2006-07-12 - 11:32 a.m.
Ever since I’ve come to Turkmenistan, I’ve seen a lot of burn victims and I don’t just mean a shiny patch on someone’s forearm. I’m talking about all over, melted face, hands, and arms kind of burns. My good friend’s cousin and brother were both burned in a house fire and they’ve even tried to go to Russia to get reconstructive surgery but were told that they weren’t eligible yet because their bodies weren’t used to the Russian air. It sounds like something vaguely 19th Century, when they’d send you to some hot spring in Arizona because the weather would clear up tuberculosis.
Anyway, you see someone with 75% body burns and people tend to react the same way: first you’re taken aback, then you realize that it could happen to anyone, you sympathize, but then you realize your chances of it happening to you are so small, that you’ll escape unscathed for years and years. I go through the same process but I never manage to reach that fourth step of counting your blessings that it’ll probably never happen to me.
Ever since I was a little kid and seen people in wheelchairs, confined to beds, covered in sores, missing a nose, with hooks for fingers, skulls sunken in, trunks without limbs, and so on, I’ve felt like I was going to be one of them, that something terrible was headed my way. I’ve never really thought of it as a terrible burden or an awful premonition headed my way and to be feared; it’s been more of an inevitable thing to be accepted quietly, like the fact it’s going to snow in December or that your dog will die in the next five years.
I don’t know specifically how I’m going to be crippled or what kind of handicap I have, but sometimes I imagine if it’s going to be something, it’ll be from getting hit by a semi as I cross the street or me turning on the lights when there’s a gas leak in my house, blowing my body through the house and it’s aluminum siding.
While I don’t know what specifically is going to cripple me, I do have images of what it’ll be like afterwards. The first one is always me in bed, immobile, while my husband spoon feeds pureed carrots into my mouth, wiping the excess off with a little peach colored hand cloth. After he finished swiping the jar of its last remaining globs, he puts the glass down, looks at my glassy eyes, and says, “Steve, I’m leaving you. After your tragic mountain climbing accident that has left you no movement in anything but your mouth, I can’t be with you anymore. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life spoonfeeding tapioca pudding into someone’s mouth. I’ve decided to move out and live with my new boyfriend, Trevor, who enjoys kayaking, bike riding, and intense power lifting. Believe me, I wanted to stay with you but holding Trevor’s rock hard body with 1% body fat against me is better than your atrophied and distrophied body. Goodbye.”
And then as he left, I would keep trying to get my mouth wand to hit the sad-face button on my Stephen Hawking voicecomputer. Just as my husband closes the door, the computer lets out a monotone “boo-hoo. Oh god.” A single tear strolls down my immovable face.
The other scenario I always imagine is in some sort after-school special (which I don’t think exist anymore, making my imagination a little outdated—hey, I dream in trolls!) where I’m in my electric wheelchair with a big fat white tube into my throat, tongue pressed to the bottom of my mouth (remember? It can’t move.), and exhorting children across the English-speaking world: “Wemembeh, alway looh acroht da stwee wheh cwossy. [panting and gasping to catch breath for uncomfortable 10 second period] I diden and I we wegreh it fo da res of my yife. Pwee, [gasping] do ee fo mee.” It’s always in a really book-laden library with bookshelves that have really dark wood. There’s a desk behind me. Because I managed to become a lawyer after my accident? Who knows.
It’s not even a psychic sense of what’s going to happen—it’s just an acceptance of something that’s going to happen. Psychic visions hit you like a small stone striking your forehead; this is more of a heavy cat that won’t get off your leg.
What’s even more bizarre about my acceptance of being handicapped when I’m older is that I think of it as some sort of toll I have to pay for being vain or having terrible thoughts about people. That all the awful things that did laps in my mind are going to hit me with some karmic punch in the stomach of my physical well-being. And I think that’s a reason why I accept it so readily, because my mean thoughts bubble to the surface so often. When I lay in that hospital bed with my trained Rhesus monkey, Brandon, changing tv stations for me, I’ll just have to nod my head and say, “Well, I had it coming.”
And we all want to be the good handicap person, right? The one who shows up on Oprah, says something powerful, writes a poem that gets cross-stiched onto quilts across America, and makes a middle-aged woman in the audience cry her mascara into a crooked line down her face? We all want to be that one, but I’m so afraid, despite the fact I accept my fate years ahead of time (or maybe even days!), I’ll be the mean one who purposefully drives into people or drools on purpose to make someone wipe it up. Or I cry a lot and asking people around me, sitting uncomfortably I add, why it happened to me. I would have that sentence programmed into my voicecomputer, believe you me.
Do you get to pick the voice of your computer? I would pick Angela Lansbury.
All I ask is that if I am handicapped, I know it’ll probably be weird for you guys to see me and hang out with me. But just be patient if I get really sad or I need you to change my bed pan. At least get one of you to hang out with me. The rest of you can drop me as a friend if you want--just make sure one of you sticks around, ok?
