An AFO is a mechanism which sounds vaguely military and therefore more than a little scary. Trust me, it's not scary, but it's part of a nurse's language that has to be broken if you're going to get along with them.
"What'd you do with your AFO?" Maggie says one morning.
I had no idea what she was talking about, even though I'd been wearing two of them for months.
Try this on for size. Two goals I had in Heartland Manor; one of them was to get out. The other was to get some good sound "occupational therapy." So you're something of a cripple now, I told myself--you can't use your legs without a walker. How do you pee? Takes a nurse. How do you change underwear? Takes a nurse. There are things you have to learn before you graduate into the real world where there are no nurses.
I thought I'd take a shortcut and learn some things on my own--like how to pee in a toilet instead of that blessed uranyl. So I deliberately avoided that little red button on the long stem, told myself I didn't need two fricken' nurses to help me relieve myself. I swung my dead legs out from the bed, harumphed myself up to my walker, stood, took one step, and crumpled like a cheap suit, at which point I hit the button for the nurses.
I didn't put a light on in the room, so there I lay on the floor in my underwear.
"Where are you hurt, Jim?" the nurse says.
"Right there in my pride," I said, or something similar--I mean, there I lay, gird only in my Duluth skivvies, a 260-pound, 6'2" old bald man sprawled out on the tile floor like a really bad joke.
"What's this?" one of them asked, pointing at a lake of dark liquid.
"Maybe I spilled some cranberry juice," I said innocently. Honestly, I had no clue it was blood, but then my feet had been numb for months. I had no feeling.
It wasn't long I was in an ambulance headed for Orange City because those nurses were sure I was going to require stiches to repair the rips beneath my toes.
Nobody'd seen anything like it at Orange City Emergency, and a doc on call shook his head, just like the nurses, who took picture of this patient with slices of open meat beneath his toes--"amazing! I've never seen anything like this."
I giggled, so they did too. For fifteen minutes, I was the show in Emergency.
But once they got me glued together, they sent me back on my merry way to the home, with the stern advice that I stay in a chair or bed for 72 hours. . .72 unmovable hours, seemed like half a lifetime. And it was.
What I didn't realize was that I was also sentenced to an instrument of torture--if I needed to move, I'd be hoovered (I don't know how to spell it), which means being harnessed up with four wide straps, then lifted (a hoover is motorized) freakishly to wherever you need to get to--a toilet, for instance.
It was, for me anyway, the height of humiliation to be hoisted up off the bed by a medieval machine pushed into my room to take control. There I was, bare-bottomed or Jockeyed, hauled off to the throne, where the hoover gently set my bottom down where I meant it to be when I took that damned, fatal step out of bed.
For 72 hours, it was just me and the hoover, "the stork," I called it--the nurses giggled--because it wasn't a wholly different method of transportation than that commonly attributed to storks delivering similarly undressed babies. "Get the stork," I'd say for 72 of the longest hours in my life.
Here's the deal. When my 72 hours was history--and not a second before--the OT, a darlingly hefty blonde who might have made a good line coach had football been her thing--told me that blessed hoover would enter my room no more the moment I could stand. "It's that simple--can you?" she said.
I never did feel any pain; my toes were far too numb, so I said something akin to "you bet your ass I can."
So the two of us turned into a team because she understood how tough it was for an old Dutch Calvinist professor of literature, but still a rookie at this whole hospital schtick, to be paraded around, strung up, arms and legs dangling like some stuck creature from who-knows-where.
"Let's get you up," she said, growling through a smile.
And I stood. I did. I got myself standing, and there I stood, hanging on to the walker. I stood on my own too bandaged feet. I stood straight up, locked my shaky knees for a minute, stood there before the OT, who, I swear, was just as thrilled as I was.
It would take me three weeks to graduate from rehab, three long weeks I could have avoided had I pushed the damn red button and called in the potty squad instead of playing Lewis and Clark on my own in the middle of the night.
I can't tell you what a joy it was to stand there, even if it was for no more than twenty seconds. I stood, and in my mind, the image of me hung up in that blasted hoover was gone. Free at last. Thank God a'mighty, free at last.
It may seem a pittance to you, a silly little moment one afternoon in a rehab hospital, but I'm telling you, I announced the great tidings to every last nurse who dropped by that day and night, every last one. It was a holiday. Pure joy.
On our way to an old-years service at our church that night, I told myself I had a sermon for old-years. Not only that, I deserved a place in line to tell my story. What kind of year was 2024 for the Schaaps.
If you must know, it was plain-and-simple, the shits. We lost half our house, I lost my legs, and Barb got handed a wheelchair with a cripple in it. Good riddance.
But then let me tell you about hoovers and AFOs, and the 72 hours at Heartland when I couldn't move without a hoover, and the pure joy the moment I stood up for the first time, let me tell you about a level of sheer thrill all through my broken body.
There's more to the story, more to that sermon I planned all the way to church on Old Year's Eve.
Don't know that it would have gone over, but I had something to say.
