Continued... Pink Elephants

This one is especially for J.J.

I know I promised not to apologize, but I feel compelled to break my own rule and say, “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry because I can’t write about my broken neck right now, even though I left you hanging in the middle of my story. I tried to pick up where I left off, but everything I typed tonight was as boring as plywood. I tried three times. So to those of you who don’t know the rest and are now left in a state of suspended curiosity… I owe you one.

Ahhhh. It feels nice to take the pressure off. The muddle in my mind is already un-muddling, now that I’ve stopped trying to force an ending. Perhaps there is a different tale wanting to be told, pushing on the doorbell of my mind. What if I just open that door and write about the first thing that strolls in when I get to the end of this sentence, like… (Drum roll, please)… pink elephants.

I’m remembering the time I saw some on the ceiling of my grandparent’s bedroom. My grandparents were living in Oregon at the time, and my sister and I had gone to stay with them for a few days while my parents vacationed. I got very sick that week, and couldn’t bear my own heat, so I was moved out of the steamy guest bed onto the cool, white sheets of grandma’s. They were fluffy like clouds. I felt myself floating up toward the ceiling. I was happy.

Then the elephants came, blowing horns and riding tricycles. The elephants were pink, and that didn’t seem right to me, so I called grandma in. I had to call many times, because my voice was echoing and weak, and the elephants were getting noisier. Finally I saw her, leaning down close, asking me what was the matter. I’m not sure exactly what I said, but it went something like this: “The elephants make me dizzy. Their horns hurt my head, and I want them to stop riding their tricycles on the ceiling.”

Clearly, I was not seeing too straight, due to the influence of my fever. But it didn’t help me one bit to have grandma explain that I was seeing imaginary things, nor to perceive that she was worried about my condition. It did help when she brought grandpa in, and he made a joke about the elephants, filling the room with his laughter. It also helped to know that my grandparents would stay with me until the elephants quieted down, bringing cool rags for my forehead and speaking soft words of sympathy.

What good advice this story suddenly gives me! I’m often sitting with folks whose reality has been bent by homelessness, alcoholism, or severe forms of trauma and rejection. Whatever the elephants on the ceiling may be—an immense inheritance that was stolen away or a wife who kidnapped their children—it doesn’t do a damn thing for me to reason away the pain. Nor does it help when I’m too worried about their sanity to listen. What does help are kind sighs and words of sympathy; cool rags of time spent sitting there together. Sometimes, after the stories get so noisy and pink they make me dizzy, a joke comes bubbling up between us, and we laugh together. That laughter helps a lot. It heals something inside them that I can’t fix. It can quiet the trumpeting elephants.

Of everything I remember from that vacation I spent at grandma and grandpas, nothing is as vivid as the memory of those elephants. The other images are fuzzy: going to see the strange doctor, then feeling well again. Before I got sick I played outside with my sister on a wonderful teeter totter my grandpa had made that also spun around in circles—even that memory is as gray as the rain. But the cool sheets like clouds, the tricycles and horns held by pink pachyderms, and my grandparents staying with me until the elephants left—these things are positively unforgettable. When I look back, I mostly feel like giggling at the absurdness of my comments to my grandma. The elephants look so harmless from this angle.

Harmless elephants. I want that for my friends who are constantly battling sickness of one type or another. I want to partner with a community of people willing to stick around long enough to be part of a vivid memory of healing. I want to have faith enough to believe that someone can overcome a 20-year meth addiction, and humor enough to laugh with them, even in the midst of it.

I want to tell stories about living, walking miracles—not just the one I carry around in my bones, but the others out there waiting to happen. I don’t want to miss my chance to be the one to see at last the x-ray that matters most. Brokenness needs protecting.

There is nothing wrong with a story that ends (or begins!) with a person becoming a paraplegic. But that wasn’t my story to live. I’m taking you out on a limb here (and you may believe that I’m seeing the world through crazy pink elephant lenses) when I say to you:

PEOPLE HAVE STORIES THEY’RE MADE FOR.


To be continued…

Cont. from Oct. 2: Surprised by Gratitude

Gratitude. It is the great magician in our lives. It can pull joy out of sadness, and laughter out of weeping. It can surprise us with hope when we think despair is winning.

When I broke my neck at age 19, I didn’t expect to be grateful. I didn’t think my active, super-independent self could survive such a drastic change of plans. Six days after my ill-aimed dive into the Okanogan River near Canada, I was lying in a hospital bed in Spokane, WA instead of riding my bike like the wind down Idaho back roads. I was pleading with nurses for early doses of pain medication instead of packing my bags for a study abroad in Latin America.

It was a nightmare, yes. It took me a week to get my x-rays for the very fact that I KNEW my life could drastically change in the instant I found out the facts; I delayed for five days in excruciating pain in an act of denial so great, my dad still shakes his head, amazed. To be told that the surgery I needed was serious enough that I’d have to wait three MORE days wrapped in IVs until the man who could fix me came back from vacation… that was unbearable, yes. Yet more than that, it was a miracle almost too large for me to grasp. I was not only alive, but I had the use of both my hands, and feet, and head. I had the ability to hear what was said by folks who visited a 21 year old boy across the hall. He had also dived awry (into a pool nearby), yet had not yet opened his eyes to complain about the bedpan, or all the ways his accident had changed his plans. The knowledge of the fact that he was lost in some place between life and death, while I was still able to talk and cry and laugh, was not lost on me. I grieved for him. I celebrated for me. I was overcome with a gratefulness I couldn’t help but have. I don’t like to take credit for the shift that happened then--my next six months of fearlessness and peacefulness and sense of good things happening amidst the bad--because I wasn’t using my willpower to choose an “attitude of gratitude”. I was grateful. Just that. I was grateful for the life I had.

In three days time the surgeon came to talk to me about the vertebrae displaced inside my neck. He explained about the way it could be linked (by metal plate) unto the strong and stable bone beneath. I did my part of fasting and of waiting for the surgery that never came that day because he was delayed by NINE emergencies. There were nine surgeries performed that day that couldn’t wait because they were not the same as mine--they were labeled “life and death”. While I waited for my turn the nurses brought me in to get more x-rays, (cat scans? MRI’s? I actually don’t recall the shot that saved the life I had....) They said the surgeon thought it best to use the time to gather evidence. Thank God. I still thank God.
The surgeon would have tried to seal my wiggly bone unto a bone that was not strong or stable, rather BROKEN. He probably would have sealed my fate as a quadriplegic on that day. Which may have turned out okay. But I am here to say that I am grateful for the night he saw that break and stopped the anesthesia.

To be continued…