Back in the Saddle

Monday, April 26

8:00 pm

After the flurry of activity on Friday and insurance finally approving a Tuesday discharge, the weekend turned out to be pretty calm. I did get an OT session and a couple of turns on the stim bike in, which I augmented with exercises on my own. I also had a tech take a video of me walking yesterday (the harness is a belay system only in case I stumble):

Today was my last full day here at Sheltering Arms, so a lot of the day was spent doing assessments of my current capabilities. OT Lori tested my grip strength and had me do the exercises involving moving cubes over the divider and putting pegs in the holes again—on all of which I did slightly better than I had the other day. We talked about further exercises that I could do at home, and then Lori took me to the wheelchair clinic, where I had another appointment with the wheelchair rep.

Unfortunately, the chair that I’ve had here, which I like, is a vendor demo and therefore not available as a loaner. So they are sending me home in a different chair. Because my release date was moved up three days, the wheelchair rep was unprepared and scrambled to find a loaner chair that she could give me. She came up with one that, on first sit, hurt. They made adjustments until eventually it was nearly as comfortable as the old one. But when Linda arrived and tried pushing it, she had a hard time because the handles are too low. We have asked for a different chair, but I seriously doubt that the wheelchair rep will come up with another solution by tomorrow afternoon. The chair I leave SAI with will be a loaner to me for the next couple of months while we wait for my customized chair to arrive—by which time I hopefully won’t even need one.

Right after Linda arrived today, I had an appointment with Jared, whose adaptive sports organization had brought in recumbent bikes—three-wheeled bikes with essentially a slingback chair, with bicycle pedals out in front of you, and there are low handles you hold onto on each side that have the gear shifters and breaks. They put me in one, and I took off. It was a lot of fun.

When Linda was here, we went outside to see if I would be able to manage getting into her car, which is high off the ground. Brian suggested that I back in, first putting my butt against the edge of the seat and then scooting my way further onto the seat. But I stepped up onto the passenger side with my left foot and got into the seat the way a person normally would. I love surprising my PT guys like that.

After that, I had my final hand and arm recovery session—consistently one of the worst forms of torture I've experienced here. Eliza put me through a long series of escalating exercises: for example, reaching down and picking up weights; reaching back for a clothespin and clipping on a board; picking up foam straps like grocery bags, carrying them to a bench, putting them down, picking them back up. Bottom line: she destroyed me, for the last time.

In their final assessments, my therapists were about as effusive as they could possibly be about how well I’ve done these last three weeks, which gives me hope for the future. Lori told me, “We have to keep moving the bar for you, because every time we give you a goal you blow right past it in half the time we expect you to!” And yet, I still feel like a total spastic.

One of the things I was not prepared for was just how quickly and severely the muscles of the body atrophy. Earlier in my stay here, when I told Christine that I feel like I look and move like an old person, she quipped that I would Benjamin Button my way right back to where I was before the accident. That hits home today for a different reason. When I look at my arms and legs, I think, Yup, I’ve Benjamin Button-ed all the way down to about 10 years old. There’s no bulk left. I have skinny little arms. And I wonder how I will ever build back the muscle I had after 64 years of an active life. I know it can be done, but the atrophy is a bit disturbing.

Another odd aspect of my recovery is that people often talk about “relearning how to walk,” but my brain and muscles never actually forgot. In my case, it’s like a robot that has a fully functioning central processing unit (so the computer itself functions fully), and all the robot limbs that are supposed to move are capable of moving, but the communication lines between the computer and the limbs are totally haywire. My brain knows exactly how to walk. And it keeps telling my legs, “Put one foot out in front of the other.” But somehow the signal from my brain to my legs gets scrambled. So it’s not like relearning how to walk, because (unlike a baby learning for the first time) my brain already knows; rather, it’s retraining those communication pathways to restore their connections.

A bright spot today is that I may be able to receive benefits through the Veterans Administration (VA). We had applied for benefits about 10 days ago but found out last week that I was denied. This wasn’t really a surprise, since I did not sustain the injury as part of my active-duty service. But, through a series of wonderful coincidences and contacts contacting other contacts, we found out that I may yet qualify. There is a special benefits priority group for catastrophic injury, including spinal cord, under which I should be eligible for VA benefits. Through the dogged determination of Christine and Lauren, and some angels helping along the way, yesterday we finally got through to the right people at the local VA facility, who acknowledged that I should be eligible under the category 4 catastrophic injury exception.

So the benefits that were denied earlier are now back on the table. This means in part that there is a slight possibility that tomorrow I might go straight from SAI to a VA inpatient facility just south of Richmond for one week. We do not think this is highly likely at this point, for the same reason I’m getting kicked out of SAI: my scores are so good and I’ve made such progress that outpatient therapy is probably sufficient from this point. More exciting to me, though, is that it opens up doors for adaptive equipment that insurance would never pay for—not just my wheelchair but also recreational equipment like a recumbent bike. At this point, we are highly optimistic that I will be able to tap into those benefits. It will be the second-best thing that the Air Force has ever done for me. (The best thing, of course, is that it provided the vehicle for me to meet my wife. And the third-best thing is that I got to play very high-level rugby while I served. Oh—and I got some great job training along the way, too.)