It's Electric!

Wednesday, April 7

1:30 pm

I had a good night until about four in the morning, when I had to pee badly and had pretty severe muscle spasms in the tops of my thighs. At times it felt like I was being pulled up into a ball. The doctors think the spasms were related to pressure in my bladder; they diminished after I was relieved of a full liter of urine. I was pretty pissed off about it.

OT Lori came into my room at 8:30 this morning, and part of today’s therapy was learning to feed myself breakfast. At one point Lori inquired about my life at home, so I told her about the zipline, the hovercraft, and the 360-degree swing. She asked how many times I’d had people tell me, “You’re going to break your neck one day!” She apologized for it, but I thought it was hilarious.

Before we started working, Lori pulled out a little battery box with electrodes that she hooked up to my arms, which ran electrical signals through my muscles while we were working. She then put my right wrist in a brace that theoretically is meant to hold utensils, but the utensils didn’t fit through the loop very well, so Lori tried to bend the them to fit, to little avail. We tried to make it work anyway. You know how if you drink from a firehose, you end up wet and still thirsty? Well, spastically feeding myself breakfast was like that: I went away hungry and covered in food. I wasn’t crying over spilled milk, but I did have egg on my face. (Christine is so sorry for typing that.) But I managed to shovel some food in my mouth, and Lori seemed pleased with what I was able to do.

We did a crouch-and-pivot into my wheelchair, which I propelled on my own into the bathroom and to the sink. In preparation for brushing my teeth, Lori told me to turn on the water, so I managed to get my left hand up onto the counter and smack the large left handle of the faucet with my wrist, causing hot water to run and getting my hand all wet. I then managed to wrestle my right arm up onto the counter and smack the cold-water faucet. So both hands were wet now. I smacked the hot-water handle back off. Lori put my electric toothbrush in my right hand and told me to grab it, which I was wholly unsuccessful at. I just can’t pull my fingers open enough yet to get them around the toothbrush. Lori helped me get my hand around it, and I was somewhat able to lift my right hand up to my mouth. I did not yet have the dexterity to press the “on” button, which Lori did for me. I moved my hand (and my head) enough to partially brush most of my teeth. We turned off the water and I tried to let go of the toothbrush, which went about as well as my initial attempt to grasp it.

When we were done, she pulled out devices that looked like tasers. They kind of felt like tasers, too, when she zapped me with them along my neck muscles. It felt like I was in some kind of science fiction movie being treated with a space alien device to reprogram my brain. (Christine detects little evidence thus far that his brain has been reprogrammed; his puns have always been this bad.)

I’ve spent the last couple of hours on the phone with friends, which always cheers me up. I wish I were able to receive more visitors while I’m in Richmond, but I will have to wait until I’m home again.

7:30 pm

Sometime around lunch today, psychologist Dr. Matt Evers came in. He was great. We chatted so long he barely got around to asking me the questions he was supposed to ask. When I told him I used to be active duty Air Force, he said there are a half-dozen spine-specific VA clinics throughout the country, one of which is in Richmond. I don’t know anything about it yet, but he seemed pretty excited by the prospect that I could be part of it.

At PT today, Brian helped me get up and into my new wheelchair. He wheeled me down to the CORE gym and stopped me in front of a device called stim (stimulation) bike. It looked like a stationary bike with a monitor attached to it, but instead of a bike seat my wheelchair was used and my legs went straight out in front to reach the pedals. Brian had not used this machine before, so he called assistance from a PT tech named Kiara to make sure we did it correctly. They attached electrodes to four main leg muscles and tested those muscles while I was pedaling. The way they tested it was by instructing me to pedal and increasing the electrical current through a specific electrode until I felt it; when I felt it, that was the “minimum,” and when I couldn’t stand it anymore that was the “maximum.”

After establishing the minimum and maximum on each leg, Brian and Kiara had me continue pedaling while the electricity fired through the muscles at the appropriate moment of each pedal rotation. The current is meant to help my brain remember what it feels like to fire when that particular motion occurs. Think about when you have a low battery in a flashlight—it still lights up but the light is dim. When you recharge the battery, the light becomes bright again. It’s as if my muscle “batteries” are low, and they are basically recharging my batteries so the light becomes bright again.

I biked for 16 minutes before going to the track I described yesterday and got hooked into the gait belt again. I walked 80 feet with Brian—40 feet out, then 40 feet back—and felt like I depended on him a lot for support. They then put me in a harness that wraps around my chest and attaches to a track on the ceiling. The harness is programmed not to support my weight but to help me with my balance, so if I seem to be falling in one direction it will tighten up. I walked in this harness, without Brian’s support, until my legs wouldn’t go any further. One of the most difficult aspects of this was getting my right foot to land where I wanted it to; it kept tending toward the inside, and I even stepped on my own foot occasionally, instead of setting it in front of me. It’s all part of reprogramming the brain to say straight ahead, foot down.

Having been exhausted, I was taken back to my room and Brian put me back in bed around 4:15. Brian is a beginning woodworker and expressed interest in some of the projects I’m working on. It’s always nice to find a way to connect with the people working with and helping me.

Linda arrived around 4:30 and was here when the tech Lily came in to give me a shower. I was so tired I really didn’t want to get up again, but I did. I got up using a device called Sara Stedy, which I kept calling Steady Freddy. With this device, you can stand up but your shins lean forward against a padded brace and a seat is folded down behind you for you to sit on. They got me in my wheelchair that way and rolled me to the shower seat, where Lily washed my hair and gave me a shower. It was a laborious process, but it made Linda happy and it feels great now.

After my shower, they put me back in bed, and Linda dried some of the parts of me that were still dripping and gave me a shave. She then fed me a dinner of salmon with rice and a Caesar salad, followed by apple crisp. The rest of her visit flew by with chatting and catching up on my emails. I wish I knew how to relieve her of the long drive visiting me requires. But she’ll be back again tomorrow, god love her. I know I do.

My room at Sheltering Arms