from my brain down my spinal cord and into the muscles.
I picture it like a dispatch call. Central command to unit one. Do you copy? Requesting movement. Any movement. A twitch, a flex, anything to tell me the wires aren’t permanently cut.
Nothing comes back. The blanket doesn’t move.
I try the left foot. Same routine, same desperate focus on a body part I never thought about once in thirty-two years of having it.
I used to run three miles on that foot every morning. I used to kick down doors with it and stand on it for twelve-hour shifts and never once considered the miracle of standing.
Turns out you don’t appreciate being able to walk until you can’t.
I used to take the stairs two at a time at the station.
I did it without thinking. I’d give everything I own to take one step.
Just one. To feel the weight go from heel to toe.
To stand up and walk to the bathroom without calling someone first. That’s all I want.
My room faces east, which means I get the sunrise, which sounds nice until you realize that a sunrise through a hospital window lights up the things you don’t want to see. The IV stand, the monitor cables and the wheelchair folded against the wall that the physical therapist left there yesterday.
The sun comes through at an angle that lights up a crack in the glass.
The crack runs diagonal from the bottom corner, about four inches long, and it splits the sunlight into two strips on the floor.
One strip reaches the foot of my bed around seven-thirty.
By eight it’s moved past me and onto the wall behind my head.
I know this because I’ve watched it happen every morning.
I’ve learned the schedule of the light. Seven-thirty means the sun is on my feet.
It’s the only time of day anything touches my feet and I can see it happening, even if I can’t feel it.
The phone rings at seven. Same as always.
“Morning, baby,” Mama says. “How’d you sleep?”
“Like a rock, Mama.” I slept in forty-minute intervals between a nurse checking vitals and the pain waking me up. She doesn’t need to know that.
“What did you have for breakfast?”
“Scrambled eggs and toast.” The eggs were poured from a carton and the toast was the texture of cardboard.
“Keep eating. You need to keep your strength up. Have they said anything new?”
“Nothing new yet. The swelling is going down. They’re happy with the progress.”
“When will they know, Mickey? When will they know for sure?”
She asks this every morning while trying not to sound like a panicked mother wondering if her son will walk again.
“Soon, Mama. They said it could be a few more weeks before they can do the full assessment. But the signs are good.”
I don’t know if the signs are good. I’m making shit up to keep her from worrying more than she already is.
I know the swelling is reducing slower than they hoped.
I know the sensation tests come back the same every day.
I know that Dr. Raleigh pauses a half second too long before she answers my questions.
I don’t tell Mama any of this because she has enough to deal with.
“How’s Dad today?”
Her pause tells me everything. “He had a rough night. He got up around three and was looking for his keys. He wanted to drive to work. He thought he was late for his shift. He was standing in the kitchen in his underwear looking for keys to a truck he doesn’t drive anymore and I had to talk him into coming back to bed. It took an hour.”
My dad was the strongest man I knew until he wasn’t.
Until his brain started stealing pieces of him one at a time.
The keys first. Then the names. Then the route home from the grocery store he’d been shopping at for thirty years.
Now he stands in the kitchen at three AM in his underwear looking for a shift that ended over a decade ago.
“Mama, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault and it’s not his fault. It just is.”
She says that about everything now. That’s how she survives. She doesn’t fight the diagnosis or look for someone to blame. She just gets up, walks her husband back to bed, and calls her son in the hospital and asks if he ate breakfast.
“I wish you could come,” I say. “I miss you.”
I don’t usually say it. I know why she can’t and I don’t want to make it harder. But this morning it comes out before I can stop it.
“Oh, baby.” Her voice breaks on the word and cracks right open. “I want to. You know I want to. If I could split myself in two, I’d be there right now sitting in that chair. I’d be feeding you real food and giving those nurses hell.”
“I know, Mama.”
“Linda can do Tuesdays and Thursdays for a few hours but he gets upset when I’m gone too long. He knows I’m gone. He might not know what day it is but your daddy knows when I’m not in the house. He goes to the window and watches for my car.”
“Stay with Dad,” I say. “I’ve got people here. Tex comes when he can. And there’s this guy, Benji. He’s coming. He brought me pizza last night. He’s the guy they were beating on when I got to the bar.”
She’s quiet for a second. “That’s a long drive to bring food to a man you just met.” Mama doesn’t miss much. She never has. “Tell him thank you from me.”
“I’ll tell him, Mama. Get some rest today if you can. Call me tomorrow.”
“I love you, Mickey.”
“I love you too.”
After breakfast, Dr. Raleigh comes for rounds.
She’s a small woman with dark hair pulled back tight and a face trained to deliver information without coloring it with personal feeling.
I respect that. I do the same on the job.
You learn to say “we’re investigating all possibilities” with a face that doesn’t tell the family what you actually think.
“Good morning, Officer Weaver,” she says. “How are we feeling today?”
“Like I’ve been in a hospital bed for five days and would trade my badge for a shower that lasts longer than four minutes.”
She smiles the doctor smile, that acknowledges you’re trying to stay upbeat when the facts aren’t great.
“The imaging from yesterday looks encouraging,” she says.
“The swelling is responding to the anti-inflammatories. We’re seeing measurable reduction, which is what we want.
It’s moving in the right direction. That’s what we see in patients who recover function.
The fact that it’s responding at all is a positive sign. ”
“I hear a ‘but’ coming,” I say.
“Well... the rate of reduction is slower than we’d typically hope to see at this stage.
That doesn’t mean it won’t continue. It means the timeline is longer than we initially projected.
We’re talking weeks rather than days before we can do a full assessment.
This isn’t a static injury, Mickey. It’s changing.
That matters. I know that’s not what you want to hear. ”
“You’re right. What I want to hear is that I’m going to walk again, Dr. Raleigh. Can you tell me that?”
Her face stays neutral. She’s good. But I’m a cop who’s spent years reading faces, and I catch the half-second delay before she answers, the tiny hesitation of a doctor deciding how much hope to hand out.
“I can tell you that the swelling is reducing and that your body is responding to treatment. We’ve seen patients with similar injuries make full recoveries. Every case is different and I won’t make a promise I can’t keep. What I can promise is that we’re doing everything possible.”
I’m days in already, with the best equipment and the best people, and they don’t know if I’ll walk again.
Dr. Raleigh checks a few things, makes notes and leaves.
At nine o’clock, the physical therapist comes along with his assistant. Eddie is a former college linebacker who is wider than I am, and gentle in a way that would be comforting if the things he’s gentle about weren’t so devastating to go through.
Today’s session involves what he calls a “transfer exercise,” which means he’s going to help me move from the bed to the wheelchair. Or that’s what he pretends we’re doing. He’s actually physically moving me. I’m not doing jack shit.
I’ve been avoiding the wheelchair. It’s been sitting against the wall since yesterday and I’ve been pretending it’s decorative, a piece of equipment meant for someone else.
Because once I’m in it, there’s no pretending any of this is temporary. But Eddie says it’s part of the process, that I need to start building upper body compensation, that the sooner I can move myself the sooner I get some independence back.
“Alright, Mickey, here’s what we’re going to do,” Eddie says, positioning the chair next to the bed and locking the wheels.
“I’m going to support your upper body. Angela’s going to manage your legs.
We’re going to pivot you as a unit. You’re not lifting anything, you’re not pushing anything, you’re just letting us move you. Sound good?”
Fuck no, it doesn’t.
It sounds like two strangers are going to carry me six inches sideways because I can’t do it myself. I’m a cop who chased suspects on foot and caught them most of the time. Now I need help getting from a bed to a chair that’s two feet away.
“Sounds great,” I say, because the only thing worse than needing help is taking out my frustrations on the very people trying to give it.