Sliding

I awaken in the morning convinced that everything neuro has gone awry.  Things seem out of focus.  I don't believe my balance will last from bed, to standing, to dropping into the adjacent wheelchair.  Nothing will last, that is the thing so readily apparent now, this morning, the last morning.  Maybe.  Fear pervades everything.  Can I stand at the bathroom sink with everything out of focus?  Turn on the electric tea kettle?  Pour it?  Dare to eat a peach?

Within a few minutes, the morning is doing a credible imitation of a middle-aged person waking up.  Which may very well have a whiff of death about it.  But what doesn't?  That is the thing.  And is that the thing underlying my anxiety?  Or is Jane and my getting closer and me feeling the threat of attachment...is that the thing?  Still another possibility.  Jane wonders if feeling successful about my life isn't actually threatening me.  Hard to say.  Useless to speculate.  All I know is that I am beyond the tea stage of things and into the bathroom.

The last time I had a fall was in this very bathroom.  On these very tiles.  This is where gravitational fear crystallizes.  Down.  I am going to slip, descend and break.  I did break something once, and not exactly in a bathroom but in a bathhouse.  A local hot tub place, where I stubbornly tried to get myself out of a difficult spa...and plummeted to my orthopedic doom.  I can see it now, the ignominy of lying on the shower floor, my femur broken.  I can also see the more minor...if that is the word...slip in my own bathroom.  It seems more instructive for the present moment, composed as it was of spirit and flesh.

Late the previous night, actually in the wee hours of the morning, Marlou had woken me.  Something was on her mind.  Her funeral.  She had planned it, wanted to talk about it, even though she was in remission, not even undergoing chemotherapy at that moment.  But we talked.  Or I listened.  Instructions for her funeral.  Wishing I could sleep instead.  Wishing we did not have to drive to San Francisco for an opera matinee the very next day.  All of which had me distracted enough during the morning's post-shower time before the mirror, hair combing and shaving to, as the British say, briefly lose the plot.  That is to say, space out.  Losing my balance and falling to the bathroom tiles.  Marlou picked me up.  She was perfectly strong at that point.  While I was feeling perfectly weak.

Proving how deceptive appearances can be.  Fear.  Is it friend or foe?  No doubt about it, the bathroom is a danger zone.  But memory is a danger zone too, and where both converge...well, it's enough to make a person zone out.  Which is the ever present danger.  Having lost the spinal cord's ability to help keep me upright and positioned in space, I'm flying on visuals.  The instruments are down.  Proprioception virtually switched off, according to my physiotherapist.  So I look out for trouble, sight substituting for balance.  Which is fine, as long as I don't relax my vigilance for even a second.  Being an eternally pensive person, ever drifting into random thought, spacing is a natural reflex.

But not on the shower seat.  To get into the shower, I sit on a plastic seat that extends over the edge of the bathtub, slide my bottom into the shower zone, dragging the legs behind me.  It's a tricky maneuver, the entry.  But nothing compared to the exit.  I have, like the much lampooned narcissistic photo subject, a good side and a bad side.  The bad side is the paralyzed one.  My right side.  Getting out of the shower involves lifting my right paralyzed leg, all weight, inertia and a soupçon of spasticity.  Having lifted it, I also have to slide, slipping my wet bottom across the plastic and around to face forward.  I don't know how I do it.  These words are not a figure of speech.  I really don't know.  It's clear that I brace my left hand against a railing, twist something that inches my thigh around the edge of the shower chair.  But what exactly twists?  I really don't know.  Perhaps I push with the good leg, wrench my back around a bit and the right leg follows.  Is that it?  I don't know.  Some bits of my body still move a little.  And I rely upon those bits, working a lot to make something move a little.

It is a perilous moment.  There's a certain balance, an opposition of forces.  If the shower chair wasn't wet, I couldn't slide my butt.  Because it is wet, there is the distinct possibility of sliding my butt off the chair.  And down.  Down where I do not like to consider.  Hitting the bottom of the tub.  Breaking something?  Or just catching my leg on the edge of the tub, twisting, wrenching something?  

Please understand.  I do this every morning.  It always works.  Except for this morning, it seems.  Conscious of the uncertainty here, I take an extra second or two to consider things.  Consider what?  Hamlet's sorry decline, the inevitable consequence of pausing a little too long on his own shower chair?  Doubtless at the wrong moment, in the depths of the Danish winter, wondering not only how he was going to slide his butt into the drafty North Sea air, but why?  That I'm always considering the latter, certainly that is my undoing.  But I'm not undoing now.  I'm doing.  With a gulp and a wrench, I twist myself forward.  I am facing the mirror, facing a handrail which I'm about to grab, facing the day.