a new life

The nurses woke me early in the morning and gave me a cloth and a little yellow tub of water to wash myself, but they had to do most of the washing for me. Intense pain seized my body each time they shifted me slightly, and as they pulled my broken leg back, I cried out, "Mijn been is gebroken hier!" They laughed, because they already knew, and because I pronounced gebroken as if it was German.

"You sound like you're saying your leg is baked, gebakken!" A few tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. I was not amused. "I think she's scared." They giggled.

They told me I was washing myself for the surgery in half an hour, but my anticipation waned as the empty hours drifted towards noon. Lifting myself for the bedpan was torture, but the only useful action of which I was capable. And suddenly they came at once, and they were wheeling me away. Hands plucked my white teddy bear Snuggles, which Alice had brought the night before with a bag of my things, out of my arms without a word. I reached up weakly after it. "Awww," a nurse exclaimed, but Snuggles was not returned to me.

They wheeled me into a waiting room with three eerily empty beds and left me to wait. I thought alarmedly of patients who had received too little anesthesia and had felt every last incision of their surgeries unable to move or scream and resolved to plead with the anesthesiologist to ensure that did not happen to me. But when Dr. Mattheussen came with warm and caring questions, I was at a loss for words.

Finally the sterile blue and white walls of the operating room slid into place around me. Dr. Vandenberk introduced many people, but I remember only that his lanky young assistant was named Tony.

"I've already performed three surgeries this morning, so I'm warmed up," the doctor said, standing over me smiling. I shuddered as they began to undress the bloody rack. Please don't move my leg from that thing until I'm out, please... please, oh please...

...I couldn't tell whether I was in the same room because it was wheeling relentlessly around me. Tony was standing to my left. "Why does it hurt so much?" I whispered.

He knelt beside me. "On your right side? It's normal." I shook my head fervidly. "But why does it hurt all over my lower body?" Silence. "It's going to be okay." I clasped his outstretched hand and cried myself into darkness.

They were standing to my right, perhaps five of them, silhouetted against the window of my hospital room, everyone and everything spinning out of control around me. Outside, dazzling golden clouds draped themselves against a brilliant blue sky. They stood with their hands folded behind their backs, looking down solemnly at me, silent shadows. The sky shone like a vision from another world, so close, so far. I had to tell them. Did they speak English? "Les nuages sont très beaux," I whispered. They did not react, and the weight of their gazes rested leadenly upon me. It broke my heart that in the midst of such beauty, all they could see was sadness. But then they too spun away into the void.

Nightmares began to wake me repeatedly in the evening, alone there in the dark, my shocked body drugged with untold amounts of narcotics. Vision after terrifying vision passed before my eyes until Tom arrived, and thank god he did, because the night would have been unbearable without him there to anchor me in reality whenever I awoke crying or screaming. I babbled deliriously to him, offering every appropriate and inappropriate thought that swept into my mind in my desperation to fling forth words that would hook into the reality that kept slipping away from me. "You must be so exhausted," I said in a moment of relative clarity, ashamed that he had been sitting at my bedside for hours as I prated. "Please, go home if you need to."

"Are you kidding?" he asked incredulously. "I'm not leaving you like this."

I surfaced into rationality and drowned in madness time after time, tossing my head from side to side to fling away the visions, trying to sleep but terrified of what awaited me in my waking dreams, until finally I awoke from a long doze at 2 am to find myself fully and sanely conscious. Tom fell asleep in a chair across the room, still keeping me company in that now mercifully empty darkness until sunrise.

The hospital had kept me on a strict diet of white bread, but on Sunday they brought me a hot, steaming lunch with witloof soup. I could only pick at the main course, but as I smelled the soup deeply, I realized it was the first real food I had enjoyed since Friday. Tears of joy rolled down my cheeks.

And so my recovery progressed, visitors came, my table filled with flowers and cards, and my closet filled with lovingly chosen inpatient clothes from Alice. She and her husband brought me homemade tomato soup and newspapers in which the same article appeared:

Fietser gewond
MECHELEN - Aan de Uilmolenweg gebeurde een zwaar ongeval. Aan het kruispunt met de Stuivenbergbaan werd een 22-jarige vrouwelijke fietser gegrepen door een auto toen ze de rijweg overstak. Het slachtoffer werd met ernstige, maar geen levensgevaarlijke verwondingen naar het ziekenhuis gevoerd.

I was perfectly outraged. The police had omitted every interesting detail possible. An American student studying the carillon in Belgium had been hit by a car! I had nearly attained carillon martyrdom or sainthood, nearly outdone Jo himself. But luckily for me, that honor must wait.

"Did you know that there was a terrible three-car pileup on Saturday morning, and they brought the victims here?" Alice asked me. I thought of the three empty beds in the waiting room. My operation had been delayed because others had arrived more seriously injured than me. I had been fortunate...

Sessions with the physical therapist became the highlight of each day, as he brought me first a walker and then crutches and taught me to "walk" further and further from my room. My parents flew in on Tuesday from San Francisco despite my protestations, and a few minutes after they saw me for the first time, a hesitant, unfamiliar woman appeared at my door. Sensing who she was, I beckoned to her to enter, and she introduced herself in Dutch as the driver of the car that had hit me: Emilia. She looked from my crutches to me sitting at the table and back at the crutches and began to cry. We could hardly communicate in each other's languages, but I reassured her as best as I could that I wasn't angry at her, not at all, and gave her a hug--she seemed to need it most of anyone in the room.

On Thanksgiving Day, I was released from the hospital earlier than expected, but when I called Alice, she already knew. The day before, her neighbor had come rushing in to tell her, having heard the news from her husband, a colleague of Dr. Vandenberk.

Marie-Claude drove me to the BAEF luncheon that I had been planning to attend for weeks. Right on schedule (well, 40 minutes late, and I couldn't give the carillon concert I had promised). As we held up our glasses around the long, elegant table, Dr. Boulpaep declared that most of all they were thankful to have me there, but I could not help but be thankful most of all for the miracle that had been my disaster. You see, today at home I saw my bicycle for the first time. I had expected it to be crumpled in half, having sacrificed itself for me, taken the brunt of the impact. I brought a close friend along to ensure that someone would tear me away from the thing when I threw my arms about its broken frame and tried desperately to revive it. But when I hobbled into the foyer and opened my eyes, bracing for the worst, my bike stood in near perfect condition before me, gleaming silver in the light. A bent fork, an out-of-true wheel, a frayed brake cable, handlebars off axis...

I was incredibly fortunate to emerge from the accident with only a broken leg, my bike came through with perfectly reparable damage, and even my five-euro windbreaker showed no sign of the disaster that had befallen its wearer. My guardian angel was watching over me that day as I wheeled jubilant and free out of Vrijbroek park--and my guardian angel Alice then took up the slack.

Outraged as I am about it, I simply cannot remember my life flashing before my eyes or my body being flung into the windshield. But during those days in the hospital, I lived my life from a new beginning to the present. I arrived screaming and crying in the hospital, frightened and helpless. Two kindly Belgians rushed in to take me in as their own child. I could do nothing for myself, couldn't move my leg a few millimeters when it was seized with pain, couldn't use the toilet, couldn't shower. I had no idea what the back of my bed or the wall behind it looked like until the physical therapist taught me to walk again, and each day my world grew as I huffed and puffed further down the hallway, and eventually up the stairs and back down. Slowly, I began to discover the world, to regain independence as I struggled into the bathroom for the first time and washed my own hair after the nurses had told me it would be impossible that day. Alice brought my English-Dutch dictionary, and because some of the nurses spoke only Dutch, I learned to talk as well as walk again. With visitors streaming in each evening, I discovered new friends I'd never known I had.

And finally, on the day of my coming-of-age, I struggled awkwardly into business casual with my parents' help and huffed and puffed my way out of the hospital into the 'real' world. That world had never seemed so perilous before--bitter cold, rainy, filled with roaring traffic, lined with narrow, unprotected cobblestone sidewalks and uneven steps, sprouting slippery, narrow nineteenth-century stairways--so many obstacles that could threaten an exhausted, helpless woman on crutches.

But even in my room at home now, the world reveals new gifts. The first snow of the season graced my second night here. A card arrived from Kim in Texas, telling me she had been unable to play for six weeks in Mechelen after breaking a finger, but that her playing had improved as a result. My aunts and uncles in Australia and Hong Kong sent me flowers and offered to buy me a used car, showering generosity and caring upon me beyond my imagination. My new flatmate Wendy heard me sobbing one night, and although we were barely acquaintances, she came and plucked me off my bed, talked sense into me, and resolved to take me home for Christmas so I won't spend it alone on my crutches in this little room.

Soon, we'll be out there again, me and my other half, wheeling out into the unknown, alive as ever, reborn.