Stretching

At the center of our European journey, the thing around which my current experience orbits, is my wheelchair.  Transporting this bulky, 200 pound thing has required endless planning.  And the wheelchair itself imposes serious limitations.  But overall it makes much of this trip possible.  And, oddly, so do its limitations. 

Take my cousin's home in Gloucestershire.  It's a magnificent five-bedroom transformation of 18th-century agricultural buildings and, like most structures of its era, the house occupies various levels and floors.  This confines my power wheelchair to one fairly small corner of the house, a sitting room by the front door.  This area offers a great opportunity to read, use the computer, roll into the wheelchair-accessible toilet.  But that's about it.  Everything else requires walking, that is to say, limping with my one crutch, up and down steps, and across expanses of sandstone.

Is this bad?  This is the question I have to keep asking myself.  After all, currently I have no other form of exercise.  The recumbent exercycle I use daily in California is far away, as is the rowing machine, both gathering dust in our carport.  While I am gathering weight and joint pain.  When I crutch my way about my cousin's home, it feels as though I am underwater, walking through ancient seas, dragging some enormous load.  This was how I learned to walk 40 years ago, out of doors, across the terrace of a Los Angeles hospital.  A fiendish physiotherapist had attached two five-pound weights to my walker, what the British would call Zimmer frame.  I dragged these metal weights, tied to ropes, for hours and across the terrace.  Getting stronger?  Oh, I supposed I was, but the Sisyphean quality of this experience was not lost on me, even then.  I had a burden to drag, and drag I did.

It is in a similar spirit that I drag myself around my cousin's home, up and down the corridors of our hotel in London, the Queen Mary 2 and even the Sheraton in New York.  These days I move with a steady, grinding pain.  There is a diffuse ache radiating from my upper thighs to my lower back, haunting my knees, biting my feet.  While I am biding my time, hoping that it all doesn't get too much worse.  And yet this difficult walking may be the very thing that protects the musculoskeletal apparatus from further deterioration.  My physiotherapist, his assistant and all the other physical medicine apparatchiks in my life urge me to do the same thing: be in the wheelchair less, walk more.

In short, this trip, at least its physical ardors, is just what the doctor ordered.  It's hard to believe this when I rise from the armchair in my cousin's front room and begin the trek, hips burning, back ripping, to dinner in the dining room several continents away.  But it would be hard to gauge the alternative.  Sitting in the wheelchair is worse, it seems.  Not that I really believe this, for my body is rebelling mightily.  Which, I suppose, is why quadriplegics travel.  It's a stretch, every day, every minute.

For a couple, it's a life-expanding ordeal.  Even the most modest objective -- a few days driving around France -- involves staggering logistics, failures and compromises.  In Aix-en-Provence, the electric wheelchair may only prove useful in our hotel.  Actually, this is no small thing.  What's killing me in my cousin's home is the walks, often fairly short ones.  I tire of progressing from bed to toilet, for example.  No particular reason, but there are perils underfoot.  There always are.  The rugs in our bedroom actually are quite splendid for walking and protect my unfeeling feet from any splinters.  But one has to be careful.  On the day of our arrival, heading to bed, I took a step, leaned on my crutch and felt everything giving way.  My stick was making the rug slip, and I was about to slip with it.  I righted myself in time.

In Provence, we will rent a car and a folding wheelchair.  The idea is for Marlou to push me places and, in between, have the freedom of a conventional car.  The unconventional van required by my battery-laden behemoth wheelchair isn't available in these parts, anyway.  So, it's two chairs, two options and, I'm afraid, too many days being dependent on Marlou.  I don't like being pushed.  Not only do I have to abandon steering and control of my progress overland, but all sorts of minor things become impossible.  Such as buying my own newspaper.  Such as getting a glass of water on my own.  I will be able to do that sort of thing in my hotel room on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence, but nowhere else.  I have to ask people for help, otherwise.  Please get me some water.  Did you get my book?  I hope my computer is charging....

None of these things are issues at home, or they don't seem to be.  Actually, it's hard to say.  The doctors insist that this thing that feels so bad, painful schlepping everywhere by crutch, is actually good.  Marlou and I have to do things together that we normally do alone.  Simple matters that normally aren't discussed at home have to be confronted, analyzed and dissected on the road.  Does she really want to take the wheelchair out of the car trunk, get me in it, and push all the way to that church?  What if we can't get inside?  Will she mind going inside alone?  Where is the nearest accessible toilet?  And so on.

It's a stretch.  And although I don't mind stretching, something inside me is rather glad that we are heading, at last, for the home stretch.