"Can you hear me?"
The voice was distant, cold; he struggled to understand it, meaning sifted from the noise until the question settled in his mind.
"Yes," he croaked, an old man’s voice, not his at all, but it must have been.
"Do you know where you are?"
He thought a moment; he had been sailing that day, cutting classes at the Police Academy (it was only PT anyway, and he was already a medal-winner, so it had been all right) to spend a lazy spring afternoon on the Thames in a little dinghy. But after that... No; there was nothing. A terrible blank spot.
"You’re in the hospital; you had an accident."
The pain began to gnaw then, through the soft layers of anesthetic, a dreadful, deep pain on his right side, beyond anything he had known, a physical, repetitive hammerfall of agony. His right arm felt stiff and numb, but for the bone-deep torment that throbbed through it. His right foot hurt most of all, like the worst cramp that he could not, no matter how hard he tried, relieve by stretching. He imagined his foot clawed like an arthritic hand, toes curled agonizingly over.
"You had an accident," the voice repeated. "I’m afraid you lost your right leg."
"Did I?" he replied softly. "That was careless of me."
And then nothing.
* * *
The surgeons thought they had saved his leg. It was 1967, and miocrosurgery was a dream in those days. His leg had been repaired as best they could, carefully sewing the arteries that pumped and gushed, pulling chunks of bone back into place. They really thought it would work.
And then gangrene set in, and, regretfully, they realized that they would have to remove it. The entire lower leg, from knee down, was removed, the kneecap attached to the base of the femur to provide a cushion, and the remaining skin pulled over the wound and sewn tight.
He had lost most of the muscles in his arm, shredded beyond repair, leaving him with a pink, skin-wrapped skeleton, clawlike fingers clenched loosely to his palm, operable now only by overworked, complaining tendons.
His pinky finger died sometime along the way too, and was removed at the first knuckle, leaving him with a short, useless stub and a permanent tattoo on his ring finger, where the gangrene had imparted its color after being bound so tightly to it.
Slowly, he recovered. He learned to walk again, first with a simple post, then with a functional, heavy artificial limb with a loose hinge (hardly state-of-the-art, even for 1967). It worked; it served. That was enough.
His progress astonished the doctors; they had expected six months or more of rehab. He was home in three.
His cherished dream of becoming a police officer with Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police was over. So, in 1968, he enrolled at Teacher Training college, earning his Bachelor’s degree in Education and his teaching certificate.
While there he directed a production of Othello, and met a delightful young woman. On their first date, standing on a bridge overlooking the grey Thames, he turned to her and said "Well, I suppose we should get married."
She smiled, and replied, "I think so," and they married the next Spring.
His first job out of college was at a private Boys’ School, which gave him experience but no joy. The following year, he applied to work at a school for the disabled, and to his delight, he was accepted immediately. He was the only handicapped member of staff, and the children responded to him immediately.
Over the next few years, he and his wife had three children; in his work, children whom the system had written off due to their mental and physical disability achieved the English equivalent of High School Diplomas, and each and every one of them cherished him.
"You have a great power," he told them all, every year. "You can make people feel good. Accept their help, even if you don’t need it, because it helps them. You can help people more than they can help you, and you lose nothing by doing so."
He was forced to retire after ten years; the doctor who examined him was astounded he had ever worked, let alone for ten years and more.
His spine, tortured by years of uneven stress, had developed scoliosis, laterally and ventrally. A few years earlier, he had undergone a painful operation to move his pectoral muscle to where his biceps had once been, to allow him some movement of his right arm. Four lumbar and three thoracic vertebrae had ossified. He had arthritis of the hip, spine, neck, elbow and shoulder.
More recently, he developed nerve lesions on his left arm from overuse, and the brachial nerve had slipped from its channel and now impinged painfully on his tendons and bone, causing constant pain and loss of utility.
He’s sixty years old now. He’s never changed his leg, preferring still to use that primitive prosthesis. He’s never taken a painkiller stronger than aspirin, despite the constant agony. He’s been disabled ("crippled" as he puts it) for more than two-thirds of his life, and he bears it all with grace and humor. He allows little old ladies to escort him across the road, because it makes them feel better, not because he needs it.
One day, he’ll be in a wheelchair, but he’ll put that day off as long as he can. After all, he wasn’t supposed to make it to forty, let alone sixty. Every day is a blessing.
This is my father. He’s my hero. I left out his name, because he is a private man, and such adulation would embarrass him. He teaches me not only how to live, but, indeed, to live each day.
Why did I post this? Is it a lesson in single-payer healthcare? Perhaps, for without the National Heath Service, he would certainly have died many times in his recovery, and would certainly have been financially crippled by the hospital bills. Perhaps a lesson in humility, or that bad things happen to good people, but through those bad things, we become stronger, better.
In the end, I don’t know why, except that I wanted to write somewhere how proud I am to have him as my father. He will never read this (he has no internet connection, and besides, would never come to DKos in a million years, but it will stay here forever (or until the site closes...) as a son’s testament of love to a father.