Left in the dust.

Part 11 | From one hospital to the next

I’d been thinking I was going to leave Delray for a couple of days. They kept telling me tomorrow might be the day, and that day didn’t come. The anticipation was at an all-time high, but when the day finally came, I don’t think I was ready to leave. They just came in and were like, “Ok you gotta leave in the next hour.” It kinda caught me off guard. I felt rushed all of the sudden. The hospital had become a comfort zone, and I liked all of my nurses and PTs. But I was also like it’s time for the next chapter. I gotta go. I gotta go to Jacksonville, and get better.

They came into my room, put me on a stretcher and wheeled me out. I was still in my neck brace, so I was just looking at the ceiling, and I heard all of the girls at the nurse’s station saying, “Bye, Cody!” “You got this!” “Come back and see us!” I remember crying and just feeling overwhelmed.

They wheeled me outside. It was sunny and hot, and the ambulance engine was loud. Next thing you know they loaded me into the back of the ambulance. They told me they wouldn’t be able to pull over to empty my bag; so I hadn’t drank hardly any water, and I felt dehydrated for the whole ride.

The stretcher bed was so narrow. My left arm was hanging off the side, and I remember thinking I can’t believe I have to lay in this thing for the next four hours. I just wanted to get out. I was so uncomfortable. I tried to shut my eyes for the whole way, but I couldn’t really sleep.

I was at a work appointment four minutes west on the same road as the hopsital without cell service. My meeting wrapped up, I got in my car, and as I headed east my service bars flicked back on one at a time. My phone took a minute to process, and then it started to ding with messages with Mama Helcher.

This one came in first:

The next message read, “They left me in the dust.”

For as much as we were ready to get out of Delray and move on, we all felt left in the dust in some way. Overnight, everything we knew about life and how we lived had changed completely. Yet somehow for our whole lives, people with spinal cord injuries have existed all around us as if in some secret underground society we were grossly unaware of. The hospital was a revolving door, and despite driving four minutes west and back east past the hospital every Wednesday for the last 10 years, I never much thought about what was happening on the other side of those doors. We weren’t naive enough to think tragic injuries didn’t occur, but we were naive enough to think they would never happen to us. And certainly not an injury of this magnitude.

The hospital had oddly become comfortable. It was close to home. I had finally learned the winding pathway to his room from both the front and the side entrances. We liked our medical team, and besides, it wouldn’t be long until he came out of spinal shock and this would be something we looked back at as a close call that we narrowly escaped. I was still in the denial stage of grief, but I was slowly moving into the anger phase.

Because what the hell was supposed to happen next? He was limp in the back of an ambulance that was putting a growing distance from home where I had to keep working and the insurance-approved 30-day stay at the hospital in Jacksonville. And then what? Did we take another ambulance transport back home? Where would they unload him? All of the bedrooms were upstairs. We’d need a stair lift. Oh, but first, we’d need to install stair rails that were currently non-existent because tragedy doesn’t care if you’re in the middle of a DIY project.

So, we had 30 days to get the railing up, and in the meantime, we could put the bed in…I don’t know, the middle of the living room? But we needed a hospital bed. Oh gosh, and we needed a wheelchair and a wheelchair van and a wheelchair ramp to get into the house on the wheelchair we didn’t have. We needed a daytime nurse and probably a nighttime nurse as well. And also, how would we afford any of this?

And was anybody supposed to help us figure it all out? It seems like someone in the hopsital should be there for your transition beyond hounding you to determine your next hospital and scheduling an ambulance transport. Maybe it was just another day at work for them, or maybe this is how it works — sorry about your accident, thanks for being a good patient and good luck figuring everything out. Bye!

The unknown is a daunting place to live, yet there we were. His mom and I decided we would take shifts. We didn’t know whose shift was when or for how long, but that was the plan. And having a plan made us feel less scared, so we pretended our plan was well-thought-out and solid.

First, I would go home and pack a bag. It was a Thursday, so I would head up and stay for the weekend. Mama Helcher had a friend in Jacksonville who she would stay with. Somewhere in there we would rotate between the hospital and home, but that was the extent of our plan.

I drove home and found my suitcase, packing cubes and duffle bag strewn about on the floor exactly how I left them from the retreat I arrived home from less than two hours before his accident, now 18 days ago.

I stepped over this mess unaware of its presence every night I came home from the hospital and fell into bed. I’d love to tell you that if his accident never happened, I would’ve cleaned this up the following day when I got home from work. In truth, it would’ve stayed like this for a week because I landed home and got into bed at 3:30 a.m. on a Monday, had to get up and go to work in a few hours, and then I had a kickball game that night and a meeting for the board of the non-profit I sat on. I had plans to play pickle ball and grab lunch with a friend later on in the week after my chiropractor appointment but before my softball game. I had marathon training runs on my calendar, and I had work out of town so I’d spend a night at my sister's where I’d need to play with my nephews and niece until the street lights came on before heading to meet friends for flag football practice and dinner. I’d pull an all-nighter catching up on work the next day after my second kickball game of the week, and when I finally needed clean clothes, I’d drudge upstairs and consider unpacking the contents of my suitcase, but instead only gather the dirty laundry because I was supposed to leave the following Thursday for the Grand Canyon for a Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim hike across the Canyon and back, so what was the point in putting the suitcase away?

That’s how I lived. In the fast lane. Always. And I loved it.

Hurricane Ian cancelled my flight to the Grand Canyon though I’m not sure I would’ve gone with Cody in the hospital, but it felt good to have the decision made for me. I sat down at my computer and pulled up a reservation to a renovated old nun convent turned AirBnb that two friends and I had booked the summer prior because fall in Maine fills up fast. It slept 16, so I recruited a bunch of friends to join. I was the glue, so I cancelled it and sent a message to everyone letting them know we’d try again next year. We had a wedding the weekend after that, and Cody was supposed to be the flower boy. Yes, the flower boy. I messaged our friends to deliver bummer news and cancelled his tux rental. A few weeks after that, the Dolphins were playing the Bears in Chicago, and we were going for Cody’s birthday. We hadn’t booked that trip yet, so there was nothing to cancel, which was good because it was all I could take.

The two black envelopes with the X on them in the photo above are Cuts shirts that were part of the swag from the retreat. They had extra mens shirts, so I brought them home for Cody. I never got to see him wear them.

I wondered what else we would miss out on. What else this injury would rob of us. It was cruel and unfair. It was bullshit. And I was mad.

I opened my email for the first time since his accident, responded to 18 days worth of messages, and then through nervous fingers not sure how it would be received, composed a message to my customers letting them know I would be working virtually for the next 30 days.

Forget the shifts. Forget the plan. Nothing else mattered. I was going to Jacksonville, and I wasn’t leaving until he was coming home with me.

There are only two good things about being left in the dust:

1. You can kick and scream and cry and get it all out without seemingly kicking up more dust.

2. Eventually the dust settles, and you can see clearly again.

I called Mama Helcher to make sure they all arrived safe and sound, told her I was going to drive up in the morning instead, and I spent the night screaming and crying and kicking up dust. It would settle eventually, but not for a long time.