Stronger (16 page)
But I couldn’t say no. And when I hedged—“I’m tired, guys”—they wouldn’t take the hint. My friends kept calling.
“We miss you, bro.”
“It’s a party.”
“Bauman always shows up for a party.”
About halfway through, my dad came by the apartment. He wouldn’t come into Mom’s apartment, where he knew he wasn’t welcome. He stood in front of the building and tried to convince me to put in an appearance.
“I’ll drive you,” he said. “It will be easy.”
He didn’t understand. Nothing was easy.
Finally, around eleven, I lay down in my own bed for the first time in a month and tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep.
The next morning, Mom called my brother Tim. Tim’s a plumber, has been for years. He had become friends with the Odoms in the hospital, and Mr. Odom, who owned a mechanical contracting business in California, was helping him finally get into the pipefitter’s union. The circle of kindness, you know. It keeps going on.
“You need to get over here,” Mom told Tim. “Jeff wants to take a shower, but he can’t reach the knobs. He needs one of those handheld shower nozzles.”
“Ah, Ma, I told you he was going to need that last week.” It was obvious Tim wasn’t feeling too good. “Okay,” he muttered, when Mom wouldn’t let it go. “I’ll come over this afternoon.”
“No, Tim, you gotta get over here now. Your brother needs you.”
Tim showed up a half hour later. He looked like hell, and he was hopping on one foot. He couldn’t even put his right foot on the ground.
“We went to the Hong Kong after the party,” he admitted. “Vinnie gave us free drinks. For Bow-Man, he said. The whole place was toasting you. Bow-man! Bow-man! I tripped on a sprinkler head coming out.”
“Sniper on the roof!” I yelled, imagining Tim going down like he’d been shot. I still say that to Tim whenever I see him. “Sniper on the roof!”
Like I said before, nothing good ever happens in the Hong Kong.
The next day, Tim’s lower leg was a balloon. Turns out he’d broken his foot the week before, when he dropped a cast-iron bathtub on it. He’d tweaked the break when he tripped outside the Hong Kong.
But he came through for me, like he always did. He installed the handheld, and that afternoon, in Mom’s apartment, I took my first pain-free shower since losing my legs.
The sutures holding my thighs together came out a few days later. “Compared to everything else you’ve been through, this will be a breeze,” my surgeon, Dr. Kalish, told me in the exam room at Boston Medical Center.
I didn’t believe him. My legs looked bad. These weren’t stitches, they were metal wires, and most of them were covered with bloody masses that looked like boils. I made the mistake of checking on them the day I got home. I immediately texted Dr. Kalish a few photographs. He said, yes, they were infected, but don’t worry, he’d take care of them when the sutures came out.
Now here he was, telling me not to worry again, before leaving me with a resident, who raised her pliers, smiled nervously, and said, “Ready?”
I lay back on the table and stared out the window. An American flag was flying at half-staff. I thought about Martin, Krystle, and Lingzi Lu, who had all died at the bombing. And Officer Sean Collier, who had been sitting in his patrol car when the bombers snuck up from behind and shot him five times, twice in the head. I wondered if the flag was for the victims of the bombing, or if the hospital had moved on. Had another tragedy occurred? Or did the flag often fly that way? Surely someone died at Boston Medical Center every day.
By the time those thoughts had crossed my mind, I was crying. I gritted my teeth against the pain and felt the tears rolling down my cheeks. I wanted the resident to be finished, but sometimes, when she yanked hard, I cried out, and she stopped.
“Oh, okay. Do you need a break?”
I shook my head no. Dr. Kalish came back to finish me off. There were ten deep sutures that needed a surgical hand. I whimpered, according to Tim Rohan in his
New York Times
piece, as Dr. Kalish tugged and jerked the wires through my skin. I stared at the flag, flying at half-staff. It looked like a storm was coming.
Then it was over.
Dr. Kalish wiped the blood off his instruments, shook my hand, and said, “You did it. I hope that wasn’t so awful.”
Or as Tim put it: “After this, there would be no more procedures. There was nothing more his doctors could do. His legs would be this way for the rest of his life. Learning to walk again, and whatever happened after that, was up to him.”
Poetry. Pure bandbox poetry. But you can save it for Matt Harvey’s elbow, son.
I’m walking.
I
was hoping to be measured for my artificial legs at BMC the day my sutures came out, but after the operation I was too bloody and sore. So two days later, Mom drove me to United Prosthetics in Dorchester, a south Boston neighborhood. The company had been founded in 1914 by Philip Martino, an immigrant from Italy who was trained as a shoemaker. That’s what their website said anyway.
Paul Martino, Philip Martino’s grandson, told me a slightly longer story. He said his grandfather actually started carving wooden legs in his kitchen in 1903. He carved every leg by hand for a specific patient, then wrapped the wood in leather and provided a leather cable to hold it in place. Two of his customers liked their new legs so much, the three of them went into business together. They eventually received a government contract to provide artificial legs to soldiers wounded in World War I, and they had been a fixture in Boston ever since.
It was cool, listening to this guy talk about the company. I could tell he loved his family, and he loved fake legs. It was even cooler when he pointed at a shelf, and there they were: real pirate-style wooden legs that old-timers had actually used. The office wasn’t fancy. It was in a nondescript industrial area and looked like an old police barracks. But it had history. It was like a museum of legs in there.
“This is your leg,” Mr. Martino said. “The Genium.”
Mr. Martino had come to Spaulding a few weeks before to give me my shrinkers, tight cotton mesh socks designed to shape the ends of my legs. The shrinkers were so tight they pushed some of my sutures into my thigh, making their removal more painful, but it was a necessary step. Legs become sensitive after they’ve been blown apart; they couldn’t have handled the pressure of the sockets otherwise.
During that visit, Mr. Martino showed me the Genium. The manufacturer, Ottobock, had agreed to donate my pair, and the installation was being covered by donations. “We had a lot of calls from concerned citizens,” Mr. Martino told me. “They told us to make sure that kid gets the best. These are the best.”
Still, actually holding the thing was intimidating. The Genium wasn’t wooden, and it wasn’t one of those legs that’s plastic and flesh-colored, so at first you don’t notice it, until something sticks in your mind as not quite right, and you do a double take.
The Genium looked like a Terminator leg. I mean that part at the end of the first movie, when you think Arnold Schwarzenegger is burned up in the tanker explosion, but then he comes out with just his metal skeleton, and they show his legs clanking along, with motor sounds, like nothing could stop them. The Genium was metal and plastic, with a titanium joint and a metal plate that attached to my socket—the part that would slip over my thigh—with four industrial-size bolts. Nothing about it seemed human. It had steel rails and a metal pole for adjusting your height and what looked like a piston hidden behind a plastic shin, which moved as the leg bent. Etched on the front, like the brand on a bicycle, were the words: Genium Bionic Prosthetic System.
Holy cow, I thought. These legs really are bionic.
And it was heavy, at least when the six-inch-long central component was attached to the thigh socket and the foot. It was so heavy it was hard to lift with one arm.
“The technology was developed by the government for soldiers during Operation Desert Storm,” Mr. Martino explained. “It was improved during the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of people lost limbs over there. They’re a hundred grand a leg, but the public demanded the best.”
What about other people? I wondered. What about car crash victims? What about hikers like Ben, who wake up to find all their limbs gone? Ben had never been in the news. Who was paying his bills?
Mr. Martino explained how the legs worked. I listened intently, but most of it went over my head. I caught that the pistons were hydraulic tubes filled with fluid. They weren’t meant to lift the leg. They were created to slow your descent if you fell, so that you wouldn’t go straight down and break your tailbone.
“Are you okay?” Erin asked, putting a hand on my shoulder.
“Yes, why?”
“You’re rubbing your thighs again.”
I looked down. I was digging the heel of my hands into my thighs and pushing down toward the ends of my legs. It was a habit. My legs always hurt, and rubbing them made them feel better. It also calmed my nerves.
The knees, Mr. Martino said, contained a microchip to control the hydraulics. (Robot legs!) The microchip processed information one hundred times a second, through six sensors built into the knee unit. That wasn’t nearly as fast as your spine processed information—because walking and balancing aren’t brain functions, they are spine functions—but far faster than any previous artificial leg. Again, though, all this technology didn’t help you bend your knees or move them faster. That was the responsibility of your muscles. It was designed to keep your legs balanced and your foot level, especially on uneven ground.
I was starting to see a pattern here. These legs may have looked like parts of a motorcycle, but they weren’t the engine. They were the kickstand. Everything was geared toward not falling down.
“Any questions?”
Only a million. Like: Why does so much have to go into staying upright? Is it that difficult? If this is twenty years of technology, why isn’t it more like Iron Man?
“No, I’ve got it.”
“Good. Then let’s fit you for some sockets.”
Mr. Martino measured my thighs. Then he wrapped them in plastic and netting. He covered the netting with strips of plaster, sort of like how you make a papier-mâché mask for a science project in school. The plaster would form molds. The molds would then be used to shape hard plastic sockets that would fit tightly over each leg. The molds needed to be as exact as possible. My thighs were my only leg muscles now; they had to press on the socket to lift the rest of the leg. The more snugly the socket fit, the less effort would be wasted, and the more comfortable movement would feel.
I lay back and tried not to think about the complexity. All the things that could go wrong. I thought of the two soldiers who had visited me at Spaulding. The way they walked right into the room, like it was nothing.
The way they said, “You can do it, Jeff.”
Ten months. That was how long I had until the next Boston Marathon. I didn’t have any doubt: I’d be walking by then.
“Trust the leg.” That was what Mr. Martino said. “You have to trust the leg. That’s the most important thing.”
Okay, Pops. I got you. I’m ready to go.
I
t would take about a week to manufacture my socket. I spent most of that time at home, except for my appointments. I still had checkups at BMC and physical therapy at Spaulding. Since I couldn’t drive, and Erin was working, Mom took me. It was good to see all my new friends, but the exercises were brutal, especially now that I had a new physical therapist, Michelle Kerr, who specialized in prosthetics. My left leg was weaker than my right, and that was a problem.