Today marks one year since the car accident. It's left me with some aches and pains that will probably never go away, and a tendency to flinch whenever I see a car approaching an intersection too fast. I saw a car run a stop sign today, in fact, right in front of me. Why do people do that? Stops signs aren't suggestions.
I think the medical stuff is mostly over with, but this won't be done till the lawyers say it is. And I probably shouldn't say anything else about that.
Which leaves me just with gratitude for my physical recovery and for all the support from my family and friends. And amazement at how difficult it is for me to write about this, even after having a whole year to get used to the idea.
I spend another afternoon in a waiting room. I read, listen to the desk staff chat. One of them starts humming-singing a blues (gospel?) tune in a low, but perfectly pitched voice, another joins her. Harmony, until they laugh at themselves because it's such an old song.
Finally I'm back in an exam room and the doctor comes in.
"So, how are you? Let's see those films," he says.
We look at the MRI of my neck, the film clipped to a light box, and look at my spine, my disks, my spinal cord. And a slender whisper of white therein.
"Ah, see. Here, this is what I thought." The doctor traces the thin dash of white with his index finger. "This is fluid, that shouldn't be there." He tells me about how the consequent disruption to the nerves in the shoulder can lead to the destruction of the joint. "You need to see a neurosurgeon."
He dives for the door and I contemplate the film while arrangements are made.
At this precise moment, I have no medical appointments of any kind next week. I've been trying to get as much of this doctor stuff done by the end of the year because (presumably) my astronomical deductible was met within the first few minutes of my even more astronomically expensive hospital stay. The last few weeks have been just so much fun, I can't tell you.
Today, the last day of the year (2004 can't end too soon for me, I can tell you), was the day of my last medical appointment: an Electromyogram. This test is, in my case, used to make sure that the nerves in my arm didn't get messed up in the accident. I've had a lot of weakness and pain in my shoulder, as if some muscles suddenly stopped working and the others got strained from picking up the slack.
The test begins with some probes being taped to my hand and the nurse zapping me with a little taser-type thing. This is the nerve conduction velocity form of the fun. She measures the distances between the zapping points and the probes. This doesn't hurt, but the electric shocks are startling. All of me jumps, not just the muscles that are being stimulated.
Then the doctor comes in and starts the real EMG, in which he sticks a needle way into my muscles and we listen to the electrical activity on a little speaker and look at the waveforms on the laptop being used as an oscilloscope. This doesn't sound that bad, the needle is little, but he keeps jiggling it around and making me tense my muscles.
"How far in are you sticking that needle?" I ask.
"Oh, not any farther than the hub," he says. "Just think of it as acupuncture. After all, 600 million Chinese people can't be wrong. Sometimes, because of how we're amplifying the signal, we pick up radio. You can't change the station though."
"Ow!"
"There're over 250 muscles we could test, but I don't think we need to do them all. You're going to have to stop bleeding." He presses gauze onto a recalcitrant stick site.
Then he sticks the needle into a muscle that works my index finger and tells me to point at the ceiling.
"Ow!"
Mercifully, he doesn't mess around with that muscle too long. For the grand finale, though, he sticks the needle into a muscle in the back of my neck and tells me to relax, but not to worry if I can't because this isn't an endurance kind of thing. And we'll only do that one muscle.
The neck stabbing actually hurts less than the finger one. And then we're done! The data are collected. I pass the test and my neck is okay, or at least it was.
"Women usually do much better with this test than men. I guess it has something to do with being able to deal with childbirth," he observes.
I enjoy being a girl.
Cross sections of the neck are grosser looking than cross sections of the arm. The neck is mostly gristle.
I look at the films and think, "Euw. Is that my trachea? Euw. Is that my spinal cord? Euw. What's all that other tissue?"
I don't think I managed to stay as still as I did when they did my shoulder either. Somehow it's impossible to keep immobile the body part they're imaging. They put you in this plastic thing to keep that part of you immobile, but which really just makes you so uncomfortable that you can't help but twitch. For this image of my neck, they put my head in a cradle, pack foam rubber around my head, and then lock a plastic frame over my face. My neck is therefore in a rather unnatural position and even so, I find that my neck moves constantly when I breathe. Moreover, every time the machine kicks on for another series of images, it's (1) loud and (2) sudden and therefore I jump as much as one can with one's head locked in a plastic cage.
It's too bad they aren’t imaging my right knee. My right knee is perfectly still for the whole twenty minutes the machine runs.
I get another job offer. This one is for medical records, lots of broken up text (harder to translate than continuous text), and handwriting by medical people. It's also not too many words, but will be disproportionately time consuming because of the broken up text. Ick. I take it anyway, because I'm available and I need the money. Once I receive the file, I check through it and skim some of the notes made by an English-speaking doctor. Turns out that the patient was in a side-impact auto accident and has some injuries similar to mine. This person's injuries were considerably more extensive, but one of them… I'm getting an MRI of my neck tomorrow to look for the same problem with the same vertebrae because I've got the same symptoms.
This is going to be a tough job.
Another day, another trip to the doctor's.
Today I got to see the MRI of my shoulder. I've seen MRI images before in Science News, for example, but there's something different about seeing a cross section of one's own body.
My bones. My muscles. My layer of subcutaneous fat.
The clarity of the image was startling. I knew I managed to stay really still and as my reward, I got to see the individual muscle fibers of my biceps.
I look like meat. The cross section of my upper arm reminded me of what one sees in the meat department at the supermarket, except I lack marbling.
My shoulder got messed up in the accident last July and it's been hurting ever since. My doctor has finally deigned to pay some attention to the shoulder and had me scheduled for an MRI. (I also happen to have an appointment with one of his colleagues tomorrow, before my MRI follow up with first doctor, that I scheduled during a mad fit of wanting to get a first opinion on my shoulder.)
This morning, bright and early, I go to the hospital for my MRI. The MRI area has these great doormats saying "Warning! Magnet in use!" I find these doormats appealing, but that speaks more of my geekiness than of the doormats, which are not terribly attractive. I fill out the forms claiming that I have no metal in my body and change out of my clothes.
The MRI machine is shaped like a great big aquamarine donut. I lie down on the pallet and skooch under this plastic thing that will cover my shoulder and help me keep it still, basically by pressing right where it hurts. The technicians give me earplugs because the machine is noisy and show me how they want me to hold my arm (in kind of a painful position). They also put a cushion under my knees and a blanket over me so I'll be a little more comfortable.
I am not claustrophobic. There is enough room around me in the middle of the donut. The only hard part is lying so still for so long. I want the images to be as clear as possible.
The other only hard part is when they said they were done and they'd bring me out of the machine, but then they didn't, deciding instead to run another series of images.
When I finally get out of the machine, I notice this thing on the pallet, a blue squeeze bulb connected to a clear plastic tube.
"Is that the panic button?" I ask. I want to squeeze and see if it sounds like a squeaky toy. It would have to be a mechanical type of arrangement because an electronic button would be messed up by the magnetic fields.
"Yes, that's to call the nurse. I didn't give it to you since you didn't look like the panicking type," the tech tells me.
Lazy Thanksgiving. Paid a stack of bills, submitted my resume a few more places. Took a walk in the wind and sun. Oz came over and we made Japanese-style curry with turkey in it. We used Vermont brand curry roux. Still don't know what Vermont has to do with curry. While it cooked, we danced the Okinawan party dance around the kitchen to Asi Asi. And I thought, "Wow! I can dance around. I'm not a paraplegic, I'm not brain damaged. I'm not even hurting very much right now. I'm going to be okay." That's maybe more than I've ever had to be thankful for.
When you (bleeding and unconscious) are rushed into the trauma unit at MCV, they don't bother with your name. You get identified as Trauma Fe, the "Fe" is for female (I suppose men get "Ma"), and you get a "trauma number" and a generic birthdate of 1 January of whatever year they pick based on how old you look. In my case, they knocked a couple years off my age. How flattering! As a result, however, all your medical records from your initial few hours in the trauma unit are associated with your trauma number and you get two birthdates to keep track of as you try and get your medical records consolidated once you regain consciousness. After all, there's nothing like the distraction of combat with a mindless bureaucracy when you're on opiates, in pain anyway, and trying to figure out what's happened to you.
For the whole week I was in the hospital, the name on my chart and the name plate on my room door was Trauma, Fe. Oz had to tell people that if they tried to call the hospital and reach me, or get my room number to come visit, that they shouldn't ask under my name, they should make inquiries regarding Trauma Fe. I asked the nurses about this (they knew my name and used it), but they explained that I'd be home before the name thing could get straightened out. This was the least of my problems and I wasn't really bothered by it. But one night, I awoke to a soft voice saying, "Miss Trauma? Miss Trauma?" when the health care helper who was on duty had to wake me up to take my blood pressure. I woke up laughing.
So, today the physical therapist (aka The Mistress of Pain) told me that I don't need to come in for PT anymore. But I should still go to a gym, since there's one available to me at school and I'm paying for it anyway, and do more strengthening exercises. Engineering students have every so much time to go work out, really. I pointed out that walking to the student facilities from where I have to park would be plenty of exercise, ha ha, but I suppose I should take her advice seriously and at least find out where the gym is.
For the most part, I've only ever driven compact cars, which you can basically point at a parking place and they end up in it, perfectly centered. Maybe I've driven mid-sized cars a few times, many years ago. Now, as the owner of a land yacht, I'm going to have to learn how to park a large car, which is rather a different matter. So far, I've been getting it between the lines, although a lot closer to one line than the other. Since I have a temporary handicap parking permit, I can use the big spaces with lots of room around them; while the parking job is incompetent, it does not affect other drivers. However, I won't be able to justifiably use handicap parking for more than another month or so, although the permit is good till February. Because one of my pet peeves is people with large vehicles who can't park them properly and create problems for other drivers, I must become a competent large vehicle parker or be overcome with self-loathing.
Today is my first practice session. With Oz in the passenger seat, I drive to a supermarket parking lot (a place with tiny parking places which is closed on Sundays) and proceed to park. And check how I did, and then back out and park again. Once I can turn right into a parking place and end up basically in the middle of it, I practice turning left. And again. And then again.
"That's fine. I'm getting queasy. You can stop now," says Oz.
"Are you sure? I'm still a getting little too close on this side."
"Yes, I'm sure. I'm queasy from all this backing up!" he says.
"Really?" So his digestive system isn't galvanized after all. Heh.
Next week: Parallel parking. Oz may prefer to stand on the curb and watch. Or maybe hide his eyes and wail.
And I guess I should look into getting a couple tow-headed children to throw into the backseat of my Volvo. Yes, that's "my" Volvo, although it's Oz who came up with the money. Big maroon wagon, tan leather interior that matches my purse. Elegantly aged and meticulously maintained. (The car, that is. The purse is a little worn.)
I needed to replace the Nissan Sentra that was destroyed in the accident, and in the interests of not spending my settlement before I got it, we opted to get a used car. Let me just say, ads are not the way to go when shopping for previously owned vehicles.
After one disappointment and some consideration of how I sold my Toyota a few years ago, I suggest, "Let's drive around the Fan and look for cars with 'For Sale' signs in the windows." It's a lovely day for a drive. Besides, the Fan district has a rather well-off and transient population, including lots of retrievers and tow-headed children. Prime territory for high-end used vehicles.
Bingo.
"It's awfully maroon," Oz observes.
"It won't crumple the next time someone runs a stop sign and hits me," I point out as I write down the phone number on the For Sale sign.
"Hey, you look taller. It's weird to see you not sitting down!"
"Hey, you're walking!" "Yeah, with both feet even."
In fact, I was cleared to walk (with crutches) a couple weeks ago. I'm still going to physical therapy and it will be a while before all this medical stuff is over with, but I'm feeling better all the time. Although I started school on time—over a month ago—it seems like my life has been on hold for the last two months. It's time to start writing again. Or something.
Thanks for all the good wishes sent my way. Dr. Science and the rest of the folks I worked with this past summer sent me a card too. As a get-well gift, Dr. Science even made up a miniature version of the Hamster project poster from the poster session that I missed because I was in the hospital. How engineer-like! It's on my mantel now.
On the evening of July 27, someone ran a stop sign and T-boned my car (and me). I spent a week in the hospital and now I'm continuing to convalesce at my mother's house. Between the pain medication and the fact that we've only got dial-up internet access here, I expect that entries will be sporadic for a while. Besides, nothing happens when you're confined to bed and wheelchair for a month to six weeks (I'm almost two weeks in. Heal bones! Heal!). The big excitement is—well, there is no big excitement. I read, sleep, wiggle around to keep my muscles from atrophy, read a little more. I ride the wheelchair around in circles: family room to breakfast room to kitchen to living room, then back to family room. I'm lucky to be alive. I'm lucky that my most serious injury is one that should heal up completely. I won't be disabled. I'm really lucky. I'm not dead.