Body
I was at Chicago Fest in August of 1981, which took place near Navy Pier right there on Lake Michigan. I was 24 years old at the time (I’m 67 now) and was working as a bouncer and security guard for local and national rock bands. At the time I was living in Chicago near McKinley Park and Bridgeport.
I was at the festival with a bunch of my friends, and I decided to dive into the lake. I put my hands in position over my head like you do when you’re going to dive and I did a standing dive into the water from the rocks. Because my left hand had just come out of a cast a few days before from a prior injury, looking back, I think it was weak and couldn’t protect my head when I hit the water. I basically hit the water on my neck in such a way that I sustained a C7/8 spinal cord injury and broke my C5, C6 and C7 vertebrae as well. I was basically totally paralyzed except I could wiggle my fingers. I didn’t have the ability to yell to my friends, and they thought I was just goofing around in the water. But I was actually going to drown. Luckily, a nurse who just happened to be there noticed that something was wrong and she pulled me out.
The first thing I noticed when I woke up at the hospital was that there were bolts on my head, and tubes all over the place. I remember a doctor coming in and just really bluntly telling me I was paralyzed, had broken my neck and would never walk again and then he quickly left the room. I was totally stunned and in shock, but I knew I couldn’t break down in front of my friends and family. I tried to act like it was going to be OK for everyone else. I felt like I just could not freak out or it would make everyone else even more upset. I had to act brave, and like I could handle it and keep a smile on my face.
I was in the hospital for a month. I had a tibial bone fusion where they took some bone from my shin and put it on each side of my spine to stabilize it. After I recovered from that, I was paralyzed from under my arms down.
After I was discharged from the hospital, I was moved to a rehabilitation hospital. They told me I would be there for two months. In my mind, that date two months from when I got there, was going to be the exact day I would go home.
I had therapy from morning to around 4 or 5 o’clock every day. My schedule would be taped to the back of my wheelchair so that all the clinical staff would know where I had to be. At first, I didn’t really understand that I had no control over my voluntary muscles and that took a while to sink in.
Some of the physical therapy activities involved games, and stuff that kids might do, and I understood it was necessary for my rehabilitation and to help me regain some function, but it seemed geared towards children rather than learning skills I would need. Sometimes I wasn’t totally comfortable with it.
I had a few psychiatry sessions, but the first time I met my psychiatrist, the first thing he said to me was, “I understand how you feel,” and that really turned me off, because how could he? He wasn’t the one with a spinal cord injury.
There didn’t seem to be any time where I was free to really think about what happened and do some grieving. Any time a staff person thought I was getting down or depressed, they wanted to provide some support, or have me talk to my psychiatrist, but what I really needed was some time to myself, and that was a bit hard to come by because the therapy was so intense and I felt like I was always being watched or monitored.
I was able to go home to my family for one weekend while I was in rehabilitation. My mom and my brother were going to be there and they were going to be my primary caretakers. But when I got home, everything was rearranged to make getting around in my wheelchair easier, and while I get that, I had this image in my mind of home, and when I got there it wasn’t home. It was ‘rehab home.’ That was a big disappointment for me. I wish they had left the house as it was.
What I really got in rehabilitation was a solid base, or foundation of skills for living as someone paralyzed from the armpits down. Like transferring from my wheelchair to a bed – it’s tricky and just a slight change in your angle can mean the difference between getting it right or ending up on the floor. But I felt that in rehabilitation, the therapists were just going by the book. Like, ‘this is how you transfer’ and that was it. I wish that I was more involved in the learning process, like if they helped me understand the end goal, and the elements to get there, and then I could work with them to figure out how I was going to do it, rather than being told there was a certain way and just practicing that way. I also felt like they wouldn’t let me fail, and I think failing once or twice might have been a good lesson.
When I got home, I used what I learned and modified it to fit me and refined my techniques. And that’s when I finally had time to be alone and grieve what happened.
I didn’t go into any additional rehabilitation, like day rehab after that. I just worked on getting my routine down.
I’ve been a volunteer with the Vaughn Chapter of the Paralyzed Veterans of America. And I also volunteer as a veteran research consultant for Hines VA research.
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As part of a grant to study how differences in acute care and rehabilitation length of stay affect outcomes for people with spinal cord injury in different countries, the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research has collected blog posts by people with SCI in different countries about their injuries and rehabilitation. In these posts, writers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and The Netherlands share reflections on their unique inpatient rehabilitation experiences, what worked, what they wanted more (or less) of in rehabilitation, what it was like going home, and how they are doing today. The grant is funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (grant 90DPHF0012).